Book 1

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, driven far astray after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose minds he learned, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he did not save his comrades, for all his desire, for through their own blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the cattle of Helios Hyperion; whereupon he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where you will, tell us in our turn.

Now all the rest, as many as had escaped sheer destruction, were at home, safe from both war and sea; but that man alone, filled with longing for his return and for his wife, did the queenly nymph Calypso, that beautiful goddess, keep prisoner in her hollow caves, yearning that he should be her husband. But when, as the seasons revolved, the year came in which the gods had ordained that he should return home to Ithaca, not even then was he free from toils and among his own people. And all the gods pitied him except Poseidon; he continued to rage unceasingly against godlike Odysseus until at length he reached his own land.