
“Even Homer sleeps.” Fair enough. But if Homer sleeps, then perhaps that explains why everyone who reads the Iliad does, too. (All those hecatombs didn’t do it for you, huh?)
Let’s face it: bards hit the wall. Hard. You can’t always capture the magic, and when you do, the magic inevitably mixes with everything else – Muses come, Muses go, and the poet hitches a ride whenever they can get one. This gives readers a job: we parse and parse, and pray we find some morsel of sagacity. Pithy clauses, favorite lines, stanzas learned by rote… Readers bump into things.
Is that why we plug our noses through the majority of forgettable quartos? All that fluff, all those hollow verses – they’re tolerated, like the banality of life, for the sake of something short and sweet. The truth is, if poets were like baseball players, and each of them had a batting average – something to mark their capacity to arrest us – then even Orpheus, the son of Calliope herself, would only rip a dinger every third or fourth try.
No, nobody bats a thousand. The Mighty Casey struck out. And yes, Horace was right: idem dormitat Homerus.
Registration will open to members at 8am on July 17th. The registration page can be reached by clicking the button below. Participation is reserved for Athenæum members, so please consider becoming a member if you’d like to join a group! If you have any questions, email readinggroups@provath.org.
REGISTERThe Athenæum is deeply grateful to our wonderful volunteer leaders. Please note library reading groups are not classes or courses, but rather a way for individuals to discuss readings together, guided by both expert and amateur enthusiasts. Participants should expect discussion-based, not lecture-style meetings.