The Odyssey

Odyssey is the oldest great story of a man trying to get home. Ulysses, the cunning hero of the Trojan War, spends ten years wandering the Mediterranean, meeting the Cyclops, the Sirens and the enchantress Circe, while his son Telemachus and his wife Penelope hold off a house full of arrogant suitors in Ithaca. It is an adventure, a family drama and a long, patient study of endurance and recognition, composed in ancient Greece nearly three thousand years ago.

Samuel Butler, the Victorian satirist and author of Erewhon, published this plain English prose rendering in 1900 "for the use of those who cannot read the original", and it remains one of the most readable. It keeps Butler's famous prefaces, in which he argues that the poem was written by a young woman from Sicily, and his notes. This volume offers the original text alongside a modern-English edition.