If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once the timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savour, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' introduction.

'[Robert Fitzgerald's translation is] a masterpiece.. An Odyssey worthy of the original.' - The Nation '[Fitzgerald's Odyssey and Iliad ] open up once more the unique greatness of Homer's art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase.'

This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students. Iron maiden the bbc archives.