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I’ve just closed The Odyssey, and I’m sitting here with that particular kind of quiet that follows a long journey — not restlessness, not exactly satisfaction, but something closer to arrival. The Iliad and The Odyssey are behind me now. Virgil is ahead. And I find myself wanting to pause here at the threshold for just a moment before I cross it.
I came to Homer knowing, of course, what he was supposed to be — the beginning of everything, the bedrock of the Western literary tradition. That kind of reputation can be a burden on a reading experience. It’s hard to settle into a story when you feel like you’re supposed to be receiving a monument. But somewhere in the middle of all that rage and wine-dark sea, something quietly shifted. Homer stopped being a cultural landmark and started being a storyteller. A remarkably good one. Whether we’re talking about a single voice, a committee of oral poets, or something we’ll never fully untangle, what matters is what arrived on the page: a vision of human life that is vivid, merciless, and deeply, unexpectedly tender.
That tenderness is what surprised me most. For all its martial fury, The Iliad kept breaking open into grief — Achilles weeping for Patroclus, Priam crossing enemy lines to beg for his son’s body, Hector saying goodbye to Andromache. And The Odyssey is, at its heart, a story about wanting to go home and how we experience transformation. These aren’t small, sentimental themes grafted onto epic adventure. They are the epics. The violence and the longing live side by side, and neither cancels the other out. I didn’t expect to feel as much as I did.
What this reading will do to how I approach literature going forward is harder to pin down, but I think the biggest gift Homer gave me is a tolerance for slowness. Not unlike Melville with Moby Dick. The oral tradition doesn’t hurry. It circles back, it repeats, it lingers. Odysseus is “the man of many ways” and Homer will tell you so again and again. At first that feels like padding. By the end, it feels like a pulse. I think I’ll read differently now — a little more willing to let a work take its time with me, a little less impatient when a writer trusts the reader to stay.
The question that feels most alive to me right now is the one pointing forward. I’m about to read Virgil, and I have to say — I’m ready in a way I couldn’t have been before this. The Aeneid is in direct conversation with Homer. Virgil knew these texts the way a musician knows a standard before they start to riff on it. Without The Iliad and The Odyssey under my belt, I would have been reading Virgil the way you watch a sequel before seeing the original. Technically possible. But you miss so much.
More than that, though, I think Homer prepared me emotionally. I have been told that the Aeneid carries a weight — the cost of empire, the grief of what gets left behind, the burden of destiny — and I think I’ll feel that weight more fully having just lived inside Homer’s world. Aeneas carries Troy with him. I’ve been to Troy now. I know what he lost.
There’s something both humbling and quietly exciting about being at this particular point in a reading life. Homer is done, and he turns out to have been everything they said he was — but not in the cold, obligatory way that reputation suggested. He was alive. And now I get to walk into Virgil carrying that aliveness with me, already tuned to the frequency of these ancient, stubbornly human stories.
That feels like the right way to begin.
The Curious Table 