The right way to read “The Odyssey”

“This is what you should teach me, how to be like Odysseus—how to love my country, wife and father, and how, even after suffering shipwreck, I might keep sailing on course to those honorable ends.
— Seneca, Moral Letters, 88.7b

Most of us were taught The Odyssey the wrong way. Somewhere in a classroom, a teacher walked us through the dates, told us about Homer's blindness, explained the mechanics of the Trojan Horse, and asked us to memorize which god did what to which monster. We could name the Cyclops and the Sirens and still walk away having learned nothing that mattered.