Reading Homer’s Iliad feels like scrolling through TikTok

I first picked up The Iliad because the cloth-bound red cover, stamped with gold flames, was simply gorgeous. So much for not judging a book by its cover. The Penguin Classics edition sat on my shelf for months before I finally opened it. For years, the text had felt inaccessible, surrounded by a kind of academic gate-keeping that suggested it belonged more to specialists than to ordinary readers.

What I discovered, reading Peter Jones’s 2003 revision of E.V. Rieu’s translation, was something entirely different. The…

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