Abstract
Abstract “This poet,” Plato said of Homer, “educated Greece,”1 a statement that would hold true for nearly two millennia. Greek youngsters learned their ABrs from lists of Homeric names; one of the first sentences they wrote was “Homer was not a man but a god”; and among their first reading assignments was a selection of verse from The Odyssey. 2 Among papyri that survive from the early empire are scraps of lines from The Iliad and The Odyssey copied as a writing exercise,3 a school manual quoting from The Odyssey and containing an elegy celebrating a temple in Homer’s honor,4 an epitome of Books 3 and 5 of The Odyssey,5 and student essays on Homeric themes, such as the preparations for the Trojan War,6 events of the war after the death of Achilles,7 and the sufferings of Philoctetes.8
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