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Penguin Classics at 75: five landmark books that shaped the iconic series

10 things you didn’t know about the women of Troy

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10 things you didn’t know about the legendary women of Troy

The Wrath of Achilles

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 
 
On the fields of Troy, war is raging. At its centre is Achilles: godlike, swift-footed, the greatest champion of the Greeks. But when his pride is wounded and he refuses to fight, the thread of fate begins to spin . . . From frenzied rampages to intimate moments of grief, this selection from Homer’s Iliad traces the tale of a warrior whose name echoes through the ages, and whose story remains as powerful as ever.

Homer is thought to have lived c.750-700 BC in Ionia and is believed to be the author of the earliest works of Western Literature: The Odyssey and The Iliad. E. V. Rieu was a celebrated translator from Latin and Greek, and editor of Penguin Classics from 1944-64. His son, D C H Rieu, has revised his work. Peter Jones is former lecturer in Classics at Newcastle. He co-founded the 'Friends of Classics' society and is the editor of their journal and a columnist for The Spectator.

On the fields of Troy, war is raging. At its centre is Achilles: godlike, swift-footed, the greatest champion of the Greeks. But when his pride is wounded and he refuses to fight, the thread of fate begins to spin . . . From frenzied rampages to intimate moments of grief, this selection from Homer’s Iliad traces the tale of a warrior whose name echoes through the ages, and whose story remains as powerful as ever.

The Iliad

READ THE STORY BEHIND THE NEW BBC/NETFLIX EPIC SERIES, TROY: FALL OF A CITY 
 
A stunning new translation of Homer's great war epic, the legendary tale of honour, love, loss and revenge during the fall of the city of Troy.

Caroline Alexander's Iliad is miraculous. It has the rhythms and even the lineation of the original Homeric text. Its language conveys the precise meaning of the Greek in a sinewy yet propulsive style that drives the reader inexorably forward. In my judgement, this new translation is far superior to the familiar and admired work of Lattimore, Fitzgerald and Fagles

G.W. Bowersock, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Of the many new translations of Homer’s poem that have come out in the past two or three years, perhaps the most highly readable is Caroline Alexander’s. Thought to be the first woman to have Englished the poem, Alexander embraces Matthew Arnold’s four essential Homeric qualities: rapidity, plainness of style, simplicity of ideas and nobility of manner, in lines that ebb and flow with the tide of battle. The book wears its learning lightly, the introduction pitching the Iliad as the ultimate anti-war poem.

The Homeric Iliad originates from a rich tradition of performing song. It was meant to be heard. True to the living word of the original Greek, Caroline Alexander’s new translation invites us to engage directly with this tradition. When I read her verses I can almost hear the music of Homeric performance.

Professor Gregory Nagy, Professor of Classical Greek Literarture, Harvard University

Caroline Alexander has done admirably in rendering the meaning of the Homeric text faithfully and suitably dignified language. The format gives a genuine sense of reading a verse epic. Her line-numbers match the Greek, which will make this version convenient for use by college teachers and students

Martin West, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

This powerful and readable version of the Iliad is modern without sacrificing the accuracy, energy, or the seriousness of the original. It is a toss-up between Alexander’s translation and Lattimore’s version

There is an epic poise to this new translation, whose varied line lengths ebb and flow with the tides of battle… Translucent, readable and recitable.

Caroline Alexander is the author of seven books of non-fiction including the international bestsellers The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition and The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. A contributing writer for National Geographic, Alexander has also written for the New Yorker, Smithsonian and Granta among other publications. Alexander’s latest books are Lost Gold of the Dark Ages: War, Treasure and the Mystery of the Saxons and The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of the Iliad and the Trojan War. Between 1982 and 1985, Alexander established a department of Classics at the University of Malawi, in central-east Africa.

Read this stunning translation of Homer's great war epic, the legendary tale of honour, love, loss and revenge during the fall of the city of Troy. 
 
 
High on Olympus, Zeus and the assembled deities look down on the world of men, to the city of Troy where a bitter and bloody war has dragged into its tenth year, and a quarrel rages between a legendary warrior and his commander. Greek ships decay, men languish, exhausted, and behind the walls of Troy a desperate people await the next turn of fate. 
 
 
This is the Iliad: an ancient story of enduring power; magnetic characters defined by stirring and momentous speeches; a panorama of human lives locked in a heroic struggle beneath a mischievous or indifferent heaven. Above all, this is a tale of the devastation, waste and pity of war. 
 
 
Caroline Alexander's virtuoso translation captures the rhythms and energy of Homer's original Greek while making the text as accessible as possible to a modern reader, accompanied by extensive extra material to provide a background to the poem. 
 
 
The result of 3,000 years of story-telling, Homer’s epic tale of the fall of Troy has resonated with every age and every human conflict: this is the Iliad at its most electrifying and vital.

Circe and the Cyclops

'You must be Odysseus, man of twists and turns...' 
 
The tales of Odysseus's struggle with a man-eating Cyclops and Circe, the beautiful enchantress who turns men into swine. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Next to nothing is known about Homer's life. His works available in Penguin Classics are The Homeric Hymns, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-clothbound-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Banner&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Clothbound_Series_26_06" target="_blank">Buy 3 classics for £33 on the Penguin Shop</a>

A stunning Penguin clothbound edition of Homer's great epic, in E. V. Rieu's classic translation. 
 
The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization - an epic poem without rival in the literature of the world, and the cornerstone of Western culture. The story centres on the critical events in the last year of the Trojan War, which lead to Achilleus' killing of Hektor and determine the fate of Troy. But Homer's theme is not simply war or heroism. With compassion and humanity, he presents a universal and tragic view of the world, of human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death, set against a vast and largely unpitying divine background.. 
 
Seven Greek cities claim the honour of being the birthplace of Homer (c. 8th-7th century BC), the poet to whom the composition of the Iliadand Odyssey are attributed. The Iliad is the oldest surviving work of Western literature, but the identity - or even the existence - of Homer himself is a complete mystery, with no reliable biographical information having survived. 
 
E. V. Rieu initiated Penguin Classics with Allen Lane and his famous translation of the Odyssey was the first book published in the series in 1947. The Iliad followed in 1950.

Penguin Classics

The Odyssey

HOMER is thought to have lived c.750-700 BC in Ionia and is believed to be the author of the earliest works of Western Literature: The Odyssey and The Iliad. 
 
E. V. RIEU was a celebrated translator from Latin and Greek, and editor of Penguin Classics from 1944-64. His son, D. C. H. RIEU, has revised his work. 
 
PETER JONES is former lecturer in Classics at Newcastle. He co-founded the 'Friends of Classics' society and is the editor of their journal and a columnist for The Spectator.

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 
 
The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon - Odysseus must use his wit and native cunning if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.

Translated by Robert Fitzgerald

The best poetic version of The Odyssey to have appeared this century - Hugh Lloyd-Jones

Homer's Odyssey is still enchanting readers after thousands of years

Surely the best and truest Odyssey in the English language

Fitzgerald is taking his place beside Chapman and Pope in the unbroken lineage of English Homeric translations...it has the economy and soar of a poet

A strong salty flavour of its own. And it makes you see things

The Homeric poems are interesting...because of the way in which they present human shocks and surprises... It is the surprising twist that war brings to the domestic...which makes Homer repeatedly shocking

Of all bookes extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best...writ from a free furie, an absolute and full soule

Homer is a much-debated figure traditionally considered to have composed the two great oral poems The Odyssey and The Iliad in eighth or seventh-century-BC Greece. 
 
Robert Fitzgerald was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard University.He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.He published four volumes of his own verse during his lifetime.His translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad, and of Virgil's Aeniad, won him many honours and are universally acknowledged to be among the finest of their kind this century. He died in 1985.

Penelope has been waiting for her husband Odysseus to return from Troy for many years. Little does she know that his path back to her has been blocked by astonishing and terrifying trials. Will he overcome the hideous monsters, beautiful witches and treacherous seas that confront him? This rich and beautiful adventure story is one of the most influential works of literature in the world.

Homer

Daniel Mendelsohn

Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek… Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus’s heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I’ve ever read

Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poem’s language and thought but also to its formal properties

Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer’s Greek ... A momentous achievement

The expertly crafted work of a true scholar-poet, Mendelsohn’s rich and rhythmical version hews closely to the Homeric verse-line – it feels like the original … this superb translation will entice new audiences to delight in the ancient epic

Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule

His knowledge as a renowned classicist, his ear and eye for sound and image, his acuity in rendering the circuitous yet also self-arresting syntax, and his ingeniously faithful line-by-hexameter-line rendering, make for what will surely be the edition for our time and beyond … [a] triumph

Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey is a vividly rendered experience that feels inward and mesmerizing … take[s] us deeply into the experience itself through an intense focus on speech and sounds, which are the essence of poetr

Mendelsohn is gifted with a wonderful surefootedness of imagination, an almost mystic insight into both the homely and the terrible beauties of antiquity... He has given us a lithe, deft, psychologically nuanced Odyssey. Timeless, cadenced, thrilling, and humane

Neither jarringly contemporary nor distractingly archaic, Daniel Mendelsohn's brilliant and necessary translation of The Odyssey is a testament to the enduring power and grace and beauty of Homer's narrative

History's greatest adventure story brought to us anew by America's greatest living classicist—this is fast, fluent, thrilling, and a hugely impressive accomplishment

This Odyssey brilliantly succeeds in its ambitious plan to provide a worthy companion for our time to Richmond Lattimore’s classic Iliad. Mendelsohn’s long and flexible dactylic lines are eminently readable while communicating the heft and dignity of what the Greeks called Homer’s ‘heroic’ hexameter. With a scholarly and personal Introduction that sets out the major themes of the poem, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey will put all who read (and teach) the poem in English in possession of the most illuminating insights of modern scholarship while equipping them to understand the epic sympathetically and to appreciate the artistry of this astonishing work of ancient art and its uncannily modern hero

Following the roundabout journey of its hero and the seductive rhythm of lines packed with music and meaning, Mendelsohn’s fresh and vigorous translation reminds me that what is at the heart of Homer’s epic—for all its sea-soaked adventures and creatures and gods—is entrancing poetry. His Odyssey is a homecoming worthy of the pleasure and dignity and endurance of the original.

A New Translation by Daniel Mendelsohn

With his Odyssey, bestselling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has created a momentous new work, hailed by classicists and poets alike - a translation to stand with those of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles. 
 
Setting aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance – and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. His expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. 
 
The result is the richest, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, one that fully conveys its oral poetics while bringing to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer’s work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent, endlessly enjoyable masterpiece.

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Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Homer

Praise for The Odyssey

Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek… Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... The highest ...

Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poem’s language and thought but also to its formal properties

Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer’s Greek ... A momentous achievement

Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek… Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... The highest ...

Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poem’s language and thought but also to its formal properties

Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer’s Greek ... A momentous achievement

Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek… Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... The highest ...

Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poem’s language and thought but also to its formal properties

Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer’s Greek ... A momentous achievement

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The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

Penguin Classics at 75: five landmark books that shaped the iconic series

10 things you didn’t know about the legendary women of Troy

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