"The origins of Western literature? Sounds heavy."
That's exactly why I avoided this book for years.
Homer's Iliad. An epic poem. Nearly 3,000 years old.
Full disclosure: I've bailed on it before. I picked up the classic scholarly edition, got about halfway, kept losing track of who was who, and quietly closed the book. Oof.
But this time is different. And I want to tell you why.
This book is a blast.
More than that, it carries a lesson that lands hard on those of us living right now. Three millennia later, and it still stings.
Wait — was Homer even real?
Let's start with the obvious question.
"So who was Homer, exactly?"
Honestly? Nobody knows.
Even the ancient Greeks couldn't say who he was, where he lived, or when he composed. To this day, scholars can't agree on whether he was a real person or an invented one.
There's even a theory that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by two different poets entirely.
The one thing we can say for sure is that "Homer" wasn't a stand-in word for "anonymous" — it was a man's name. That's more or less the only solid fact we have.
Which also means it's a little shaky whether the Iliad even counts as a "debut" at all. But let's roll with it. A book whose author has no face is standing at the very front of European literature. That alone feels kind of romantic to me.
The version I read, by the way, is a retelling for younger readers by Barbara Leonie Picard. It's not the full original text. But as a story, it's incredibly well put together.
I'm not doing literary research here, so this was exactly right for me. If you've ever bounced off the classics, an entry point like this is a gift.
The Trojan Horse... isn't in it?
Before reading, I had exactly one piece of trivia in my head.
The Trojan Horse.
And even that came from an old Brad Pitt movie.
So I opened the book — and got a shock.
Nothing like the movie.
The bigger jolt: that famous Trojan Horse episode never appears in the Iliad itself.
So what does it cover?
It kicks off when the Trojan prince Paris carries off Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus. That triggers a long, grinding war.
And the Iliad covers only a brief stretch of the war's tenth year.
Its center isn't even the outcome of the fighting.
It's the anger of one Greek hero: Achilles.
A whole epic, turning on a single man's emotion. As someone who writes, that ruthless focus is the first thing that floored me.
The gods are shockingly close
The most fun part, for me, was the worldview.
The gods live right next to the humans.
People offer sacrifices and beg for protection. The gods answer — or blow them off.
And these gods are far from perfect.
If anything they're more emotional than humans: jealous, quarreling, each one rooting for their favorite hero.
What came to mind was warring Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
A spear flies at a hero, and a god nudges it off course. In a tight spot, one quietly steps in to save them.
"Hey, that's cheating."
That's how directly the gods intervene, and to a modern reader it feels wildly fresh.
Offering sacrifices is just part of ordinary daily life here. Back then, the gods were that close.
The organizational lesson: don't enrage your best people
So what can we actually take from this story?
"A 3,000-year-old tale, with a lesson for today? Come on."
There is one. And it's unsettling how universal it is.
In a sentence: don't punish your people unjustly.
The Greek army's biggest problem isn't a shortage of troops or a bad strategy.
It's that the commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, made Achilles furious.
Achilles didn't care about the prize itself. What he couldn't forgive was his honor being trampled.
In that moment, he decides: "I will never fight for Agamemnon again."
And he doesn't budge. No pile of lavish gifts, no stack of apologies, softens his rage. Once trust is gone, it doesn't just snap back.
With their strongest warrior on the sidelines, the whole army lands in crisis.
Sound familiar? However huge an organization is, sour your relationship with one exceptional person and the whole thing wobbles.
Treat your people unfairly and they may still nod along in the moment — but their hearts quietly walk out. Rebuilding lost trust is harder than earning it the first time.
A 3,000-year-old poem, doubling as a management textbook. I found myself nodding the whole way through.
Distant family, and the weight of waiting
One last thing.
The Iliad features a hero named Odysseus — the lead of the sequel, the Odyssey, about a long journey home and the family that waits and waits for him.
Thinking of family far away.
That theme, unexpectedly, overlapped with my own life.
While I was reading this, my wife was traveling in Sri Lanka for about twenty days — the longest we've been apart since marrying.
During the trip, something went wrong: double vision, dizziness, nausea, numbness. She had to see a local doctor.
From Japan, all I could do was call the travel-insurance line and look things up. I couldn't be there to support her. Just listen. That helplessness was a lot.
Thankfully it wasn't a stroke or diabetes, and her eyes were fine. But the cause is still unknown, so the detailed exams are waiting until she's home.
We have the internet now. You can reach family overseas in seconds. In the age of the Odyssey, there was no such thing. If family were far away, you couldn't even know if they were alive. Everyone — the one waiting and the one traveling — just carried the fear.
And that anxiety hits your creative work without mercy. During this stretch, I barely wrote a thing.
So how did the great writers of history handle moments like this? Some turned suffering into art. Some went silent for a while. As I read 100 debut novels on my way to becoming a writer, I'm hoping to meet the author who answers that for me.
On to the next book.