The best-known epic of the Western canon, The Odyssey signifies the beginning of literature as we know it.
Odysseus, King of Ithaca, is stuck in a perilous and seemingly unending journey home after the ten-year-long Trojan War. Because he's upset Poseidon, Odysseus must reckon with both godly and earthly threats on his passage. He travels through the land of the Cyclops, encounters the enchantress Circe at the ends of the earth, and faces the sea monster Charybdis and the six-headed serpent Scylla. He loses his crew and tries to hang onto his sanity.
Back home, Odysseus' wife Penelope assumes he is dead and fights to fend off the suitors who come for her. Here is one of the more romantic and doomed love stories ever written.