I'm a former English teacher. You don't need to be an English teacher, however, to know THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY ARE TWO DISTINCTLY SEPARATE STORIES.
This lying fuck did a wikipedia search of "the classics" and wants smart people points for name-dropping THE WRONG FUCKING NAME.
He hasn't read either. At best he's seen a bunch of bleached Hellenistic statue avatars on the internet and nodded along to their RETVRN prattling. 
Ever meet that annoying kid in grade school that said "I am very smart. I know that E Equals Em Cee Squared!" 
Fifty years later, one of those became 
Honestly, that sounds more interesting, if only for the purposes of learning about Roman military organization during the transition to the early middle ages. Even then, you'd still have compare the original source with how each generation of scholarship has to say about it.
dramatic book-on-hard-surface sound
Gravity's. Rainbow.
How about Vegetius "Epitoma Rei Militaris", that book was very popular so medieval chuds probably had unread but extremely luxurious manuscrips on their shelves.