The Iliad is one of the most misinterpreted—and thereby maligned—books ever
composed, recited, or written. Eric Larsen’s Homer Whole sets out to correct this misreading
of the great epic, to move it out of the caves of primitivism current readers
consign it to and raise it to its proper place as the central foundational work of modern
literary art.
Generalizations like “Homer glorifies war,” “Homer’s highest value is violence,” or
“honor in Homer is gained only through pillage, slaughter, and war” are heard too
often to be suffered easily, and they are also incorrect, being half-truths no less false
than “girls are bad at math” or “Frenchmen are arrogant.”
Reading the Iliad with an open rather than a pre-judging or pre-selecting mind—that
is, reading it “whole”—brings to light psychological elements, philosophic dimensions,
emotional nuances, and myriad dramatic subtleties that remain forever locked in darkness
for those who assume, believe, or have been taught that the poem is “primitive,” that it
comes from “an age of barbarism,” extoling only pillage, greed, and violence.
The Iliad has in it much blood, gore, suffering, and death; but it also, in Blake’s great
phrase, holds much “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love.” To emphasize one side of the poem
over the other; to assume one to be “good” and the other “bad”; one “barbaric” and the
other “civilized”—this is to read the Iliad with one eye closed and the poem reduced to
one-dimensionality, the poem’s aesthetic, emotional, and philosophical textures and
depths—the essence of its modernity—unseen and unknown.
Homer Whole describes and elucidates the real reasons why the Iliad has survived as the
seminal classic that it is, reasons unknown to most readers, both inside academia and out.
