Comment by jasode

>Terrible advice for a potential reader.

Your quotation left out the context of that advice which explains the reasoning. The paragraph before it states:

>, I would recommend familiarizing oneself with the main characters and the basic outline of the story. This may sound like strange advice, since readers of contemporary fiction are often accustomed to avoiding “spoilers,” but developing prior knowledge of the characters and story actually brings one closer to the experience of ancient audiences, who, as I have said, would have already known the broad outlines of the myths the epics tell before they went to a performance of them.

A rough analogy would be today's audiences already being familiar with comic superhero characters and stories like Superman, Wonder Woman, etc in DC Comics, or Spiderman, etc in the Marvel Universe -- before watching any of the movies about them. Sure, there might be a few in the audience who are totally oblivious to the background of the Superman mythology before the movie starts but for the most part, everybody is familiar with Clark Kent, kryptonite, and so on. (Cue up the famous Jay Leno skit of asking random people in the street, "what is the chemical composition of salt?", and they don't know to answer "sodium-chloride" ... but when he then asks "what's the name of the rock that hurts Superman?" and they immediately say "Oh, that's kryptonite!")

The idea is to bring that level of cultural knowledge into the reader's brain before reading Iliad/Odyssey.