The Odyssey, Homer’s gorgeous, sprawling epic, is widely considered to be the gold standard for tales of grand quests and heroic journeys. Crowded with characters (human and non-human) and crammed with action, The Odyssey details the adventures of Odysseus, King of Ithaca and hero of the Trojan War, as he struggles to return home to his ever-faithful, ever-waiting wife, Penelope. Along the way he encounters the seductive Circe, who changes men into swine; the gorgeous water-nymph Calypso, who keeps him a “prisoner of love” for seven years; the terrible one-eyed, man-eating giant Cyclops; and a host of other ogres, wizards, sirens, and gods. But when Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca after twenty years away, his trials have only begun. There he must battle the scheming noblemen who, thinking him dead, have demanded that Penelope choose one of them to be her new husband—and Ithaca’s new king. Often called the “second work of Western literature” (Homer’s Iliad, written earlier, being the first), The Odyssey is not only a rousing adventure drama, but also a profound meditation on courage, loyalty, family, fate, and undying love. Over three thousand years old, it was the first story to delineate carefully and exhaustively a single character arc—a narrative structure that serves as the foundation and heart of the modern novel. Robert Squillace’s revision of George Herbert Palmer’s classic prose translation captures the drama and vitality of adventure while remaining true to the original Homeric language. Introduction and Notes by Robert Squillace “Each reader today faces the suitors’ choice: to read the story as it concerns himself—or herself—or to turn it aside as an extraordinarily old man’s babble. No arrow will pierce the throat of those who make the latter choice. But a contracted sense of humanity may follow.” —from the Introduction by Robert Squillace Deeply involved with the world of the ancients, Robert Squillace teaches Cultural Foundations courses in the General Studies Program of New York University. He has published extensively on the field of modern British literature, most notably in his study Modernism, Modernity, and Arnold Bennett (Bucknell University Press, 1997). Homer, about whom so little is known, was almost certainly a blind bard from Greece, most probably Smyrna (now the Turkish city known as Izmir) or Chios, an island in the eastern Aegean Sea. Some scholars place Homer in the late-Mycenaean period, which means he would have written about the Trojan War as recent history. But how, other scholars argue, could Homer have created works of such magnitude in the Dark Age, when there was no system of writing? Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, placed Homer sometime around the ninth century B.C., when the Greeks adopted a system of writing from the Phoenicians and widely colonized the Mediterranean. Scholars do agree, however, that The Odyssey and The Iliad were passed down by oral tradition and are among the foundations of Western literature. Features a map of the Mediterranean Sea and an index.