A bold new translation that preserves the swiftness, austerity, and clarity of the original.

"Tell us, Goddess, daughter of Zeus, start in your own place:

when all the rest at Troy had fled from that steep doom

and gone back home, away from war and the salt sea,

only this man longed for his wife and a way home."

Homer's Odyssey, at once an exciting epic of strife and subterfuge and a deeply felt tale

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Presents Homer's classic epic of the Trojan War, which follows proud Greek soldier Achilles from his angry dispute with his king, Agamemnon, to his battle with and brutal treatment of Troy's great hero, Hector; and includes a glossary of names and an introduction.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours...