/lit/ - Literature

>>11771293
genuine question: why do you care about /lit/'s opinion on this?

>>11771307
Genuine question: why don't ask every single OP that way?

>>11771293
He is literally Homer.

I can't read ancient Greek so I don't know, but if you're reading both in English it's literally not even close. The Odyssey is a fascinating myth but at the very least Hamlet, King Lear, Sonnet 73, and many others surpass it.

If I was stuck on a desert island with one book, it'd probably be Arden's Complete Shakespeare

>>11771453
genuine question: why is your English shit?

>>11771293
H
A
C
K

>>11771293
> The best Homer

>>11771498

Why Arden? Minimal to no footnotes, shoddy editorial work, no contextualizing essays, and a confusing layout. They do stellar single-play editions but their complete works is absolute shit. Why not go for the Bevington, Norton, or Riverside editions?

>>11772946
I don't understand why they removed all the notes for the complete edition

Homer is to similes what Shakespeare is to metaphors

>>11772981
It would be like 10,000 pages if they kept everything from the single player editions

>>11771503
what is shit?

>>11771503
i do not care for your correlationist virus

>>11771293
Hell no. Shakespeare was a degenerate who normalised degeneracy into the mainstream pleb population and made seem like "high art". Homer had a moral message. The entire Iliad and Odyssey are set in the consequences of right and wrong morality.

The main point of The Odyssey is the value of traditional family and wholesome home. Compare the actions of Penelope, the faithful wife, who by her virtue allows a complete and satisfying conclusion, against Clytemnestra (The wife of Agamemnon) who leads her husband to ruin and a very sad end through her treachery. The message of The Odyssey is that there is no place like home, nothing more valuable than family. All the riches and sights of the world are worthless in comparison.

The Iliad on the other hand shows the misery of many men and much suffering over the infidelity of Helen. The primary quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon is based on jealousy and theft/dishonesty. We can see again with the Iliad, the entire plot and plight of each character revolves around morality.

Far more examples than this but that's enough effort replying to a shitpost.

>>11773153
the odyssey shows how a whole generation of males became unruly,disrespectful and licentious and how the females became disloyal whores because all the men of ithaca never came back from the war...that generation was raised without fathers.

>>11773153
>>11773200
I always thought the Iliad and Odyssey were about the nature of man - how we love two things most of all
1) war
2) discovery
These two factors drive most of the conflict in both stories respectively. Man is also dishonest about his nature. He pretends to hate war, but his actions say different. He wishes to get home, but when he does get home, he almost immediately turns back to seek new adventures. In that respect, they're also about the duality of man.

>>11773200
>>11773217
These are very good observations

>>11773217
In the epic, Odysseus is instructed by Tiresias to take an oar from his ship and to walk inland until he finds a "land that knows nothing of the sea", where the oar would be mistaken for a winnowing fan. At this point, he is to offer a sacrifice to Poseidon, and then at last his journeys would be over.

odysseus becomes a sort of priest of poseidon. remember he angered the god and this is what he must do to make up for it.

>>11773018
Your dreams in a corporeal, ante-coprolitical form.

>>11773200
BASED and wine-dark-sea-pilled.

>>11773153
>Homer had a moral message
Epic meme
Seriously, an important element of why Homer is good is the lack of any simple message suitable for mechanical analysis in school. If the message of Iliad is what you described, maybe the poet shouldn't have spent ten thousand verses describing completely unrelated shit, armors, biographies and army catalogs, maybe could've actually described what Helen and Paris did and why it was bad, instead of keeping them as mere side characters.
If the story of Clytemnestra was so important to the meaning of the Odyssey, again, why was it mentioned only in passing? It'd be like reducing Levin's half of Anna Karenina down to one chapter.
>All the riches and sights of the world are worthless in comparison.
Odysseus profits nicely off his travels, though. He got a fuckton of gold from Alcinous.

>>11773217
>He pretends to hate war, but his actions say different
This sounds mostly like a misinterpretation Greek culture and the texts.
>He wishes to get home, but when he does get home, he almost immediately turns back to seek new adventures
Literally what

It is pointless and forced to read some sort of allegory into Homer. Homer was essentially a simple poet of material, life and movement. His style is one of oral poetry, with low originality and filled with a lot of useless data, unsuitable for close reading. It was designed for being sung, for an immediate, visceral experience for illiterate listeners.
When I read Homer I was initially baffled by how seemingly nihilistic and meaningless his world is. It is not so, but I was treating him like some normal written text, reading meaning into every verse. That was pointless and unenjoyable, I realized that Homer should be read rapidly to be appreciated. Basically all allegorical interpretations misunderstand this, and read all sorts of messages into the text based on overanalyzed minor passages, or even parts of the story that aren't mentioned at all in the texts. Those things are what >>11773217 does.

>>11773153
People who don't read are the real degenerates
((You))

>>11773217
is this bait? did you intentionally write things that sound reasonable but are actually completely wrong and contradicted by even the most cursory reading of the texts to see how many people only pretend to have read homer?

>>11773153
coach red pill please leave.

>>11773217
The Iliad and Odyssey exalt the nobility of Honor.

The very first word of the Iliad is “RAGE.” The “RAGE” of Achilles when his honor is violated and his rightful prize and love is taken from him by his very own commander.

Right here we see Man versus State, as Achilles is the superior warrior, and as he takes all the risks, he ought get the reward. That is the Natural Law of Zeus, for after Achilles Natural Rights are violated and Achilles quits, Zeus sees to it that the Greeks begin to lose, as Zeus’s will was done.

Long before Atlas Shrugged in Rand’s cheap novel, Achilles quit the Greek army.

Homer shows that women who honor their commitments, like Penelope, lead to happy endings. Women who disregard their commitments, like Helen, lead to War.

Achilles quits for the sake of Honor, refuses to return when offered millions times more prizes, arguing that once honor is taken away, mere money/prizes cannot buy it back. He also reasons that all the wealth in the world is not worth him losing his life in an arena where his honor was taken away. When offered honors and awards, Achilles states, “I receive my honor from Zeus, not from corrupt Kings."

And too Achilles returns to fight for Honor, so as to avenge the death of his friend Patroculus, knowing full well he will die.

Simply put, Achilles is a man who lives and dies not for mere prizes, nor perks, nor tenure, nor titles, nor money, but for honor, and honor alone.

A few hundred years later, Socrates would invoke Achilles while facing death at his own trial. Socrates was offered perks and prizes and life if he would only recant his teachings that “Virtue does not come from money, but money and every lasting good of man derives form virtue.”

But then Socrates asked, “Would Achilles back down from battle if bribed by physical wealth?” Socrates reasoned he would be dishonoring the Great Achilles if he ever recanted his teachings.

>>11773758
>with low originality
Homer has some of the best similies in literature

>>11774416
"Best" is not the same as "original", and you're probably missing my point. Homer's style is built off stock formulae (not just the epithets, but whole verses and passages were recycled and modified as needed; it's quite possible that the whole catalog of ships is a formula too), retelling a known mythological story. It's not original in any sense of the word, "just" done with great skill.

Nah now fuck of angl*id

>>11774514
I've read both poems several times and lots of essays about homer and his poems and I have to disagree with you.

>>11774551
And...? What do you even disagree with?
I've read the books too, and a nice fat 600 page companion to them, I'm not pulling this out of my ass.

>>11774639
That Homer isn't original.
His similies are the best because they are original. And just because there was the story of the Trojan war before Homer doesn't mean Homer's poems about Achilles and Odysseus are not original.

>>11774649
>His similies are the best because they are original
Ok, how do you know they are original?
>And just because there was the story of the Trojan war before Homer doesn't mean Homer's poems about Achilles and Odysseus are not original.
Yep, you're missing the point. This is veering off into mere speculation and completely unfounded claims. Keeping in mind how conservative an oral tradition is, I find it unlikely that a poet could just make up a whole new theme and become the central text of a culture. Remember how Euripides was unsuccessful just because he modified the classical myth of Medea, how would such people react to something completely new?
But anyway whether the story existed before Homer or not is irrelevant to the reading experience today. What I was aiming for when calling Homer "unoriginal" was the style, the formulae, which are much more traditional than authorial, which function in a way that is foreign to the modern culture of the written word. Those conclusions are in large part based on observations of the living (at least back in Parry's time) practices of Yugoslavian folk poets, whose poems function in ways similar to Homer's, and it is safe to assume that there's a fair degree of similarity between the Yugo and Greek epic traditions.

If you like Homer because of some vague notion about Western values, please rethink your life. The Odyssey is great but that's not what it's about.

In response to OPs question, Shakespeare is the greatest ever so yes

>>11773255
t. someone who hasn't read the poems

>>11774781
>the style, the formulae, which are much more traditional than authorial
The "body" of the tradition has to be created by someone at some point.

can someone tell me anything insightful about shakespeare techniques and grander structure of one of his major works