The Odyssey has been so much exerpted and adapted into various media that most people are acquainted with its parts even if they haven't read the whole. Stories such as Odysseus and the Sirens, the Cyclops, Scylla and Charibdis are so familiar that it's common to think of the Odyssey as being principally the story of Odysseus's ten-year wandering. But it isn't. It is the story of his homecoming and his attempt to restore his life to what it was before a 20-year hiatus.

The Odyssey begins with Odysseus's wanderings almost at an end. Having persuaded Calypso, who has held him for seven years as her lover, to set him free, he puts to sea on a raft and is washed ashore on the friendly shores of Phaeacia. Here he will sit safely by the banquet fires and tell the story, all too briefly, of his ten years' wandering.

Meanwhile Odysseus's son Telemachus is journeying brazenly forth, seeking out other veterans of the siege of Troy to see if there is any news of his long-lost father. He finds the aged Nestor in Pylos, then journeys to Sparta where he is entertained by a nostalgic Menelaus and his penitent wife Helen. As all this is going on, Odysseus's wife Penelope is using her famous delaying tactics to keep at bay a pack of suitors who are eating her out of house and home.

The final third of the epic sees Odysseus return stealthily home, confront and slaughter the suitors. The climax comes with the dramatic question of whether Penelope will accept this demonic, blood-drenched intruder as her husband and welcome him back to their marriage bed.

In stark contrast to the immediacy of the Iliad, the dominant theme of the Odyssey is nostalgic memory. Odysseus thrives on the memories of his past exploits and uses them as currency to buy his way home. Telemachus searches for memories of his father, and finds two old kings living in the past. Penelope and her few loyal servants live on the tenuous threads of memory of a husband gone for twenty years. Odysseus's final act is to attempt to wipe away those years in blood and return his life to what it had been. And how natural it is that memory should figure so prominently in a tale that began as verses sung, from memory, by roving minstrels. ( )

Homer’s Odyssey is everything an epic should be, so much so that it is indeed the standard-bearer of the genre. Odysseus, in this tale, struggles to get back home to Ithaca, to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus, but along the way gets waylayed by the gods Poseidon and Circe and loses everyone who came back with him from the Trojan War. And once all this has been dealt with, he comes home to find every man in Ithaca trying to woo his wife, so he hides among them as a beggar, and finally kills them all.

The translation is a bit stifling, staying with archaicisms of older texts (a lot of “thy” and “lo”). It is also very exact is its translation, copying the oral traditional style of the Greek poets. The same phrases and paragraphs are used many times to help the reader maintain a flow through the text.

I enjoyed this version of The Odyssey by T E Lawrence, however having just started to read Charlotte Higgins's excellent 'It's all Greek to me' (2008) her comment on this translation is: 'T E Lawrence, who made a rather bad translation (plodding) of it, was surely right to call it "the first novel of Europe" (p.32). She also takes Lawrence to task for 'pouring mild scorn on the poet's war-worthiness' thinking 'Homer's battle scenes were all wrong' consequently he must have been "very bookish" and "a house-bred man" unlike T.E. who had himself "hunted wild boars and watched wild lions" (p.100) '.

This book is a timeless epic (and an actual epic, not in the way the word is overused anymore). The language of Homer is down to earth and not flowery or difficult to read or understand. The characters are relatable to some degree; one quickly realizes the superstitions of today are deeply rooted in ancient cultures. ( )

This book is a timeless epic (and an actual epic, not in the way the word is overused anymore). The language of Homer is down to earth and not flowery or difficult to read or understand. The characters are relatable to some degree; one quickly realizes the superstitions of today are deeply rooted in ancient cultures. ( )