Odysseys of Homer

The Odyssey is the original homecoming story, and it remains the benchmark against which all others are measured. Ten years after the Trojan War, the Greek hero Odysseus still hasn't reached Ithaca. His journey home becomes a decade-long odyssey through temptation, danger, and transformation: the lotus-eaters who dull his men's memories, the Cyclops Polyphemus whom he blinds, the witch-goddess Circe who turns his crew to swine, the Sirens whose song promises deadly knowledge, and the dread passage between Scylla and Charybdis. But the real test awaits him at home, where suitors have consumed his estate and his wife Penelope has waited faithfully, weaving and unweaving her famous shroud. This is George Chapman's 1616 translation, the first rendering of Homer directly into English, the version that made John Keats feel 'like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.' To read the Odyssey is to encounter the source code of Western literature itself.