The Iliad and the Odyssey were the books he’d read most often, along with the first philosophers, whose writings he would never understand, but they baffled him rewardingly. He felt a sort of nostalgia, he said, for a society that had no scriptures. How anyone could believe in a just and merciful God had always been incomprehensible to him. It was much more sensible to have a gang of gods, and to make them a fractious mob. The heroes of the Iliad were wholly of the earth, according to Petros. This appealed to him, as a man who fixed cars for a living. Homer’s warriors have no secret self, no
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