The Odyssey catches up with the Greek hero Odysseus (or Ulysses) and his journey home to his island kingdom of Ithaca after the Trojan War, which due to a series of perils and misadventures takes an additional ten years. Meanwhile, his dutiful wife Penelope and Telemachus must contend with an increasingly unruly crowd of suitors who assume Odysseus to be dead and vying for Penelope's hand and Odysseus's vacant seat.
Homer was an ancient Greek author and epic poet. He is the reputed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epic poems that are the foundational works of ancient Greek literature. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time; for example in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Virgil refers to him as "poet sovereign", king of all poets; in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope acknowledges that Homer has always been considered the "greatest of poets".