Where the Iliad is about standing firm and dying gloriously, the Odyssey is about cunning, survival, and the long road home. Its structural inventions (the embedded flashback, the trial of suitors, the reunion that doubles as a test) essentially created narrative as we know it. Ulysses and his descendants haunt the entire canon, from Dante through Joyce.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.