HOMER AND HIS ILIAD

An audiobook that tracks Homer's composition of THE ILIAD sounds speculative at best. Such discussions usually rely on verbs like "might have" and "could have." But working largely from the poem itself, Oxford scholar Fox assembles a remarkably rich and convincing portrait of a figure who could have composed and recited from memory a poem of over 15,000 lines. Narrator Robin Lane Fox, who also narrates the Penguin Classics ILIAD, brings elegance and grace to a narrative that is highly accessible. Field studies of illiterate Eastern European bards in the last century demonstrated they could retain thousands of lines of verse. Ironically, once they learned to read, that ability was lost. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2023]