Where to start with Homer
Read the Odyssey first — a man trying to get home — before you read the Iliad — a war with no clean side.
You have heard the Iliad and the Odyssey are foundational, you have looked at the older translations and put them back down, and you want a sequence that meets the poems as poems before they become curriculum.
Starting with the Iliad and hitting the catalogue of ships, the long battle scenes, and the unfamiliar moral universe cold — and concluding Homer is for specialists. Or reading either poem in an old verse translation when a good modern one would do the same work in half the time.
The reading path
- The Odyssey — A modern translation — Emily Wilson, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo. Read it as a story, not as a curriculum. Notice how the poem is structured around a return that takes ten years; the patience is the form, the same way it is in the Mahabharata.
- The Iliad — A modern translation again. The poem is not about the whole Trojan War; it is about one man's rage in a few weeks of one year of it. Read for Achilles' grief, for Hector saying goodbye to his wife, for the weight Homer gives to every named soldier killed. The gods are not on your side and the poem is not consoling.
Why this order
Homer is the foundation of literary Europe and a working argument that humans have always been like this — angry, grieving, longing for home, lying to themselves — and meeting the poems in the order that lets the argument land is the kindest first reading.