At the end of the Bronze Age, the Greeks fought a long and brutal war against the city of Troy, and returned home to a collapsing world. While their cities were reduced to long-buried ruins, their names and deeds were remembered in an cycle told and retold long after they had gone to dust. Today, little survives of that cycle other than two epic poems: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
Originally published in 1871 and written for readers new to the Classics, William Lucas Collins' primer on the Iliad and the Odyssey remains invaluable to this day. Not only does Collins walk the reader through the many references, gods, goddesses, and major events of each epic, he also explores the impact they had and how they were remembered, in ancient Greece and beyond.