About the books:
Penguin Classics, translated by E.V. Rieu.
The original adventure story, which also happens to contain the best portrait of a marriage in ancient literature.
Odysseus is a liar and a pragmatist and the narrative rewards this completely.
The poem understands hospitality, grief, disguise, and the specific patience of someone who has decided, against all evidence, to come home.
Rieu's prose translation the first Penguin Classic ever published remains the most readable version in English, and the one that brought Homer to a mass audience for the first time.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Wear to cover.
Age related tanning to pages.
Tanning to cover where plastic covering was removed.
Binding a bit iffy on first two pages otherwise well bound and all pages intact.
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About the author:
Homer (c. 8th century BC)
Homer, the legendary poet of ancient Greece, is believed to have lived in the 8th century BC, though almost nothing is known for certain about his life. Tradition holds that he was blind and traveled as a bard across the Greek world, reciting epic poetry. Whether a single individual or a name representing a tradition of oral composition, the works attributed to him emerged from the rich oral culture following the Mycenaean age and the Greek Dark Ages. This mysterious background shaped a worldview steeped in heroic values, the capricious will of the gods, the glory and tragedy of war, and the enduring power of human excellence and suffering.
Homers literary breakthrough is the creation (or compilation) of the two greatest epics of Western literature: the Iliad and the Odyssey. His stylegrand, formulaic yet vividly dramatic, with soaring similes and powerful characterizationbrought the oral epic tradition to its artistic peak. These monumental poems defined Greek identity and set the standard for epic poetry, influencing storytelling across millennia and forming the foundation of classical education.
Homer profoundly influenced virtually all subsequent Greek and Roman literature, from the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to Virgil, whose Aeneid was consciously modeled on Homeric epic. His impact extends to Dante, Milton, Joyce (in Ulysses), and countless modern writers. Adjacent figures include Hesiod and the cyclic poets of the Trojan War tradition, as well as later epic and narrative poets across cultures who drew from the heroic archetype.
Recurring themes in Homers epics include the heros quest for glory and homecoming, the destructiveness of war, the interplay of fate and free will, hospitality (xenia), and the complex relationships between mortals and the gods. His major works are the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Homers poems were preserved through oral performance and later written down, becoming central to Greek culture. Though the man himself remains enigmatic, his legacy is immortal. His unique contribution was transforming oral storytelling into timeless art that captures the full range of human emotion and experience, providing the Western literary tradition with its foundational epics of war, adventure, and the human condition.
