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Epic

The Odyssey

Ὀδύσσεια

Homer · -700

Synopsis

Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus has still not returned to Ithaca. At home, the suitors who covet his wife Penelope and his throne are squandering his property, and his son Telemachus sets out to seek news of him. Held back by the nymph Calypso, Odysseus takes to the sea again, is cast ashore among the Phaeacians and tells them of his wanderings: the Cyclops, the sorceress Circe, the descent to the dead, the Sirens. Then he returns to his island in the guise of a beggar.

Context

The text is held to have been composed orally around the eighth or seventh century BCE, in an artificial literary language that mixes chiefly Ionic and Aeolic. It was recited at Athens at the Panathenaea under the Pisistratids, which has led to the supposition of a first written fixation in the sixth century. Its division into twenty-four books is attributed by some to the scholars of Alexandria, by others to that Athenian period. A papyrus fragment of the third century BCE survives, but the oldest medieval manuscripts date from the tenth century.

Who it is for

Twenty-four books and some twelve thousand lines, which one reads in French in verse translations as well as in prose.

Prizes and reception

The second oldest surviving text of Western literature, it had entered the Greek literary canon around 550 BCE.

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