The Odyssey

The second of the two epics attributed to Homer, after the Iliad. Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus has still not reached his home on the island of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope holds off a crowd of suitors who are eating up his wealth and his son Telemachus sets out for news of him. Shipwrecked among the kindly Phaeacians, Odysseus tells of his adventures: the Lotus-eaters, the one-eyed Cyclops whom he tricks by calling himself 'Nobody', the enchantress Circe, the land of the dead, the Sirens and Scylla. Then he returns home disguised as a beggar, recognised at first only by his old dog, to win back his house.

One of the founding works of European literature, it is the model for every story of a long journey home, and its title has become a common word for one. This prose translation, of 1900, is by the novelist Samuel Butler, who argued that the poem was written by a young woman in Sicily. Virgil's Aeneid tells the journey of a Trojan survivor.

Homer is the name the Greeks gave to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, probably composed in Ionia in the eighth century BC. Ancient tradition pictured him as a blind singer, and modern scholars have shown that the poems grew out of a long tradition of oral poetry, sung by bards who used repeated phrases to compose as they performed.

Whether one poet or many, Homer stands at the beginning of European literature, and the Greeks learned their heroes, gods and values from him. Sulayman al-Bustani's verse translation of the Iliad, published in 1904 with a long introduction, was a milestone in Arabic letters.