The Odyssey

Composed in archaic Greek some three thousand years ago and attributed to the poet Homer, The Odyssey is one of the two foundational epics of Western literature and the greatest of all stories of homecoming. Ten years after the fall of Troy, the cunning Greek hero Odysseus still has not reached his island kingdom of Ithaca. He has lost his ships and every comrade; the sea-god Poseidon keeps him from home; and a goddess holds him captive, offering him immortality if he will only stay.

Far away in Ithaca, a crowd of arrogant suitors devours his household and presses his faithful wife, Penelope, to remarry — while she holds them off by her wits, and their son, Telemachus, comes of age and sets out to seek news of his father. The poem braids these threads toward a single end: the long, hard-won return home. Along the way come the adventures that have shaped Western storytelling ever since — the man-eating Cyclops Polyphemus and the trick of “Nobody”; the enchantress Circe, who turns men into swine; the Sirens whose song means death; the strait between Scylla and Charybdis; and the descent to the land of the dead.

Beneath the adventure run the themes that have kept readers returning for nearly three thousand years: home and the longing for it, cunning against brute force, the sacred duty of hospitality, and the great scenes of disguise and recognition in which a hero is at last known again for who he truly is. From this single poem descend the shipwreck, the monster, the faithful wife, the disguised return — and the very word odyssey.

This edition presents William Cullen Bryant’s clear, swift nineteenth-century blank-verse translation, complete in twenty-four books, paired with an editor’s foreword on Homer, the oral tradition, and the art of the epic, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.