I Read the Odyssey in the Original Greek. No Idea What It Says.

O Tanya shares a valuable lesson: reading The Odyssey in the original Greek is pointless if you don’t actually know Greek.

The tweet: “i actually read the Odyssey in the original greek. complete waste of time, i have no idea what those symbols mean”

Gorgocutie says:

This is the single most honest confession about classical education I have ever seen. This person picked up a 2,700-year-old epic poem written in Homeric Greek — a language so archaic that even modern Greeks need a dictionary to read it — and apparently expected the alphabet to just… translate itself through sheer willpower?

“I have no idea what those symbols mean” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That’s not a review of The Odyssey, that’s a review of your own life choices. You didn’t read the Odyssey in the original Greek. You looked at a book written in Greek and turned the pages while thinking about lunch.

But honestly? Respect for the self-awareness. Most people would pretend they understood it. Tanya here is honest enough to admit she was just moving her eyes across squiggly lines for a few hours.