The Odyssey

Ten years after Troy falls, Odysseus still has not reached home. Homer’s epic tracks his scattered route back to Ithaca, past the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the Sirens, and a sea god who refuses to let him land, while every last one of his crewmen dies along the way. On the island, his wife Penelope stalls a house full of suitors who have declared him dead and are eating his estate bare, and his son Telemachus sets out looking for word of a father he cannot remember. The poem gave Western literature its first great wanderer, and its long argument that cunning and endurance count for as much as strength. Read it here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.