Degas, Manet, and Homer

I am lost in the world of art right now what with reading Sebastian Smee's book about some celebrated rivalries between major artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most recently that between Manet and Degas.  It is extraordinary to see bourgeois males dressed in their city clothes, frock coats and top hats, in situations which I should find so uncomfortable, too hot, stuffy, liable to be mussed, spilled on.  Here in Sarasota it is a burden for me to put on long pants; I have gone completely native.  Thus the paintings of Degas and Manet depicting Parisians living their daily lives reflect a world as foreign as that of ancient Rome, and it is always a shock to reflect that these austere and elegant males so handsomely portrayed were forever pulling down or off some or all of these items of clothing for the incessant pursuit of their manly lusts with the many women of the demimonde who were available to them.  What a difference the zipper and y-front underwear have made for men of action!  This is really an aside, for, truth to tell, I am ennobled by the constant perusal of so much beauty as revealed and shaped by these two supreme painters.  I am so happy that I saved the catalogues of so many great exhibitions over the past forty years.  But now indeed I must set the nineteenth century aside and proceed with my lectures notes for my Odyssey course which begins in two weeks, install myself once more into ancient Homeric Greece which is as much or even more my fantasy as historical fact.