Not long ago, Elon Musk took a break from predicting civil war to offer his followers on X a book recommendation. “Can’t recommend the Iliad enough!” he tweeted. “Best as Penguin audiobook on 1.25 speed.” He accompanied this with a screenshot of the Penguin edition of The Odyssey. Erich Auerbach, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
Still, one way or another, Homer’s great poems have fulfilled the injunction to be news that stays news. Scholars of the original Greek, or partisans of Emily Wilson’s acclaimed recent verse translations, might roll their eyes at the injunction to speed-listen to an audiobook version. But one of the great virtues of myth is that it is robust to being reimagined: The Odyssey gives us Ulysses in one direction, and The Wind in the Willows or Watership Down in another.
