Today's subject is Homer's Odyssey, first published to rave reviews around 800 BC, the purpose of the column being to save you the trouble of reading it and to give you something incisive to say about it at dinner parties. No no, the pleasure's mine.
One of the few regrets about my education is that I didn't get to tangle with Ancient Greek, not because it would have opened up the world of classical literature but because of its supreme potential for showing off. Whenever I see a quotation in that exotic alphabet I yearn to impress people by reading it out loud. But such things were not to be. Ah well.
Anyhow, at a second-hand book sale at my local school last year I picked up a copy of Cowper's 1791 translation of the Odyssey. You probably know it. I paid two bucks for it, partly in the hope that I might one day catch up on the seminal text of western literature, but mainly for purposes of ostentation, to which end I placed the book prominently in the lavatory. (I wonder en passant what is the Ancient Greek for lavatory. There are simply no good words in English, all the available ones being either barrack-room bawdy or prissy euphemism - lavatory included. But I digress.)
There Cowper (pronounced Cooper, as I'm sure you know, but still a useful nugget for one-upmanship) sat for months, and whether any visitors to the lavatory came away impressed by my classical scholarship I don't know because they didn't tell me. But there came a day when I found myself enthroned with nothing to read, and my eye fell, as eyes so famously do, on dear old Cowper-Cooper.