The Book That Changed My Life: 'The Odyssey'

 Anne Cotton

The Odyssey by Homer

(the oldest known version of The Odyssey)

How hard it is to select one book! But I am going for the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem of Odysseus’ journey back from Troy and his return to his home of Ithaka. It is a tale of adventure and mystery, the divine and the monstrous, through which runs the human narrative of Odysseus’ relationship with his companions and his return to his home and family – and it’s a work I have returned to so many times. 

I remember my father reading us abridged tales from the Odyssey as bedtime stories, and being captivated by the way that Odysseus tricks the monster Polyphemus. In my first year at secondary school, we had a wonderful series of lessons dedicated to the Greek myths, and I vividly recall us dressing up in grass skirts to enact the tale of the Lotus Eaters. 

A dramatic section in which Odysseus returns home and confronts the suitors who have taken over his home was our GCSE set work, and one of the wonderful texts which inspired me to study Classics at university, where one hot summer I read the whole text in Greek, over a few days, gaining a sense of the incredible sweep of this narrative, its range, its beauty, and its aching humanity. Since then, it has been a corner stone of my own work as a classics teacher and a reminder of all the talented, creative, dedicated pupils I’ve been privileged to teach over the years. 

It’s a narrative that captures the adventures of personal discovery and intellectual enquiry on which our pupils embark when they join us at PGS  and which has given its name to our annual Ithaka evening, our celebration of our Year 13 pupils’ academic enquiry and their stunning PGS Extend projects. And its tales now make a regular appearance in my own bedtime stories – though my children still believe that their hero is not Odysseus but Pirate Pete.