Our Iliad and Odyssey begin as acts of translation. The background to the Iliad is that of possibly archaic orality. The transfer into writing implies translation in both the generic and the more technical sense. The world of the rhapsode and the bard, of the singer of ancient tales, many-layered, open to personal and local variations, is not that of the writer. The relation of text to audience - literally to the listener - is altogether different from that of writer to reader. Perforce, we have no knowledge of the epic of Troy, of the heroic and clan-sagas which went into its assemblage, prior to 'Homer'. What is manifest, however, is the process of linguistic adjustment and semantic stylisation. The idiom of the Iliad as we know it is a composite artifice in which vestiges of archaic forms and dialects still surface. The redactor has translated, not always with absolute confidence or understanding, from diverse lexical-grammatical materials.

Responses to Homer during the 'Romantic' age (roughly, 1770-1830) were largely positive yet the emphases were often subtly different from those of the previous period and sometimes registered challenge or difficulty as well as easy acceptance. Many writers were prepared to acknowledge that Homer, or 'Homer', was endowed with a special authority which, like that of Shakespeare, gained in force from the absence of biographical detail. Homer was an originator, an original genius, the great poetic father (according, among others, to Godwin, Coleridge and Lamb). The worlds of the Iliad, the Odyssey (and, for some readers, the Hymns) were vividly realised yet almost 'unimaginably different' from those which had developed in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Homer’s achievement was often unquestioned but it could be daunting and untouchable. This complex of reactions was given expression by Robert Southey in July 1797 when he wrote: 'With Homer and Milton no future, indeed no other, poems can be compared. The age of the one and the subject of the other preclude it, independant of their unequalled and perhaps unequalable merit.' Phrases such as 'old Homer' (used, for example, by Keats and Hazlitt) signalled that the Greek poet, who was still conveniently compressed into one individual by most readers, was endowed with the wisdom and insight achieved by experience: in artistic representations he is never youthful, unlike Apollo, the god with special jurisdiction over poetic affairs.

Narrative method has long been a central issue in Homeric scholarship, since Analysts relied on narrative difficulties to identify earlier levels, while Unitarians responded by claiming that an understanding of Homer’s narrative rules would explain inconsistencies. More recently, oral poetry and structuralist narratology have contributed to more understanding of Homer’s narrative techniques. Yet even while scholars have treated Homeric narrative as problematic, readers have been moved by the poems.

To the Greeks of the eighth century, epic presented a remote, splendid, shared past. Heroic stories were a valuable cultural resource; they provided entertainment, historical continuity and a method of ethical thought. Epic performance was an especially important vehicle for transmitting these tales: at a successful performance, everyone shared in excitement, sorrow and admiration, making the occasion a source of social cohesion. The familiarity of the main characters and stories, reinforced by epic’s conservative language and style, offered stability in a changing world, while the flexibility of performance meant that the stories could be adapted to their immediate contexts.

We are never outside what the anthropologist Gayle Rubin has taught us to call a 'sex

gender system': it is the task of cultural critics - anthropologists, literary scholars, classicists, archaeologists - to specify the components and dynamics of such systems as they take cultural form, whether in societies or in artefacts like poems. Sex, sexuality, gender, reproduction, production and ideas about all of these are structurally linked in any society; consider, for example, Lévi-Strauss’s meditation on exogamy - the exchange or 'traffic in women' between social groups, fundamental to human communities thus far - as the foundational requirement for any human traffic, for society itself. Over the last thirty years scholars and activists have greatly refined our understanding about sex, sexuality and gender: a sex-gender system is not simply about men and women, nor even about 'masculinity' vs. 'femininity', or 'homosexuality' vs. 'heterosexuality'. Each of these categories has a history and a cultural specificity; it is a truism worth repeating that sexuality, gender and ideas thereof are culturally variable. Yet just as the linguist Émile Benveniste observed that nowhere do we find a human society without language, so we might also say that nowhere do we find a human society without a sex-gender system (however debated, brittle or fragile) - some way of organising sexual dimorphism, reproduction and child-rearing.