The cave of the cyclops

Homer's Odyssey is a founding tale of Western civilization: an epic story of one man's struggle to return home from the Trojan war. It became the first Penguin Classic when E.V. Rieu's translation was published in 1946. In this extract, Odysseus describes some of the horrors and wonders of his journey, including imprisonment by the fearsome Cyclops and his travels to the land of the dead.