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If you look closely, you'll see why this very smart scholarly LARP from King Bazinga pisses me off so much.
(hexbear.net)
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 
Speaking of The Iliad and The Odyssey, are there any particularly good English translations of it that I could read? Is Penguin Classics good enough? Are there better ones?
Speaking as a former educator, I can tell you the best translation is the one that you understand best. I mean that. If the ideas are conveyed in a way you can internalize and visualize, that's the best one.
Read a few pages of whatever's in reach of you, each, and see which one reads the best if they have different word choices and phrasing.
I've seen some olde-timey versions of the Odyssey, and they're wacky because they make Odysseus sound like a Popeye character.
That's why I'm always hesitant to read non-natively English texts from Project Gutenberg. It's often a translation from the 1800s, or something that is, as you say, olde-timey. That's fine for English-native works, but it grinds me a bit with translated ones.
I strongly believe that the translation that best conveys the ideas, characters, and themes in a way that most vividly speaks to you is the best one.
If you can pick up Odysseus' yearning and his stubbornness, Athena's sympathy but also her divine arrogance, Penelope's marital faith and deep aching frustration and the like, you've found the one that best speaks to you.
As weird it may seem, modernizations of Romeo and Juliet that turn the entire story into a contemporary gang war, or Julius Caesar into a corporate CEO, work somehow.
When it comes to Shakespeare I just enjoy the originals as is. I read a lot of the plays and found the stories extremely enjoyable. I haven't seen many productions of the plays, however.
That said, I also appreciate movies like 10 Things I Hate About You as a rendition of Taming of the Shrew, or that Richard III where Ian McKellan is a Hitler-esque fascist.
I suppose I got used to modernizing Shakespeare to my students because it made it a lot easier for them to get into it and start paying attention.
ah yes, but i'm a huge dork
For those (and my classes had them too) there's always the original text, and I always left that option open for their individual work.
I think younger students maybe should read the modernized versions (with some explanations for anything quirky that got lost), but the older ones should be trying to go through the original English. There's just so much to absorb on even a first run through if Shakespeare's plays (I'm always saddened when I try to reference stuff and almost none of my friends read or remember any Shakespeare), just the historical connections alone are really great/important. I've wanted to suggest watching HBOs Rome so many times to people but they never went through the Shakespeare plays and it's a much harder sell
I would agree with you if I had the time, resources, and engaged students that weren't exhausted from constant standardized testing. I considered it good enough if I could keep them engaged and maybe even interested.
Part of that is because, with a few exceptions, the plays were already anachronistic and it's not like early modern England was a place that was big on the historical accuracy thing...
My friends don't believe me when I tell them Romeo + Juliet is straight up just art no matter how stupid it sounds
I’ve really liked Caroline Alexander’s