A Tale of Five Iliads

Ok, it's six if you count The Children's Homer.  How does a woman end up with five copies of the Iliad?  It helps to be scatter-brained.  It all began when my mother-in-law downsized and gave us her set of The Great Books--the set I had envied since day one.  They are a reverend object not to be dragged around and read, but more to be admired from a distance.  Then my mother downsized her classroom and gave me a cheap, secondhand copy of The Iliad that sucked into our family book void, never to be seen until it was too late.  I wanted a copy I could write in, so I went to B&N and bought a copy of the Iliad, and--I thought-- a copy of The Odyssey.  When I got home I had two different translations of The Iliad.  One was much cheaper than the other, so I started that, intending to return the other one.  Came the day when I was in pressing need of reading material, so I grabbed the other version since it was close to hand.  Behold, sometimes, you get what you pay for and the Fagles translation is much better than the one I had started reading.  My legs were numb when I decided I could live with owning two, no three, no four copies of The Iliad.  You know how it is when you're a parent.  I wanted my kids to enjoy all the wealth I had just discovered so I bought them

The Children's Homer.  Still one short?  You are clever to keep up.  After watching it for months and encouraging others to buy it, I went into Love Inc, and they practically gave me a second set of The Great Books in a better binding and just loved enough that we don't feel bad about loving it some more.

Buying books is an adventure.  The great thing about the ancients is that they cost their publishers nothing, so you can get them in all kinds of modes, traditional bound, e-book, document file.  You can pay nothing, or next to nothing at thrift stores, or you can buy them in hand bound leather editions.  All of Shakespeare can be bought for the nook for about 6 bucks.  If you're comfortable with reading off your computer it's all there for free if you look.
So let my surplus inventory be a warning and a comfort.  If you end up with three copies of the Iliad, you're still two short of me.

PS. I have found Robert Fagles translations of The Odyssey and The Aeneid to be worth the extra dollars too.