Homer is a much-debated figure traditionally considered to have composed the two great oral poems The Odyssey and The Iliad in eighth or seventh-century-BC Greece Robert Fitzgerald was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard University. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He published four volumes of his own verse during his lifetime. His translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad, and of Virgil's Aeniad, won him many honours and are universally acknowledged to be among the finest of their kind this century. He died in 1985.

Homer's Odyssey is still enchanting readers after thousands of years