The Odyssey

In the myths and legends that are magnificently retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given readers an "Odyssey" to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

If "The Iliad" is the world's greatest war epic, then "The Odyssey" is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life. Odysseus's reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.
Translated by Robert Fagles
Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox