An excerpt from the fifth book of the Iliad, in which Homer explains why gods are immortal, sheds light upon the famous passage in Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Ephesians that defines the Eucharistic bread as ‘the medicine of im­mortality’. By implying that consumption of bread and wine is the cause of human mortality, Homer enables us to notice the revolutionary character of Eucharistic meal as presented by Ignatius: in the Eucharist the Christian dynamic of approa­ching eternal life not through ecstatic denial of human nature, but rather through its affirmation, finds its fullest expression.