Final Comments

This is only the beginning of the first and greatest work in the history of Western literature, but it it feels as if it is a complete work all by itself. Clyde Pharr calls Book 1 the greatest book of Homer and indeed it does contain all that one could desire: a semi divine hero raging over a lost war prize after an intense quarrel between two monumental figures, a goddess mother comforting her grieving son, an old man trying and failing to calm the passions of two younger and stronger warriors, that same goddess mother pleading before the father of gods and men to avenge her son's lost honor, then that same father of gods and men nodding his assent to this vengeance and shaking the heavenly mountain, and finally the quarrel between Zeus and Hera with Hephaestus intervening in his comic role as peacemaker. What a beginning to this greatest epic of the western world! This poem may have its origins in some long forgotten clash between the kingdom of Akhkhayawa on the Greek peninsula and Hittite allied Wilusa on the shores of the Hellespont at the close of the Bronze Age, but it gave birth in mind and spirit to that thing which succeded in stretching its conquering hand out over all the world, for better or worse, and whose last days we are now watching unfold. But the real secret of Homer, whoever he was, is that he tapped into that vein of feeling which I imagine existed long before him and will most likely continue to exist long after our own demise: no man of I heart can say with any honesty that, when he first heard of fast ships sailing on a wine dark sea, it did not ring some sort of bell deep in his consciousness and the thought did not occur to him that he had hear this somewhere else before, though he couldn't place where...