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No one knows what I looked like. Every portrait of Homer is an invention — a blind old man, because the tradition says I was blind, with a long beard, because the tradition says I was old. The British Museum has several. The Hellenistic sculptors created a type and repeated it.

I do not object. The poems are what matter. The Iliad begins with wrath — not with glory, not with a hero, but with anger. That is the most honest opening in all of literature. Everything in the poem follows from it: the deaths, the waste, the grief of Priam on his knees. The poem knows from the first word that wrath is the engine of human catastrophe. It spent twenty-four books proving it.