Brann, Eva. Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad.” Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2002. A close and witty exploration of the experience of reading Homer.

Camps, W. A. An Introduction to Homer. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1980. Excellent source for beginners. Provides an introductory essay that compares The Odyssey with the Iliad. Includes extensive notes and appendices to each work.

Gaunt, D. M., trans. Surge and Thunder: Critical Reading in Homer’s “Odyssey.” London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Designed for general readers. Gaunt translates selected passages, explaining fine points of language and meaning that are lost in translation. Text includes explication, analysis, and discussion. Has a guide to pronunciation, a list of Greek proper nouns, and an index of literary topics.

Lamberton, Robert. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Addresses The Odyssey as allegory, presenting a commentary and summary of the work. Supports points with material from Greek scholars. General researchers will find particularly interesting its focus on Homer as theologian. Well-indexed, well-documented, scholarly.

Mason, H. A. To Homer Through Pope: An Introduction to Homer’s “Iliad” and Pope’s Translation. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972. Mason devotes last chapter to The Odyssey and major translators of that work. Not recommended for beginning researchers.

Taylor, Charles H., Jr. Essays on the “Odyssey”: Selected Modern Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Seven selected essays, arranged chronologically. Taylor contends that interest grew in the “emblematic or symbolic implications” at work in events and images in the poem. Extensive notes.

• There have been several film and television productions based wholly or in part on the Odyssey, beginning in 1954 with the Dino De Laurentiis production of Ulisse (released in English as Ulysses in the same year), directed by Mario Camerini and starring Kirk Douglas as Ulysses and Anthony Quinn as Antinoos. In 1963, Pietro Francisi directed the film Ercole sfida Sansone, released in 1965 in the United States as Hercules, Samson, and Ulysses. A 1967 British production of Ulysses, based on the 1922 James Joyce novel which was itself based in part on the Odyssey, starred Martin Dempsey and Barbara Jefford. Radiotelevisione Italiana (RTI) produced a television version of the poem in 1969, directed by Mario Bara and Franco Rossi. NBC television produced a two-part miniseries of the epic in May of 1997, starring Armand Assante, Isabella Rosselini, Vanessa Williams, and Irene Pappas.
• The British rock band Cream, made up of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker, recorded the song "Tales of Brave Ulysses" on their second album, Disraeli Gears, in 1967. The song includes characters, themes, and motifs from the epic.
• There is at least a symbolic link between Homer's poem and the classic 1968 MGM production 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Keir Dullea, beginning with the title of the movie. Kubrick's film, although based on a 1950 novel by Arthur C. Clarke does seem to ask at least some of the same questions about human nature and its meaning as Homer does in the Odyssey.
• Elements from the Odyssey have received at least two (widely separated) operatic treatments. The first was in 1641 when Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) composed II Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria ("The Return of Ulysses"), treating Odysseus's return to Ithaca after his wanderings. The second is Richard Strauss's (1864-1949) Die agyptische Helena in 1928, with a libretto by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal based on the account of Helen's visit to Egypt in Book 4 of the Odyssey.
• Princeton University is host to a World Wide Web site entitled "The Odysseus Page" (http://www.princeton.edu/~cdmoen/). The site discusses the various encounters Odysseus experiences in his wanderings, and includes quotes from the Odyssey, links to images of some of the places and things mentioned in the poem, and some brief commentary. The Perseus Project at Tufts University (http://www.perseus.tufts. edu/), which is also available on CD-ROM for Mac from Yale University Press with a Windows version in the works, offers both the original Greek text and the Loeb Classical Library translation in English (which is, unfortunately, written in a highly artificial style and not recommended for use except as a reference), together with background information on many of the characters and places in the poem. Alan Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle" classical studies page (http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/shuttle/classics.html) is a good place to start looking for information and links to other sites relevant to the classics and classical literature.
• Audio cassette versions of the Odyssey are available from Dove Audio (1996), Penguin Highbridge Audio (two versions, both dated 1996: the Fagles translation, narrated by Sir Ian McKellen, and Allen Mandelbaum's translation), and Harper Audio (1996, the Lattimore translation, narrated by Anthony Quayle).

Sources

Some excerpts from the Odyssey are taken from the following translation:

Homer. The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Additionally, Lattimore’s introduction was essential to this research.

Aurbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.

Camps, W. A. An Introduction to Homer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Scott, John A. The Unity of Homer (Sather Classical Lectures). Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1921.

Tillyard, E. M. W. The English Epic and its Background. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1954.

Sources for Further Study

Biers, William R. The Archaeology of Greece: An Introduction. Cornell University Press, 1980. An excellent basic introduction to Greek archaeology, featuring numerous illustrations.

Camps, William A. An Introduction to Homer. Oxford University Press, 1980. A comprehensive overview of Homer and his works, accessible and with notes on key points in both poems.

Easterling, P. E., and B. M. W. Knox, eds. The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, Vol. 1, Part 1, "Early Greek Poetry." Cambridge University Press, 1989. A concise, albeit somewhat technical, overview of the earliest surviving Greek writers. This volume is the first in a series by Cambridge that chronicles the entire history of Greek literature through the Hellenistic period and into the Roman Empire.

Griffin, Jasper. Homer: The Odyssey (Landmarks of World Literature series). Cambridge University Press, 1987. A handy, affordable, pocket-sized summary of the work and its author.

Hammond, N. G. L. A History of Greece to 322 BC, 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 1986. The "standard" history of Greece up to the era of Alexander. Although the text is dense and the print small, it remains a valuable resource.

Harvey, Paul, ed. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Oxford University Press, 1984. A highly useful reference tool for basic facts, names, and dates.

Herodotus. The Persian Wars. Translated by George Rawlinson; introduction by Francis R. B. Godolphin. Modern Library, 1942. Despite not being recent, this is among the best translations of Herodotus. Although he primarily wrote about the conflict between the Greeks and Persians, Herodotus delves into various other topics, providing intriguing (and often imaginative) historical details, including several references to Homer and his works.

Homer. The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Harper & Row, 1967. Lattimore's translation preserves Homer's original line structure better than any other verse translation, without sacrificing readability or flow.

———. The Odyssey of Homer, 2nd ed. Edited, with general and grammatical introduction, commentary, and indexes, by W. B. Stanford. Macmillan, 1974. An excellent edition, featuring technical commentary on the Greek original.

———. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Anchor, 1963; reissued by Vintage Books, 1990. A somewhat loose verse translation of the poem. Some readers might find Fitzgerald's direct transliteration of Greek names confusing.

———. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles; introduction and notes by Bernard Knox. Viking, 1996. This is one of the latest and most highly praised translations of the Odyssey. Fagles presents a version in blank verse that is somewhat more flexible than the translations by Lattimore or Fitzgerald, yet it maintains the epic's poetic essence. Knox's introduction is both well-written and highly informative.

Homeri Opera, Vols. III and IV, 2nd ed. Edited by Thomas W. Allen. Oxford University Press, 1919. This is the definitive edition of the original Greek text.

Internet Movie Database, The. (http://us.imdb.com). This comprehensive database lists movie and television productions from the 1890s to the present, featuring extensive search capabilities.

Jones, Peter V. Introduction. The Odyssey. Translated by E. V. Rieu. Penguin Classics, 1946, 1991. This is an excellent, broad-based introduction to the poem that does not require knowledge of Greek. It is a great resource for finding textual references to various characters and places mentioned in the poem, and it includes a good bibliography for further reading.

Knox, Bernard, ed. The Norton Book of Classical Literature. W. W. Norton, 1993. While primarily a collection of selected passages from notable works of classical literature, this book also provides basic information about the authors and their works.

Levi, Peter. The Pelican History of Greek Literature. Penguin, 1985. This is a solid basic reference for Greek literature in general, and it does not require any knowledge of Greek.

Perseus Project, The. (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/). This extensive online reference offers primary and secondary source materials in both Greek and English, along with standard reference works. It is invaluable for tracing references to characters in secondary sources and is much faster for determining the frequency of word usage, among other things.

Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1974. This is a rather technical work that deals with books and the "book trade" in antiquity, as well as the process by which ancient texts have been transmitted to us from the classical world.

Solomon, Jon D. "In the Wake of Cleopatra: The Ancient World in the Cinema Since 1963." Classical Journal, Vol. 91, no. 2, 1996, pp. 113-40. This is a chronology that provides basic information on film and television productions that are based on or mention works from classical antiquity.

Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Richard Crawley; revised with an introduction by T. E. Wick. Modern Library, 1982. This is one of the best English translations of Thucydides, despite its age. It is very readable.