in Uncategorized | July 28th, 2026 Leave a Comment

At the moment, the answer to the ques­tion of why we should read Home­r’s Odyssey seems rather straight­for­ward: so we can more intel­li­gent­ly voice our opin­ions on Christo­pher Nolan’s new block­buster film adap­ta­tion. A quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago, the mat­ter was some­what less clear. Still, an occa­sion had pre­sent­ed itself in the form of a new Eng­lish trans­la­tion, by Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas clas­sics pro­fes­sor Stan­ley Lom­bar­do. That book, and the work of Homer in gen­er­al, was the sub­ject of a live two-hour round­table dis­cus­sion aired on C‑SPAN’s Book TV in the fall of 2000, which, with the Odyssey back in the zeit­geist, appeared on YouTube just days ago.

Apart from Lom­bar­do him­self, the par­tic­i­pants include Joseph Bot­tum, then lit­er­ary edi­tor of the Week­ly Stan­dard; jour­nal­ist and mil­i­tary vet­er­an Debra J. Dick­er­son; and Christo­pher Hitchens, who clear­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed not just because he hap­pened to be liv­ing in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., but also out of a gen­uine appre­ci­a­tion for the Odyssey and an under­stand­ing of its rel­e­vance in the mod­ern world. Ear­ly on in the text, he explains, Homer intro­duces the con­cepts of hubris and neme­sis, which “we can­not do with­out in ordi­nary dis­course. There are cer­tain pun­ish­ments that appear to fall on peo­ple, for orig­i­nal arro­gance or con­ceit, that we can’t con­ceive of relat­ing grand sto­ries with­out.”