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The Odyssey, even more than that other great legacy of the ancients, the Iliad, has suffused and indeed shaped Western culture as no other book apart from the Bible has managed to do. Poets, artists and philosophers have been referring to its abiding images and truths about human nature since Homer first dreamed the story up almost three thousand years ago, and new translations seem to have been hitting the shelves every year recently, the best to my mind being the 1996 one by Robert Fagles.

Odysseus had sailed to Troy with the Greek leaders Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus, to avenge a wrong done to the latter by Paris, prince of Troy, who had eloped from Sparta with Menelaus' wife Helen. Odysseus, after masterminding the Trojan Horse episode that finally led to the fall of the city, packs his things and sails off home to Ithaca, where unbeknownst to him his wife Penelope is herself undergoing an amorous siege by a band of suitors, who are after her money and kingdom , and her son Telemachus is powerless to resist them. They have moved in to the palace and have made themselves thoroughly at home like the spoilt young wastrels they are.

Odysseus' big mistake is to blind the one-eyed monster Polyphemos, a Cyclops who is the son of Neptune, god of the seas, though he didn't really have much choice at the time. Neptune swears vengeance and does his level best to put every barrier in Odysseus' way on his return journey, but Athene lends our hero her assistance, so it's not all bad news. The series of adventures that follows includes imprisonment on an island by the witch Circe, who turns his men into pigs; a journey to the kingdom of the dead; shooting the rapids between Scylla and Charybdis the original rock and hard place; resisting the call of the sinister Sirens; the dire consequences resulting from eating the Cattle of the Sun; and finally the show-down with the suitors on Ithaca, a blood-bath worthy of Quentin Tarantino.

The epic tale of Odysseus trials and tribulations as he fights his way home through this magical and quintessentially ancient' but at the same time perennially relevant world of monsters and sorcerers, leaves an indelible imprint on the imagination. The Iliad may be considered a more mature and manly' work, but it is the characters in the Odyssey that find their way into countless children's storybooks and stay with us throughout our lives.

But of course this is not just a book for children and fantasy fans. James Joyce hung the structure for his own Ulysses' from it, and his hero Bloom's own Odyssey through one day in Dublin just goes to show how eternal the story and characters are, and how eloquently they speak of Everyman in his struggle through life.

Learn more about this author, David Elliott.
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