The Odyssey
Samuel Butler (1900)
Homer's Odyssey (composed c. 8th century BCE, here in Samuel Butler's 1900 prose translation) is the second of the two great epics of ancient Greece and a foundational work of Western literature. It follows Odysseus's ten-year journey home from the Trojan War—through encounters with the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, and the land of the dead—while his wife Penelope and son Telemachus resist the suitors besieging his palace on Ithaca. A tale of cunning, endurance, homecoming, and identity, it has shaped the Western imagination of the hero's journey.
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