(6) The author and the audience:

The audience, to whom Homer presented episodes

from the Iliad as a lecture or on festive occasions, was as mixed as the epic is multi-layered.

The outward epic narrative was understandable to the general public, educated citizens and political decision-makers, and the lecture was an event that created cultural identity.

For the students willing to learn and the prospective sailors, the task was to acquire the learning contents hidden in the subtext (which hero of the epic stands for which star, for which constellation? Achill: star Sirius, Hector: winter constellation Orion etc.).

With the small literary circle of highly educated writers and teachers, the still Assyrian educated elite of the time, Homer organized a cat and mouse game about educational knowledge.

Just as the modern crime writer intersperses references to the murderer in his novel, which the reader is supposed to interpret, Homer intersperses educational goods in his epic, which his educated friends had to recognize.