An ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer, composed around the 8th century BCE in the tradition of oral poetry, following Odysseus on his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War -- a foundational work of Western literature whose narrative templates have been reworked in every subsequent century.
The Odyssey is nearly three thousand years old and it has never gone out of print. Odysseus -- cunning, restless, sometimes cruel, always resourceful -- has been reimagined by Joyce in Dublin, Walcott in the Caribbean, and Atwood in contemporary North America. The poem gives us the quest narrative, the homecoming story, the descent to the underworld, the faithful wife, and the returning wanderer. But it also gives us something less easily catalogued: a meditation on what it costs to survive, and on whether the self that returns home is the same self that left.