[xhevahir]

Part of why a lot of readers have found this literature to be inexhaustible is, I think, its surprising combination of familiarity (since it's had so much influence on subsequent Western culture) and foreignness. For example, consider the career of the term "hero," which seems to have meant something like a warrior-aristocrat in Homer, and later, in Greek tragedy, takes on the moral grandeur that we meet with in characters like Oedipus, but somehow also is used to describe the boxer Kleomedes, who massacred dozens of kids because he was upset over losing a match.

When I first started reading classical literature I was struck by an idea I found in Bruno Snell's The Discovery of the Mind, that Homer, apart from having no words corresponding to our "mind" or "soul," didn't even refer to the body as a single whole--more as a collection of limbs. The article here talks about this: https://intertheory.org/torrente.htm .

None of this makes ancient literature easier to read, though, unfortunately.