The Children's Homer

Why it’s on the list: The Irish poet Padraic Colum’s 1918 prose retelling, braiding the Iliad and the Odyssey into one continuous story told to Telemachus — still in print after a century because Colum was a poet and the prose sounds like it.

Where I heard about it

• Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, Texas — on its sixth-grade reading list, posted by the Classic Learning Test in September 2026, as the bridge text: Homer in prose at eleven, then the Odyssey and Iliad in verse in ninth grade. Full sequence: Founders Classical Academy Reading List.

About this edition

Illustrated by Willy Pogány.

Connections

• Founders Classical Academy Reading List — the curriculum this came from; 56 unique titles across 5th through 12th grade.
• Classical Education — the movement whose canon this list is.
• Padraic Colum
• The Iliad
• The Odyssey
• Greek Myths
• Classics