BOOK I

Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide

after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit,

and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted;

moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life

and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save

his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating

the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from

ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter

of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.

Translated by Samuel Butler

About the book

An everyman’s tale and a romance, the Odyssey is filled with adventure, longing and temptation, the struggle between good and evil, and hard-won triumph. It is an enduring classic because its hero, Odysseus, and his story, though centuries old, are remarkably human and continue to grip the contemporary imagination. The Odyssey is often cited by critics as being one of the greatest stories ever told. Despite being blander in expression and sometimes more diffuse in the progress of its action than Homer’s other well-known work, the Iliad, the Odyssey provides an even more complex and harmonious structure. The poem is built upon a series of conversations and speeches, in which individual characters emerge as they confront each other and the gods with advice, inquiry, request, resignation, and passion—and the struggle against the gods, nature, and monstrous forces is presented with the help of a poetical language of great simplicity and subtlety. The Odyssey has endured for more than 2,700 years not as the result of its antiquity and its place in Greek culture but rather because of its timeless ability to express on a massive scale so much of the triumph and the frustration of human life.

Origins

Scholars date the writing of the Odyssey to about 725–675 BCE. The poem was intended for oral performance. It was composed of 12,109 lines written in dactylic hexameter (sometimes referred to as “Homeric hexameter”)—that is, each line consisted of six feet, or metrical units, and each foot consisted of a dactyl (a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables). The original work may not have been constructed into the 24 books known to the contemporary reader, and the parts were certainly not in codex form. In the ancient world, the poem was likely written in columns on rolls made from papyrus, or possibly some kind of animal skin (such as vellum and parchment). Given its extraordinary length, the poem may have actually occupied 24 individual rolls. Homer’s role in the writing of the poem and whether he was literate have been a source for rich scholarly debate, commonly referred to as the “Homeric Question.”

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Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Odyssey-epic-by-Homer ​​http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.mb.txt

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