I have loved the Odyssey and I have read it and taught it many times. My translation imagines a reader of the future. In an introductory letter to my seven-year-old grandson, I address him as a thirty-five-year old and try to communicate the delight that Homer’s masterpiece has brought to me. I am eighty and deeply grateful for the humanistic education that I have received. But the flame of humanistic studies is flickering. I hope that I will pass some of its warmth to those whom I will never meet.