Introduction

Ten years after the fall of Troy, the resourceful Odysseus is still wandering the sea, unable to reach his home on Ithaca, while more than a hundred suitors have taken over his palace and press his faithful wife Penelope to remarry, and his son Telemachus sets out in search of him. The poem weaves together his adventures, the Cyclops, the Sirens, the goddesses Circe and Calypso, the journey to the dead, with his return disguised as a beggar and his reckoning with the suitors. An epic of homecoming, loyalty and cunning, it is the pattern of every adventure story since.