The Odyssey by Homer: Odysseus’s Ten-Year Voyage Home from Troy to Ithaca
After the fall of Troy, Odysseus sets out for his home island of Ithaca. It should be a short voyage; it becomes one of the longest journeys in literature. Homer’s Odyssey follows the hero through monsters, goddesses and the land of the dead, and it remains a classic that nobody should miss.
Author: Homer (traditionally dated to the 8th century BC)
Title: The Odyssey
Format: English paperback (Penguin Classics), prose translation by E. V. Rieu, revised by D. C. H. Rieu, introduction by Peter V. Jones
Scope: Epic poem in 24 books
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0140449116 (ASIN 0140449116)
Twenty Years Away from Home
The story is the long voyage of Odysseus (Ulysses in the Latin tradition) from Troy back to his homeland, Ithaca, and all the difficulties he has to face on the way. Counting the war and the return, he is away from home for twenty years.
Circe
His meeting with Circe delays him for a long time. First his crew are invited to a great banquet, and then they are turned into pigs; Odysseus makes a pact with the goddess to put things right. After that painful experience Circe offers them a life of pleasure on her island, and Odysseus stays there until his men remind him that he must return home to his wife.
The Journey to Hades
To get home, Circe sets him a new challenge, which he does not hesitate to accept: he must travel to the underworld, the realm of Hades, and consult a prophet who will tell him how to reach Ithaca. There he meets old friends and his dead mother, and one of his companions asks him for a proper burial. Odysseus, a man of his word, follows the instructions: he sacrifices sheep and buries his dead.
Lotus-eaters and Cyclopes
His voyage is hard and drawn out. He passes the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on nothing but the fruit of the lotus, and the island of the Cyclopes, giants with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads. Many other adventures and setbacks follow.
Telemachus and Penelope
The poem does not begin with Odysseus. The first four books follow his son, Telemachus, now a young man, who sets out to look for news of his father while a crowd of suitors occupies the palace, eats the family’s food and presses his mother, Penelope, to remarry. Penelope delays them with a famous trick: she promises to choose a husband when she finishes weaving a shroud, and every night she secretly unravels the day’s work. When Odysseus finally returns, disguised as a beggar, only his old dog Argos recognises him at once.
A Story Within a Story
Many of the best-known adventures, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, are not told directly by Homer but by Odysseus himself, as he recounts his wanderings at the court of the Phaeacians, who will finally take him home. That device makes the hero a storyteller, and a famously cunning one: readers have long wondered how much of his tale he embellishes.
The First Penguin Classic
E. V. Rieu’s prose translation was published in 1946 as the very first title in the Penguin Classics series, and it became one of the best-selling translations of any classical work, introducing generations of readers to Homer. His son, D. C. H. Rieu, revised it in 1991 to bring it closer to the Greek, and this edition carries both versions of their work.
Why Read It
Odysseus’s wanderings around the Mediterranean, full of encounters with mythological beings, are a classic that nobody should miss. Rieu’s prose translation is one of the most readable ways into the poem for a first-time reader.
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