Homer is a hard read – made easy with earbuds

Mention Homer now and most people will picture yellow, rather than bronze. But Homer Simpson’s comic status as a modern anti hero only makes sense with a knowledge, however vague, of the heroes in The Iliad and The Odyssey. 

They underpin the last three thousand years of western culture. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus and Helen… these are the chess pieces that poets, painters and sculptors have been playing with ever since. Odysseus, the Trickster, is there at the dawn of classical literature – and then again, Romanised as Ulysses, at the dawn of Modernism. What a gift. Trust the Greeks.

Still, there is a reason no-one reads them anymore – at least, not for fun. It isn’t just our tragically withered attention spans, our preference for three minute rap videos over ten hour epic sagas. These books are really hard. They are not like Game of Thrones. They were already old when Homer first set them down, and at times they show their age.