The Odyssey

This edition of The Odyssey includes:

• A new British English translation by François Dante
• An original preface by François Dante
• A note on Homer and the Homeric tradition
• A clear and comprehensive summary of the story
• An accessible analysis of the work’s major themes and meaning
• The complete text of Homer’s Odyssey

For nearly three thousand years, Europe has read The Odyssey. The empires that first received it have fallen, languages have changed, the gods have fallen silent, yet the journey of Odysseus endures.

In this foundational poem, Homer tells far more than the adventures of a king seeking the road home. He asks what remains of a man when the world offers him a thousand opportunities to forget his own name. Odysseus passes through glory, fear, desire and solitude. Each ordeal forces him to choose between what the world promises him and what he refuses to surrender.

This edition presents the complete text in a new British English translation, literary in character yet clear and accessible to the modern reader. It is accompanied by original editorial material designed to illuminate the work without standing between the reader and Homer: a note on the mysterious figure of Homer and the Homeric tradition, an original preface by François Dante, a comprehensive summary of the story, and an accessible analysis of the central ideas of the poem.

Journey and homecoming, identity, loyalty, intelligence, hospitality, responsibility, justice and mortality all lie at the heart of The Odyssey. Its adventures have become part of the imagination of the Western world, but beneath the Cyclopes, enchantresses, shipwrecks and gods lies an intensely human question: after everything that time, distance and suffering have changed, can we still recognise the person who returns?

The Odyssey does not come to us from a dead antiquity. It still speaks of our departures, our loyalties, of what absence transforms, and of that part of ourselves which must somehow be preserved if we are ever to find the way home again.