The Odyssey

About this book

The Odyssey is one of two epic poems attributed to Homer, the other being the Iliad. It is divided into twenty-four books and tells how Odysseus, king of Ithaca, makes his way home after the ten-year Trojan War, and what he finds when he gets there. It is among the oldest surviving works of Western literature and is still one of the most read.

Its survival owes something to its shape. The Iliad is a war poem; the Odyssey is a sea story, a family drama and a revenge plot combined, with monsters, sorceresses and a descent to the underworld along the way. The structure is also unusually modern: the poem opens near the end of the action, and Odysseus narrates most of his own adventures in flashback at a stranger’s dinner table.

The story

Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus has still not returned to Ithaca. His palace is overrun by suitors who are eating his wealth and pressing his wife, Penelope, to choose one of them. His son Telemachus, now grown, sets out to look for news of his father. Meanwhile Odysseus is held on the island of the nymph Calypso, until the gods decide it is time to let him go.

The middle books contain the adventures most people know: the Cyclops, the Lotus-eaters, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the visit to the dead. Odysseus tells these stories himself to the Phaeacians, who finally carry him home. The last third of the poem is set entirely on Ithaca and turns on disguise, recognition and the reckoning with the suitors.

Themes and historical context

The poem comes from an oral tradition. Whoever Homer was, the Odyssey was composed to be performed aloud, and the repeated epithets and stock scenes that strike readers as odd are the tools of that performance. It was probably written down around the eighth or seventh century BC, in a Greek world of small kingdoms, and it is one of the main sources for what later Greeks believed about their heroic age.

Hospitality is the poem’s central social value. Nearly every episode is a test of how a host treats a guest or how a guest behaves in another’s house, and the suitors’ crime is above all a violation of that code. Set against this is the figure of Odysseus himself, who survives through cunning, lying and patience rather than strength, and whose cleverness the poem admires without pretending it is always admirable.

The Odyssey has been continuously read, translated and imitated since antiquity. Its English translations alone form a long tradition, from George Chapman in the seventeenth century through Alexander Pope to the many versions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. James Joyce used its structure for Ulysses. The word “odyssey” itself has entered common speech for any long and eventful wandering.

Who should read it

In Butler’s prose, the Odyssey is approachable for most adult readers and strong teenage readers. The pace is uneven by design: the first four books follow Telemachus and can feel slow, and the adventures in Books 9 to 12 are where most newcomers get hooked. The large cast of gods and minor characters is the main difficulty, and a list of names helps. The whole poem is about the length of a medium-sized novel.

Edition notes

This is the prose translation by Samuel Butler (1835-1902), the English novelist best known for Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. Butler’s subtitle, “Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original,” states his aim: a plain, readable version for general readers rather than a literary performance. His translation was published in 1900. Butler also held the eccentric theory that the poem was written by a young woman from Sicily, which he argued in a separate book, but the translation itself is straightforward. The Gutenberg transcription was prepared by Jim Tinsley and David Widger.