If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once the timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.

In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

"Wonderfully readable... Just the right blend of roughness and sophistication." —Ted Hughes

"Robert Fagles is the best living translator of ancient Greek drama, lyric poetry, and epic into modern English." —Garry Wills, The New Yorker

"Mr. Fagles has been remarkably successful in finding a style that is of our time and yettimeless." —Richard Jenkyns, The New York Times Book Review