Troy has fallen and every other captain has gone home. Odysseus has not. He is ten years late, kept on an island by a goddess who loves him, while a hundred men eat his herds and court his wife in his own hall and his son grows up with a father who is only a story. The poem opens with the gods arguing about him the way a family argues about a relative nobody has heard from.
What follows is not a march. It is a man lying, hiding, begging and outlasting. He blinds a giant and then cannot stop himself shouting his own name across the water at it, and that one piece of vanity costs him every ship and every man he has. He comes ashore on his own island dressed as a beggar, takes a stool by his own door, and sits there listening to strangers insult him and throw things at him, because arriving is not the same as winning and he has counted the odds in the room.
Penelope is the other half of the argument. Twenty years of holding a house together with patience and a loom she unpicks every night, and when the man finally stands in front of her she does not take his word for it. She sets a trap about a bed. The reunion is the coldest and best scene in the poem exactly because she makes him earn it, and because Homer gives a woman the last test in a book full of tests.
Everything since has been downstream of it. The wandering hero, the monster in the cave, the crew who cannot leave the drug alone, the descent to the dead to ask the dead a question, the disguised king taking the measure of his own house before he acts. Three thousand years on, the reason it holds is not the monsters. It is that the man wants one small thing, his own rocky island and his own wife and his own bed, and is offered immortality instead, and says no.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of Samuel Butler's 1900 prose translation, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 304 pages. All 24 books, each opening its own page under Butler's own descriptive argument, and all 191 of his notes kept as real footnotes at the foot of the page that carries them, with his Greek quotations set in actual Greek. Butler put Homer into prose on purpose, for readers who cannot read the original and are tired of being handed a translation that keeps the metre and loses the man. Dropped: his own prefaces, the public domain apparatus, and the modern introductions that explain the poem to you before you have read a line of it.
Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
