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We're All Homer's Children; Life as battle, life as journey, and the epics that gave us both metaphors.

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From: The Washington Post
Date: 20080309
Author:

HOMER'S THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY

A Biography

By Alberto Manguel

Atlantic Monthly. 285 pp. $19.95 The English novelist and essayist Maurice Baring is often credited with the quip that it wasn't Homer who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, but another man of the same name. Regardless of who said it, we get the joke. Homer, the Ur-poet of Western civilization -- and usually the first author listed on any Western Civ syllabus -- has over two and a half millennia become a legend, not a personage whose life we can chart more or less accurately. Even in Aristotle's day, as imagined by ...

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