Their rhetoric is to set up a statement that seems to demand a pious answer. We have all heard – perhaps even heard ourselves delivering – the standard line: it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. Homer’s rhetoric is funny because it is anti-climactic. He sets up a cliché morality, but completes it with his own realist, bathetic conclusion. That makes him attractive, precisely because he is not up to the ideals with which our culture bombards us, and because he therefore allows us, too, the leeway to fail.
