In a strictly chronological sense, I should start with Homer’s Iliad and only then read the Odyssey. But.

Sometimes I feel angry that historians and translators are so closely focused on their academic and historical pursuits that they forget to make things readable, tolerable or even interesting.

Thus I have a copy of The Iliad translated by Robert Fagles–one of the most respected translators of the epic (I have a Penguin Classics edition). However, the 60-plus-page introduction is so dry, the translation a century obsolete (language evolves, see) and the footnotes or other helpful notes so basically non-existant that I can see why any schoolkid would abandon it.

However, I have a recent, “novel-like” prose translation of The Odyssey by R. L. Eickhoff that is, in contrast, an honest joy. So, until I can find a translation and edition of The Iliad that doesn’t, in my scathing opinion, suck hard, The Odyssey it is!