The Odyssey
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.
Four books pass before Odysseus appears, and the famous monsters are finished by the halfway mark; the back half is disguise logistics and palace stalling, with episodes recapped to each new listener. Then come the hanged slave women, an atrocity the poem barely blinks at. Oral-formula repetition tests modern patience in any translation.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
