Odyssey is perhaps the greatest adventure story ever told, but it is more even than that. It is the story of a man’s homecoming, the story of a yearning for hearth and home, for the familiar and native. It is also a story of burning revenge, of a man’s desire to visit retribution on those who have despoiled his patrimony. Odyssey is not the story of an everyman, but a king, and it serves as a moral example to us all.

In the introduction to this companion to Homer’s Iliad, Taerus Atellus approaches the text with a poet’s eye, focusing on the aesthetic and poetical dimensions of Homer’s masterwork. With facing Greek text and the renowned translation by poet W. C. Bryant, this is the last edition of Odyssey you will ever need to own.