Homeric poetry is vivid and precise. We can smell the dust, hear the din of battle and follow the tip of a spear as it inflicts a wound 'between the neck and the collarbone'. Even the gods - those obsolete pagan idols - seem familiar. Apollo kicks down the Achaean wall

like a child who piles sand by the seashore
and makes a tower to amuse himself in his innocence
and then, still playing, wrecks it with his hands and feet.

Athena deflects an arrow away from Menelaus 'like a mother brushing a fly away from her sleeping baby'. And Hera, after quarrelling with Zeus, runs back home to Olympus

like an idea that flashes in the mind of a man
who has travelled far and wide, and thinks in his mind's awareness,
'I wish I were in that place, or this,' and imagines many things;
so swiftly travelled Hera in her haste, a goddess.

LRB 27 August 2009 | PDF Download