They Odyssey has a dim or ironic view of epic glory. It holds up a mirror for an audience who has come to hear of such glory, and does so in moments that are virtuosic as scripts. We will perform a couple of these moments to better understand how they work on the stage, as opposed to the page. We will then turn to how Plato used one of them in his homage to the power of Homer, thinly disguised as a parody, in his Ion.