The Odyssey

What It Is

An epic poem of some 12,000 lines of Greek hexameter, composed around 725 BC, a generation after the Iliad and out of the same oral tradition. Twenty-four books, sung rather than read, built from the same repeated epithets and formulaic lines.

Almost everything else about it is different. The Iliad is a poem of the battlefield; this is a poem of the sea, the household, the strange island and the dinner table. It is intensely interested in servants, in beggars, in what is being cooked, in who is lying to whom and why. Nobody in the Odyssey tells the truth if a story will do better.

It is also more cunningly built. The telling loops, shifts vantage point and holds things back. Part of the pleasure is watching a three-thousand-year-old poem practise suspense on you and win.

Why It Matters

It is the original story of the journey home. The Greek word for that homecoming, nostos, is the root of our nostalgia. Every road narrative, every returning-soldier story, every account of someone trying to get back to a life that may not have waited for them, runs downstream of this poem.

It gave the West its first great study of intelligence as a virtue. The Iliad admires strength; the Odyssey admires cleverness, patience and the willingness to be underestimated. It also holds the oldest sustained thinking about hospitality: how a stranger is treated at the door is this poem's measure of a civilisation, and the idea runs from Greek ethics to the modern law of asylum.

Its afterlife is enormous: Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, Joyce, Derek Walcott, Margaret Atwood, a thousand films. Read it and half of literature stops being a set of allusions and starts being a conversation.

Before You Read

Easier and faster than the Iliad. Twelve to fifteen hours, and it moves. For many readers it is the better place to start with Homer, and there is no shame in taking it first.

The difficulty, again, is names. Use the glossary; past that, the poem carries you. Read it aloud where you can, and take a book or two per sitting rather than short daily fragments: the episodes have their own shape and want to be taken whole.

One thing to know going in: the scenes that look like small talk are not small talk. Meals, gifts, greetings, doorways and questions asked of strangers are where the moral action of this poem happens. Skim them and you will finish the book wondering what the fuss was about.

Which Translation to Read

• Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1996) — recommended. Warm, swift and spoken, with an introduction by Bernard Knox worth the price of the book on its own. No other version is as likely to make a first-time reader forget they are reading a classic. The cost: as in his Iliad, Fagles turns up the emotional temperature, and his English is more richly dressed than the Greek. Knox walks through the poem, so save the introduction for afterwards. View on Amazon →
• Emily Wilson (W. W. Norton, 2017). The first English translation of the poem by a woman, and a landmark. Iambic pentameter, line for line with the Greek, plain and quick and unsettling, and morally alert about the servants and the women other translators have been content to leave in soft focus. The cost: the deliberately plain diction can feel underdressed if you came for grandeur.
• Richmond Lattimore (Harper, 1965). The most literal, and the most faithful to Homer's line. The scholar's choice. The cost: slow going, and it never quite sings in English.

Take Fagles to be swept along, Wilson to be made to think, Lattimore to see the bones. Robert Fitzgerald (1961) is the most lyrical of the older translations.

The Folio Society has issued the Iliad and the Odyssey as a limited edition of 500 copies using Wilson's translations, illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. That is the collectible; it is not the reading edition.

Getting the Most From This Book

Listen to Ian McKellen's recording of the Fagles translation for Penguin Audio. It is one of the great audiobook performances, and this is a poem made for exactly that.

Pay attention to the storytelling inside the story. Characters are constantly narrating, embroidering, testing and deceiving one another, and the poem is quietly asking how you know when to believe anyone. Including the poet.

Pay attention to doors, thresholds, beds and tables. The furniture is doing work.

Read the introduction afterwards, and do not go looking for a summary first. And do not treat the fantastical parts as the good bits and the household parts as filler. The poem is built the other way round, and readers who grasp that come away with a much better book.