The poem takes its name from the city of Troy, which is also known as Ilium. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. The Odyssey By Homer Written 800 B.C. The Iliad traces the anger of Achilles (“Sing Muse, of the wrath of Achilles” Iliad.1.1) and takes place over 51 days during the tenth and final year of the Trojan War. The Iliad is composed of 15,693 hexameters (lines of verse), and is divided into 24 books corresponding to each letter of the Greek alphabet - alpha to omega, a system that was already in place by the time of Herodotus. Our hero left his home to fight in the Trojan War - that alone lasted ten years - and encountered too many obstacles that kept him away for another ten years. Homer is the earliest poet in Western culture whose works have survived intact. The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's (Ulysses) journey back to his home Ithaca to return to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus after twenty years of absence. In conjunction with Hesiod, Homer acts as a great pool of information for the Greeks about their gods. He composed (not wrote, since the poems were created and transmitted orally, they were not written down until much later) two major works, the Iliad and the Odyssey other works were attributed to Homer, but even in antiquity their authorship was disputed. 750 BCE) is perhaps the greatest of all epic poets and his legendary status was well established by the time of Classical Athens.
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