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The Odyssey
Homer was believed to have been born between the 12th and 8th centuries BC and may have lived on the coast of Asia Minor. Little is known about his life beyond which can be gleaned in his stories, and there have been many assumptions made based on his writing and the characters that appear in his work. It is generally accepted that The Iliad was written first and The Odyssey was written later in Homer’s life. Although these are the only two works attributed to Homer, many others have been linked to him, including Homeric Hymns.
Bernard Knox was born in Bradford in 1914. He studied Classics at Cambridge, after which he fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Republican forces. After the Second World War, Knox studied at Yale and earned a doctorate. He worked as a professor and went on to lead the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington. As well as writing the introductions to Robert Fagles’s translations of Homer’s The Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996) and Virgil’s Aeneid (2006), he wrote a number of books including Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His time (1957). Knox died in 2010.