The award-winning translator of Iliad and Oresteia introduces a new translation of Homer's age-old tale of the wanderings of Odysseus during his ten-year voyage back home to Ithaca after the Trojan War as he overcomes both divine and natural forces. 50,000 first printing. more..

From the award-winning translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey comes a brilliant new translation of Virgil's great epic

With his translations of Homer's classic poems, Robert Fagles gave new life to seminal works of the Western canon and became one of the preeminent translators of our time. His latest achievement completes the magnificent triptych of Western epics. A more..

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero's triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed in the exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels in this story to the historical more..

Translated with an Introduction by Andrew George. more..

In the Inferno, the first of the three-part Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri is wandering through a dark wood on the evening of Good Friday in the year 1300. Losing his way and suddenly fearful, he looks up to see the sun shining on a mountain above. He tries to reach it, but is thwarted by three beasts. The Roman poet Virgil appears, sent to guide him back to the path and on to more..

A modern verse translation by Robert Fagles, who also translated Aeschylus' "The Oresteia" and Sophocles' "Three Theban Plays". more..

On the Nature of Things (Latin: De rerum natura) is a first century BC epic poem by Lucretius that grandly proclaims the reality of man's role in a universe without a god to help him along. It is a statement of personal responsibility in a world in which everyone is driven by hungers and passions with which they were born and do not understand. more..

Robert Fagles’s stunning modern-verse translation—available at last in our black-spine classics line

The Odyssey is literature’s grandest evocation of everyman’s journey through life. In the myths and legends that are retold here, renowned translator Robert Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer’s original in a bold, contemporary idiom and given us an more..

The epic poem of war and adventure.

Beowulf is the earliest extant poem in a modern European language. It was composed in England four centuries before the Norman Conquest. But no one knows exactly when it was composed, or by whom, or why. As a social document this great epic reflects a feudal, newly Christian world of heroes and monsters, blood and victory and death.

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The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a previously unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, written while Tolkien was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford during the 1920s and ‘30s, before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It makes available for the first time Tolkien’s extensive retelling in English narrative verse of the epic Norse tales of Sigurd the more..