I don't know about the current curriculum, but when my father was a high school student in the 1960s he was made to read it in the original Homeric Greek, even though it's completely unintelligible to speakers of Modern Greek. When I was a kid, he could still recite the opening lines from memory.
If I ran the school system I would also force them to memorize the first page! Mostly for nationalism reasons but also just because i thought it would be cool. Did he like it?
He would cite it as an example of the senselessness of Greece's educational policies. But keep in mind, he is not a cultured man. His primary motivations are money and sadism.
Or without having consumed all the cultural context that makes the odyssey what it is — all the other Batman films, zendaya’s repertoire, twilight franchise
Thinking about writing a Thomas Friedman column about the odyssey but instead of asking my cabbie I’ll talk to the folks who run the Greek diner what they think
“What do you think of the Antinous character?” “Idk I didn’t trust the guy. Seemed kinda like I’d seen him somewhere before. Seemed kinda like a bat or something.”
