Odysseus
A Life

It feels somewhat wrong to give the same number of stars to this book as The Iliad and The Odyssey; however, I've done just that because Beye has made Odysseus extremely accessible without this book being overly scholarly, and thus, overly dry. The style of the work is good and reconstructs Odysseus......more

The author has stitched together a biography of the long enduring one by consulting sources and learned imagination. It is an entertaining, but diverting story only. Palamedes gets barely a passing mention, and then is excluded from the glossary of characters. Odysseus would approve.......more

Beye never quite manages to make the leap from historian to storyteller, but I can appreciate that this is an exceptionally readable account of Odysseus’ life as told by someone who very much comes off as a genial and well-read college professor.......more

Written as a biography, this 2004 book looks at the fictional character Odysseus, using a variety of sources such as "The Iliad," "The Odyssey," several plays of Sophocles, other ancient Greek epic tales, and background on Bronze Age Greece. Charles Rowan Beye is a professor of Classics at City Univ......more

This is a creative attempt at a biography of this heroic, and likely fictional, character. There were some indulgences that Beye took in his narrative descriptions of Odysseus' adventures. However, the author used actual Greek history to inform the locations and events of the Homeric epics. It has s......more