DEMYSTIFYING THE ODYSSEY

Book excerpt: The Odyssey is considered to be the most beautiful literary work of the Western civilization, and Homer the first and the greatest poet ever. The book Demystifying the Odyssey is interpreting Homer's epic in a unique and completely new way. For the first time in literature, this book explains the events and phenomena that Odysseus saw and experienced, and which were considered so far as a result of the Poet's rich imagination. So, this book reveals how Odysseus went to Hades kingdom of the dead souls; what are in reality Scylla and Charybdis; who were the sirens; how the Island of Aeolus', the ruler of the winds, actually floated; how Circa turned Odysseus's sailors into pigs and other. Besides that, this book also reveals the fallacy two and a half millennia long, dating back from the first historians Herodotus and Thucydides, according to which Odysseus was wandering the Mediterranean sea. It further provides numerous proofs that Homer's hero was actually wandering the Adriatic. For all those readers who are familiar with the ancient Greek literature this book will be great news and quite a surprise. On the other hand, for those who have not been quite aware of the old Greek world it will provide great knowledge on the first European civilization. In any case, this will surely be an interesting reading for all of them.