I was rummaging through a box of unsorted stock in one of the second-hand bookshops that still cling to the West Port, the kind of place where the proprietor knows you by your coat rather than your name, when I found it: a boxed set of the Iliad and the Odyssey, matching spines, the faint smell of somebody else's attic clinging to the cloth. I opened the Odyssey first, out of habit, and the spine did something no honest paperback ought to do after fifty years on a shelf. It cracked. Cleanly, audibly, like a knuckle. Nobody, in five decades, had ever bent that book open past its first few pages.
I was still turning this over — a complete stranger's abandoned classical education, sitting in my hands for four pounds — when my phone buzzed. Seok-won, characteristically economical with his greetings, got straight to it: he was putting together an extracurricular talk for his sixth-formers on Homer, timed to catch the wave of interest stirred up by Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which had been filling cinemas — and, apparently, sixth-form common rooms — for the better part of a month. Could I, he asked, send him something with a bit of backbone to it? Not a plot summary. Something that would survive being read aloud to seventeen-year-olds who had already watched Matt Damon do the hard work of looking heroic.
I told him I would do him one better. I would write it for everyone, and he could simply borrow whichever parts he needed.
Let us dispense with a small but persistent error at the outset: one does not simply arrive at the Odyssey. Homer — or whichever committee of oral poets history has flattened into that single convenient name — did not write a sequel. He, or they, wrote one story in two movements, and modern publishing's habit of selling them as separate paperbacks has done the reading public a genuine disservice. The Iliad compresses nine years of siege into a few furious weeks: Achilles' wrath, Hector's death, a war that never actually shows you the wooden horse, because the poem ends before the ending arrives. The Odyssey picks up the wreckage afterwards and asks a quieter, harder question: what happens to the men who survive?
This is worth dwelling on, because the two poems make an argument together that neither makes alone. The Iliad is obsessed with kleos — glory, the kind that outlives the body, the kind Achilles trades his entire future for in a single, chilling piece of arithmetic. The Odyssey spends ten years demonstrating what that bargain actually costs the men who did not take it, or who took it and lived to regret the fine print. Odysseus is, among the Greek heroes, the one who wanted to go home more than he wanted to be sung about. Read the Odyssey without the Iliad standing behind it, and Odysseus is merely a resourceful sailor having a very bad decade. Read the two together, and he becomes something closer to an argument: that survival, quiet and unglamorous, might be worth more than the glory an entire war was fought for.
Which brings me, with some reluctance, to a confession. In a great many households — British ones very much included, whatever we might like to think of ourselves — Homer occupies a peculiar shelf-space: owned, displayed, and almost never opened. I grew up around Everyman's Library editions with their green cloth spines, inherited rather than read, arranged by height rather than affection. It is, I suspect, a fairly universal vice among literate cultures: the boxed set as furniture, the complete works as proof of taste rather than an actual reading list.
But in Korea, if I may say so as an outsider who has spent the better part of three decades studying the place from the inside out, this particular vice has its own distinctive architecture. The segye munhak jeonjip — the "complete works of world literature," those matching hardback rows in navy or burgundy — arrives in a home the way a piano once did: as part of the furniture of aspiration, often bought as a wedding gift, or to fill the shelves of a child's new study before the child has learned to read anything longer than a comic. Homer sits somewhere in volume one or two, first in the queue and last in actual attention, gathering the specific, faintly reproachful dust of a promise made and never kept.
I make this observation not as a jab but as a genuinely sympathetic diagnosis, because the numbers back it up far more starkly than I expected when I went looking. South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism published its 2025 national reading survey this March, and the headline figure is sobering: the adult reading rate, the proportion of adults who read or listened to at least one book in the preceding year, fell to 38.5 per cent, the lowest since the survey began. Put plainly, more than six adults in ten did not open a single book last year. Among the over-sixties, the figure drops to a stark 14.4 per cent.
Here, though, is the detail that changes the complexion of the whole argument, and the reason I think this essay is worth writing rather than merely worth lamenting: readers in their twenties bucked the trend entirely, posting a reading rate of 75.3 per cent, the highest of any adult age group. Korean commentators have taken to calling this "text-hip" — a small but genuine cultural counter-current in which reading, and being seen to read, has become a marker of style among the young rather than a chore assigned by parents. It is precisely this generation — literate, curious, already primed to find books desirable again — that I would ask to take Homer down off the shelf. Not because it is good for them, in the medicinal, eat-your-vegetables sense that kills a book faster than any amount of neglect ever could. But because, I would argue, nobody wrote a more honest account of what it costs to lose yourself, and what it takes to come back.
Now to the poem itself, and to the single moment in it I find myself returning to more than any other. In the ninth book of the Odyssey, trapped in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus while his remaining men are eaten alive at the rate of two a sitting, Odysseus tells the monster his name is Outis — "Nobody." On the surface it is simple battlefield cunning: when Odysseus later blinds him and the other Cyclopes come running to ask who has hurt him, Polyphemus can only bellow that "Nobody" is attacking him, and his neighbours, understandably unmoved, wander off again. It is one of the oldest jokes in Western literature, and it still works.
I have never quite been able to leave it there, though. The truly unsettling thing about the trick is not its cleverness. It is how easily Odysseus could have stayed Nobody. By that point in the story he had already lost the will and the means to be anyone in particular — cast ashore, half-starved, entirely dependent on the mercy of strangers who did not know his name and had no reason to care about it. Everything that follows (Circe, Calypso's seven long years of comfortable captivity, the suitors devouring his household in his absence) amounts to the same long, unglamorous business: an anonymous man reclaiming the right to be somebody again. Not through divine intervention, though the gods certainly interfere enough. Through sheer, bloody-minded persistence: the refusal to let a temporary erasure become a permanent one.
I raise this because it maps, with a precision I did not expect when I first went looking, onto something happening in Korea at present that has nothing to do with ancient Greece. South Korea's Office for Government Policy Coordination publishes a biennial survey of young people's lives, and its most recent edition, released in early 2025, recorded that 5.2 per cent of Koreans aged nineteen to thirty-four now qualify as isolated or reclusive youth — more than double the 2.4 per cent recorded just two years earlier, in 2022. Extrapolated across the population, that works out to something in the region of half a million young people, living lives conducted almost entirely within four walls, with little or no sustained contact with the world beyond them. The most commonly cited cause, by a wide margin, is difficulty finding work — a Cyclops of an altogether more bureaucratic and less mythological kind, but no less capable of trapping a person in a cave.
I want to tread carefully here, because this is not a phenomenon I intend to diagnose from an armchair in Edinburgh, still less to flatten into a tidy literary metaphor for anyone actually living through it. Still, there is something worth saying about a three-thousand-year-old poem that understood, long before anyone had a clinical term for social withdrawal, that the hardest part of surviving a catastrophe is very rarely the surviving itself. It is agreeing, afterwards, to be seen again — to answer to a name, to walk back through your own front door and reclaim a life that has, in your absence, largely moved on without you. Odysseus's Ithaca does not wait for him patiently. It has been eaten alive by suitors who assumed he was never coming back. He returns anyway — not easily, but because he never once stopped insisting, even lashed to his own mast or curled up in a stranger's cave, that Nobody was a name he fully intended to shed.
That, I would suggest, is the argument worth putting in front of a room of Korean sixth-formers with a Nolan trailer still fresh in their memory. The monsters are impressive enough, but the real argument is that the man who beat them did so by refusing, for twenty straight years, to stop wanting to go home.
None of which requires ancient Greek, thankfully, nor even particular patience with hexameters. For readers coming to this in Korean, I would point towards two very different doors into the same house. The late Cheon Byung-hee (1939–2022), professor emeritus at Dankook University and, by general consent, the most widely read Korean translator of the Greek and Roman canon, produced the Iliad and Odyssey translations most Koreans have actually encountered, now published by Sup — his Iliad alone has sold more than fifty thousand copies, a striking figure for a translation of a three-thousand-year-old poem. Alternatively, Lee Jun-seok, who took his doctorate in Homeric studies at the University of Basel, published fresh translations of both epics through Acanet in 2023, marketed, not inaccurately, as the first fully reworked original-text translation in forty years — a touch more literal, by most accounts, and neatly timed, given that his Odyssey has since found itself repackaged with Nolan's film on the cover. Either will do. Both are considerably shorter than the guilt most of us carry about never having opened them.
I sent Seok-won rather more than he had asked for, as I suspect he half expected I would. He wrote back to say his students, mercifully, seemed less interested in Achilles' rage than in the twenty years it took Penelope to recognise the man standing, disguised and travel-worn, in her own hall. I found that oddly moving. It is, after all, rather the point.
As for the boxed set from the West Port — the one whose spine had never once been asked to bend — I bought it, obviously. Some other collector's ambition and shame will not become mine. It sits, properly cracked for the first time in fifty years, on the shelf nearest my chair, which is precisely where a book ought to sit if anyone intends it to be read rather than merely owned.
To my Korean readers in particular, and to the many others who inherited a matching set they have never opened: I make no claim that Homer will fix anything. Having just spent a fortnight back in his company, though, I will say this much. He wrote, three thousand years ago, the only account I know of a man who very nearly agreed to stay Nobody forever, and decided, against every reasonable calculation, that he would rather go home. Pick a translation, any translation. Crack the spine. It will not mind.♣
Recommended Resources
English editions (Amazon):
☞ The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson): https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0393356256
☞ The Iliad (trans. Emily Wilson): https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-Homer/dp/1324076143
Korean-language editions (Aladin):
☞ Purchase — the Odyssey (trans. Cheon Byung-hee, Sup): https://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=686827
☞ Purchase — the Iliad (trans. Cheon Byung-hee, Sup): https://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=877643
☞ Purchase — the Odyssey (trans. Lee Jun-seok, Acanet — Nolan film tie-in cover): https://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=324441050
☞ Purchase — the Iliad (trans. Lee Jun-seok, Acanet): https://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=316563045
Ex Oriente, Lux.
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh