Homer – The Odyssey – Easton Press – 1978 100 Greatest Books Ever Written Series Homer stands at the head of the Western literary tradition, the poet to whom antiquity attributed both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Almost nothing certain is known of his life. The biographical references gathered by later Greek writers are legendary rather than documentary, and the very question of whether a single author composed the poems, or whether they represent the culmination of a long oral tradition, has occupied scholars for centuries as the Homeric Question. Tradition places him in Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor or one of the adjacent islands, and the present edition follows the older convention of assigning him to the ninth century B.C. Whatever the historical truth, the two epics that bear his name became the foundation of Greek education and identity and have remained, for nearly three thousand years, among the most widely read and most influential works ever written. The Odyssey recounts the ten-year homeward journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy. Across its twenty-four books the poem moves between the wanderings of its hero among Cyclopes, enchantresses, and the dead, and the parallel story unfolding at home, where his wife Penelope holds off a household of suitors and his son Telemachus comes of age in search of his absent father. It is a poem of return, endurance, disguise, and recognition, and its narrative architecture, with its flashbacks and shifting points of view, has often been described as the ancestor of the modern novel. Where the Iliad is a poem of war and wrath, the Odyssey is a poem of homecoming and cunning intelligence. This edition presents the celebrated verse translation by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), first issued in London in 1725–26. Rendered in the polished heroic couplets that defined the English Augustan age, Pope's Odyssey is itself a landmark of English literature, a work that reshaped Homer for an eighteenth-century readership and influenced the way the epic was read in English for generations. The illustrations reproduce the classical outline designs of the English Neoclassical sculptor and draughtsman John Flaxman, completed in 1793 and long admired for their austere linear purity. The edition follows the text and apparatus first brought together by The George Macy Companies of New York in 1942, which combined Pope's translation, Flaxman's drawings, and prefatory material by John T. Winterich and Carl Van Doren. The frontispiece portrait of Homer was specially commissioned for this Easton Press edition. Bound in genuine leather in deep navy blue Spine divided into panels by raised bands, with gilt-stamped Greek key designs and the title set within a gilt meander frame Front cover framed by a gilt Greek key (meander) border; Easton Press device in gilt at the foot of the spine All page edges gilt Gilt-toned moiré endpapers Satin ribbon page marker Frontispiece portrait of Homer specially commissioned for this edition Full-page outline plates after John Flaxman's classical designs Printed on archival-quality, acid-neutral paper Printed in the United States of America Condition is as new. The volume presents as an exceptionally well-kept copy. Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.