Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Unsure if that counts. The beginning is an instant hook for me. I love muses. I love epic tales.

“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea, struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.”

I particularly love it when in antiquity, writers start going off on family trees. Somewhere in the following there’s a deeper meaning lost to time.

“There first I saw Tyro, gloriously descended, and she told me she was the daughter of stately Salmoneus, but said she was the wife of Kretheus, the son of Aiolos, and she was in love with a river, godlike Enipeus, by far the handsomest of all those rivers whose streams cross over”

Excerpts From The Odyssey of Homer Richmond Lattimore