in a fine blaze of song, starting at just the point

where the main Achaean force, setting their camps afire,

had boarded the oarswept ships an sailed for home

but famed Odysseus' men already crouched in hiding--

in the heart of Troy's assembly--dark in that horse

the Trojans dragged themselves to the city heights . . . .

I was luck enough to be introduced to Homer in the English equivalent of high school, by a teacher who lived and breathed the Iliad and Odyssey. We were required to read and translate 40 lines a day, which would have been a burden had not the teacher treated the epics as tales of adventure. I can't read the Greek any more, but I relish the translations, turning to them again and again for inspiration, for enjoyment, and for a vicarious journey through a legendary Greek world. There are translations galore, but the best of them are immortals--E.V.Rieu in colloquial prose, written soon after World War II, Owen Lattimore's wonderful rendition, and, most wonderful of all, Robert Fagles's masterpieces in luminous verse.

Fagles makes us realize with every line that Homer's tales were once sung by bards, who passed the epics from father to son, from one generation to the next. They must have tailored their performances to their audiences, well aware of the jokes and sly remarks that appealed to them, masters of drama and changing pace, of metaphor and telling pauses. You find the same qualities in a few university lectures, masters of their subject matter, devoted to convincing their captive audiences that meteorology, physics-- and Homer--have a special magic about them. Theirs is, alas, a dying art, kept alive by a devoted few.

Then the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down and some of the magic was lost, or was it? I was lucky enough to learn Homer from a teacher who recited the poems like the great stories they are, with passion and pathos, love and anger, bravery and cowardice, making the most of evocative descriptions. The original Greek is mellifluous and dramatic. English is another matter, but Fagles succeeded. Consider the ship that carried Odysseus to Ithaca:

"And the ship like a four-horse team careering down the plain,

all breaking as one with the whiplash cracking smartly,

leaping with hoofs high to run the course in no time . . . ."

It is as if we are there.

We know of the Greek Bronze Age, of Greece's remote past from archaeology as well as legend, the legends in Homer's poems. The archaeology is rarely spectacular, often really dry and specialized. Of course Homer is legend and not historical truth, but the great epics remind us that the past was as alive and human as we are, even if all we have from it is a legacy of dusty potsherds and crumbling shrines.

Robert Fagles translated Homer as part of a living past and we are immeasurably richer for his genius. He died last week, but the legacy that he left behind him, not only of Homer, but of the Aeneid, is a wonderful memorial.

We are much richer for his having been among us. He was a great Homeric bard.