2
THE ODYSSEY
The Greeks believed that the Odyssey, was composed by Homer. In our ignorance
of the man, his life and his work, we are free to believe it or not. Received opinion dates
him c,. 750–700 BC and places him in Ionia, the Greek-inhabited coast and islands off
central western Turkey. The Greeks believed the same man composed the Iliad,.
E. V. RIEU, editor of the Penguin Classics from 1944 to 1964, was a scholar of St
Paul’s School and of Balliol College, Oxford. He joined Methuen in 1923 and was
Managing Director from 1933 to 1936, and then Academic and Literary Adviser. He was
President of the Virgil Society in 1951 and Vice-President of the Royal Society of
Literature in 19 5 8. He was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by Leeds University in 1949
and the CBE in 1953. Among his publications are The Flattered Flying Fish and Other
Poems, and translations of the Odyssey, the Iliad, Virgil’s Pastoral Poems, the Voyage of
Argo, by Apollonius of Rhodes and The Four Gospels, in the Penguin Classics. He died
in 1972.
D. C. H. RIEU, his son, read Classics and English at Queen’s College, Oxford. He
joined the West Yorkshire Regiment and was wounded at Cheren in 1941, and awarded
the Military Cross. He was Headmaster of Simon Langton Grammar School, Canterbury,
from 1955 to 1977. He translated the Acts of the Apostles, in the Penguin Classics, and
revised his father’s Odyssey, in consultation with Dr Peter Jones, and with him has
revised his father’s translation of the Iliad,. On retirement he worked for Cruse
Bereavement Counselling and for the Samaritans. He has been in Subud for many years,
and has written books and articles about it, beginning with A Life Within a Life, in 1963.
A Cambridge graduate with a London doctorate on Homer, peter jones was a
schoolteacher and senior lecturer in Classics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
He is now a writer, broadcaster and journalist. Appointed MBE in 1983, he is Spokesman
for the national Co-ordinating Committee for Classics and founder with Jeannie Cohen of
the charity Friends of Classics,. He wrote the QED and Eureka, series for the Daily
Telegraph, both now published by Duckworth as Learn Latin, and Learn Ancient Greek,.
Duckworth have also published his Classics in Translation, (another Telegraph, series)
and Ancient and Modern, (from his weekly column in the Spectator),. He has co-authored
the Reading Greek, and Reading Latin, series for Cambridge, and published books,
articles and commentaries on Homer.
