LiteratureBook · -725
The Odyssey
Homer
Ten years after Troy, Odysseus is still trying to get home, and the poem spends as much time on the household he left behind as on the monsters. Penelope outwits her suitors at the loom while her husband lies his way across the Mediterranean.
Why you should read this
One of the two foundational epics of the Western literary canon, composed for oral performance and only later fixed in writing, which shapes its repetition, formula and episodic structure. Expect a hero's homeward journey told through set-piece encounters rather than the interiority of a modern novel.
- Field
- Literature
- Form
- Fiction
- Published
- 725 BCE
- Themes
- EpicAncient GreeceLiterature
