Lattimore, Richmond. The Odyssey of Homer. United States: HarperCollins, 2009.
Homer. The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation. United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
The Odyssey of Homer. United States: Houghton Mifflin, 1921.
The George Herbert Palmer translation.
This is a hero’s journey that keeps coming up later in the history of political thought.
Jorge Luis Borges in Borges, Jorge Luis. This Craft of Verse. United States: Harvard University Press, 2025.
calls the first metaphor of the book one of the greatest in human history when Homer sings of the sea being wine-dark.
The structure of the story how he returns to the place he set out — we wonder if without Ulysses we would have gotten T.S. Eliot’s line
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
Eliot, T. S.. Four Quartets. Spain: HarperCollins, 2014.
The part where he ties himself to the mast of the ship so he won’t be tempted into the deep by the sirens, comes up later as an early representation of the challenge of constitutionalism for a polity.
So many unforgettable scenes in this story.
And to think the Greeks told it to each other around a campfire, sung it really, that text was not the primary mode of learning and communication is another consideration.
The aesthetics of poetry serve the memory.
The feature image of this post is a tile mosaic found in Tunisia. Its called Odysseus and the Sirens and dates to the 3rd century CE.
Gustave Doré’s illustration of La Fontaine’s fable The Companions of Ulysses, ( Les Compagnons d’Ulysse)
Ulysses And Circe
Odysseus At The Court Of Alcinous
Ulysses And The Sirens
