The Iliad & The Odyssey

THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER contains the two great epic poems attributed to ancient Greek poet Homer. The ILIAD tells of the events of the Trojan War, a ten-year conflict between allied Greek states and the Trojans of Asia Minor. The ODYSSEY is in part a sequel to the ILIAD, which tells of the adventures of the Greek hero Odysseus as he seeks his homeland after the end of the Trojan War.

This publication features the Samuel Butler translation, and while it strays from the poetic style reproduced by more well known translators like Robert Fagles and Robert Fitzgerald, the vision of the epics as if they were prose found in modern novels take their best form under Butler's most capable hand.

In the Western classical tradition, Homer- Ancient Greek: is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek epic poets. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.

When he lived is unknown. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before Herodotus' own time, which would place him at around 850 BC,[1] while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BC. Modern researchers appear to place Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC.

The formative influence played by the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece. Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds