Selected Works of Homer: Illiad, Odessey

About this book

Epic poems in 24 books each, the Illiad and the Odessey are commonly regarded as the origins of the whole of Western literature. Composed in the eighth century BC, traditionally by the blind Greek poet Homer, the Illiad tells the story of the Greek struggle to rescue Helen, a Greek queen, from her Trojan captors.The Odessey takes the fall of the city of Troy as its starting point and crafts a new epic around the struggle of one of those Greek warriors, the hero Odysseus. It tells the story of journey home to his waiting wife Penelope, triumphing over adversity, natural disasters, monsters and seduction, over a ten-year period after the Greek victory over the Trojans. A tale of wandering, it takes place not on a field of battle but on fantastic islands and foreign lands.