One should indeed read Pope with his notes available, in the Twickenham edition possibly, to see what a vast amount he did understand about Homer.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I get letters from college kids who have read Percy Jackson when they were younger who tell me, 'I just passed my Classics exam.' The books are accurate enough that they can serve as a gateway to Homer and Virgil.
But as the Pope has a long arm, which might reach me in France, I have gone a little out of the way to tell him the plain truths contained in these pages.
Homer was able to give us no information relating to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine things.
Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.
What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.
Yes, and there were changes of light on landscapes and changes of direction of the wind and the force of the wind and weather. That whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect.
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
All men begin their learning with Homer.
Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.