Why is it, we might ask, that the “Odyssey” ultimately feels so consonant with the Old Testament in its depiction of the punishments of sensuality and perfidy, and so profoundly pre-Christian in its elevation of simple, hidden people into rewards they could never have expected?
At the risk of undercutting my ethos, I want to recommend a reason to read Homer that might at first sound shallow or unimportant: the pleasure of it, even in translation several millennia after the original…