Love Quote by George Saintsbury

Saintsbury is doing two bits of cultural housekeeping at once: crowning The Odyssey as narrative gold, and quietly demoting The Iliad from “story” to “poem,” as if plot were the true test of lasting greatness. The provocation lands because it flips the usual schoolroom hierarchy. The Iliad arrives with more prestige - war, heroes, grandeur - yet Saintsbury treats it like a cathedral you admire rather than a place you live in. The Odyssey, by contrast, is called “the original romance of the West,” a loaded phrase that drags Homer out of the classics cabinet and into the lineage of later page-turners: quest, homecoming, cunning, erotic peril, recognition scenes. He’s not just praising; he’s giving the West a founding genre.

The subtext is Victorian and early-modern criticism at work: story as a civilizing technology. The Iliad is episodic and concentrated, essentially a sustained meditation on rage, honor, and mortality over a narrow slice of the Trojan War. It’s architecture, not itinerary. The Odyssey is itinerary - a sequence of tests that build character through motion, disguise, and reversal. Saintsbury is arguing that narrative appetite, the hunger for “what happens next,” is the engine of Western reading habits.

Context matters: writing in an era when the novel had become the dominant cultural form, Saintsbury reads Homer through a novelist’s bias. Calling The Iliad “not much of a story” is less a knock than a reclassification: lyric force and moral intensity over plotted momentum. He’s telling you which Homer feels modern - and why.