distinguished families as part of banquets or dinners in the 2nd and early 1st millennia BC, and that observers may have directed or participated in them. They were probably recited--as in, not performed with music.

Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is divided into twenty-four parts. Early scholars suggested these correspond to the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, but this is widely considered ahistorical. The division was probably made long after the poem's composition but is now generally accepted as part