The Homeric epics are the Ur-texts in Western culture that encapsulate and convey what happens to human beings (soldiers and civilians) and human societies (Greek and Anatolian) when they are at war. Here we discuss how the Homeric poems function as central enculturating stories about war from their formative period as diverse oral songs in the late Greek Bronze Age (1500‒1200 b.c.e.) through their coalescence eventually as canonical texts in the Greek historical period (800‒500 b.c.e.) and the qualities in the Iliad and Odyssey that have given rise in modern times (1870 to the present) to wonder, horror, admiration, bewilderment, cynicism, and idealism in war veterans, war poets, storytellers, and prominent thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone Weil to Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Allen Ginsburg, Tim O’Brien, and Alice Oswald.