Journey's End

Finished off The Odyssey in the SAC of all places over a cup of tea. Normally I don't do more than glance at what I'm currently reading for pleasure there but I was gripped enough by the second half of Book Twenty-four, needing to know how Homer actually finished the whole thing off, to not be able to put it off to the evening.

I wasn't disappointed. Like so much of the rest of the epic, the conclusion was disturbingly strange yet oddly familiar. This is not a world we can easily recognise, we're a long way out of Kansas, Toto, but it is distinctly, nastily, nobly human. Barbaric. Sentimental. Superstitious. Irrational. Deeply partial. Nothing to like, but much to admire - from a safe distance.

It seems that the bit at the beginning of the final book, when the souls of the slaughtered suitors descend into Hades, was one of the examples Plato gave for keeping poets out of the ideal republic. Yes, you can see how this poet would be any administrator's nightmare.