You are familiar, perhaps, with those literary questions that are now ubiquitous on social media: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre? Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen? The Iliad or the Odyssey? My answers, until recently, were: Both, Jane Eyre (I am a bit of a contrarian), Ellis, and the Odyssey. After finishing Robin Lane Fox’s magisterial Homer and His Iliad, I have come to see the error of my ways. The answer to that last question must be the Iliad.

Homer and His Iliad is the best book on the Iliad in years and an exemplary work of historical and literary criticism. It is judicious, erudite, provocative, revelatory, and utterly convincing.