The Odyssey

Homer’s second epic: the ten-year homeward voyage of Odysseus from the ruins of Troy, and the war he must fight again on his own threshold. Across twenty-four books the poem turns from the open sea — the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the descent to the dead — to the long, patient cunning of a king come home in rags to a hall full of suitors. Read here in A. T. Murray’s Loeb prose beside the Homeric Greek, line for line, with Samuel Butler’s plainer rendering for comparison.