Before You Begin

Troy has fallen, and the Greek captains have sailed for home. One of them does not arrive. For ten more years Ulysses is lost to the world — shipwrecked, enchanted, held captive, blown from one strange shore to another — while in rocky Ithaca his wife Penelope holds off a house full of suitors and his son Telemachus grows up fatherless. This is the story of that long way home, and of the cunning, weathered man who refuses to stop trying to reach it.

Homer's Odyssey is nearly three thousand years old, and it invented much of what we still mean by adventure: the one-eyed giant, the enchantress who turns men to swine, the song of the Sirens, the passage between the monster and the whirlpool, the hero who comes home in disguise to reclaim what is his. Beneath the wonders runs something quieter and more human — the longing for home, the loyalty of a wife, a father and a son, and the wits it takes to survive a world of gods who meddle and monsters who devour.

This edition uses the clear, unadorned prose of Samuel Butler, who set out to tell the tale plainly, for the use of those who cannot read the original. Throughout, the gods and heroes keep the Roman names Butler gave them — Ulysses for Odysseus, Minerva for Athena, Jove, Neptune, and Mercury. What follows is an illustrated companion to that world — its gods and monsters, its long sea-roads, and the turning points of the greatest homecoming ever told. Set sail.