The book that gave us the word “odyssey”.
An ancient Greek epic attributed to Homer, from around the 8th century BC: 24 books, about 12,100 lines of hexameter. After ten years of war at Troy (that’s The Iliad), Odysseus needs ten more to get home to Ithaca, where his wife Penelope holds off more than a hundred suitors and their son Telemachus grows up without him.
It’s built like a modern series, not a straight line. It opens with the son looking for news of his father; the famous adventures (the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis) are told by Odysseus himself, in flashback, at a banquet; and then comes the return and the revenge. In between: seven years stuck with Calypso, one with Circe, and a visit to the dead in Hades (book 11).
In a 2018 BBC poll of writers it came out as the story that has most shaped the world. Nearly three thousand years later, it’s still being retold: Ithaka (Cavafy, 1911), Viatge a Ítaca (Lluís Llach, after Cavafy, 1975), Circe (novel) (2018), The Odyssey (film) (2026).
Its moral backbone is Xenia, the sacred duty of hospitality: the poem is full of good and bad hosts.