When first young Maro in his boundless mind

A work to outlast immortal Rome designed,

Perhaps he seemed above the critic's law,

And but from Nature's fountains scorned to draw;

But when to examine every part he came,

Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.

Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design,

And rules as strict his labored work confine

As if the Stagirite o'erlooked each line.

Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;

To copy Nature is to copy them.

Alexander Pope

The three bibliographies accessed from this page have self-explanatory names: Homer in Other Arts, Odyssey 1-12, Odyssey 13-24. The fourth, Structure, begins to explain some of the relationships between and among the parts of the epic.

Illustrations. All of the illustrations on this page come from the famous Francois Vase, which resides in the Archeological Museum in Florence. In 1845, the painter Alessandro Francois discovered this early black-figure vase in a tomb near Chiusi. He reassembled its broken parts and thus it was displayed until 1900 when it was shattered into 638 fragments (in some versions of the incident, the damage was purposeful vandalism). It has now been again restored, with some subsequently discovered parts added and other suspect fragments removed. In the latest restoration, all missing pieces appear in flat, bland clay with no attempt to reconstruct what art might have appeared in the missing pieces. Many of the scenes that the Kleitias painted onto this enormous volute-krater (measuring 1.81 meters at its greatest circumference) illustrate events surrounding the Trojan War: the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, Achilles pursuing Troilus, the funeral games of Patroclus, and the Caledonian boar hunt. Top left shows a chariot race with a bronze tripod in the background. Top right, the great boar dies. To the left of the page, one of the bands illustrating the boar hunt can be seen in a more complete version. The hero closest to the boar is Peleus, father of Achilles. The next band is a chariot race, part of the funeral games of Patroclus. At the bottom of this page, the vase can be seen in its entirety.