The Odyssey Essay | Critical Essay #2

The Odyssey Critical Essay #2

In the following excerpt, Jones offers a general overview of the Odyssey, encouraging the modem reader to explore this work in order to discover its "enduring hold on our imagination. "

The Odyssey is the second work of Western literature (the Iliad is the first). The ancient world agreed almost unanimously that both epics were the work of Homer. The Odyssey-the return of Odysseus from Troy to reclaim his threatened home on Ithaca-is a superb story, rich in character, adventure and incident, reconciling reality with fantasy, the heroic with the humble, the intimate with the divine, and making the household, rather than the battlefield, the centre of its world. . . .

What stands out. . . is the brilliant ingenuity with which Homer has engineered situations in which accounts of Odysseus' adventures and of developments on Ithaca in his absence can be plausibly...
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