[dhosek]

I’ve often wondered if Greeks were at a disadvantage in reading Homer since they would have the choice of reading either the essentially foreign original text or what would feel like a bowdlerization as a modernized text, while translations to other languages wouldn’t have that same negative association connected to them.

[alexey-salmin]

Funny thing is the original _text_ probably didn't even exist. Mainstream theory is that Iliad was a purely oral tradition at first and was written down (not written) a few decades or centuries later. The sack of Troy happened shortly before the Late Bronze Age Collapse which among other things destroyed the Greek writing system now known as the Linear Script B. The Greek Alphabet had only appeared 3 centuries later and the period in between is often referred as the "Greek Dark Ages", since there was no writing system for the Greek language at that time.

One way to see Iliad is as a bard's song about lost good time before the apocalypse -- when Greek cities were mighty, trade flourishing, armies big etc.

[mcguire]

Don't forget that you're not reading the text as it was originally written; the surviving texts are copies of copies. Reconstructing, partially, the original text is possible if you have many downstream copies from different sources but never perfect.