Poetic justice: suspected thief caught reading book on The Iliad

The downfall of Daniele Liquori, an IT technician, classicist and suspected cat burglar, owed as much to King Agamemnon as it did to bad luck.
Police say that Liquori, now dubbed the “intellectual thief” in the Italian media, had set his sights on stealing the contents of an apartment in Rome’s upmarket Prati quarter when he got distracted. Lying on the bedside table, Liquori explained to detectives, was a book that took his fancy.
The title intrigued him, he said. Gli dèi alle sei. L’Iliade all’ora dell’aperitivo (The gods at six. The Iliad at cocktail hour) by Giovanni Nucci examines The Iliad through a series of lectures by an imaginary French professor and a rekindled love story from the professor’s youth.
“The gods don’t watch the heroes fighting while they take an aperitif,” Nucci says of his work. “They enter into their battles, they stand beside them, they are inside them.”
Since Liquori thought he had a bit of time, and the apartment was empty, he picked it up, put his feet up on the balcony, and started to read. At a certain point, however, the 71-year-old owner of the flat, who was in another room, became aware of Liquori’s presence and called the police.
Liquori was eventually arrested after climbing on to another balcony to escape. He told a judge that after starting Nucci’s book, he had become engrossed.
He tried to explain his presence in the building. “I had an appointment with someone who lives in that building and was waiting on the communal rooftop to admire the view,” he told police. “I slipped and fell on to the veranda of the floor below. I thought I had ended up in a B&B, saw the book and started to read it.”
Police, however, said they found him in possession of a bag full of new clothes, with the labels still attached, and were charging him with receipt of stolen property plus attempted burglary.
Nucci was delighted to have acquired a new reader. “It’s fantastic. First of all I would like to find the person caught in flagrante and give him a copy of the book, because his reading will have been interrupted and I would like him to be able to finish it,” he told Il Messaggero newspaper. “It’s a surreal story but full of humanity.”
Nucci pointed out that the god Hermes, his favourite, was the protector of literature and of thieves. “So it’s clear, it all makes sense.”
Nucci, who lives only 300 metres from where the arrest took place, said the book was quite accessible and stressed the relevance of Homer’s poem even today. “The Iliad begins with a pandemic and continues with a devastating war. Does that remind you of anything?”