In the dark, dark cloud of our culture’s increasing post-literacy, there is a sliver of a silver lining. The less capable we become of immersing ourselves in intelligent long-form literature, the more we approach the condition of Homer’s intelligent, pre-literate audience. We can now imagine what Matthew Arnold said there was no point in trying to imagine: “how the Iliad affected its natural hearers.” In fact, we don’t have to imagine it—we’ve been close to experiencing it for roughly two decades on cable television.

For its natural hearers, the Iliad obviously emerged from, and shared the same medium with, an ordinary type of performed heroic narrative poetry—just as, for us, The Wire emerges from and shares a medium with the ordinary television cop show. But the unified magnitude of the plot is entirely new. The Iliad takes roughly twenty-five hours to perform (not read). Even if such a performance extended over three days, this art experience would have been inhumanly uncomfortable unless it also proved extraordinarily absorbing. Watching the Iliad in three days would be like watching The Wire in eight. We can now imagine how intense, uncomfortable, and absorbing such an experience would be.

Why, and for whom, can the tragic epic be so absorbing? The theme song of the Sopranos gives an excellent short answer (and would make a superb epigraph for the Iliad):

You woke up this morning

Got yourself a gun.

Mama always said you’d be the

Chosen