Literature and History.com.

Hello and welcome to Literature and History.

Episode 124, the last great of Antiquity.

Before we get into the greatest war story that most people have never heard of, I have a very

special announcement. Your host, Doug Metzger, is publishing a book. About six months ago,

a subsidiary of Simon and Schuster reached out to me to write an illustrated guide to Homer's Odyssey.

I've always thought that the Odyssey is one of the great gateways into antiquity and

literature more generally, so I said yes. Last autumn, I wrote the book and worked with a great

editing team and illustrator named Charlie Vince, and it's going to be published

on June 23, 26, just about a month before the new movie version of The Odyssey, directed

by Christopher Nolan, comes out.

The name of my book is The Odyssey, an illustrated guide.

The book is organized into 40 entries on the Homeric epic's most prominent characters,

and you meet the characters roughly in the order that they appear in Homer's story.

While major characters are covered thoroughly, the book is also a really rich introduction

to the Odyssey's minor characters, too.

The whole second half of the Odyssey is set on the island of Ithaca, and

in the book I wrote, the illustrator and I tried to draw attention to the poem's full cast

and its portraits of daily life in palaces and crop fields, rather than just focusing on the

seafaring adventures and sword and sorcery stuff, but we certainly do that too.

The Odyssey and Illustrated Guide goes into more detail on the Homeric Epic than I had time for

in our podcast, and there's an audiobook version as well. If you're interested in the notes of

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