Ancient & Renaissance

After ten years of war at Troy, Odysseus spends another ten battling monsters, gods, and the sea to reach home. Homer's epic of cunning, endurance, and longing set the template for every journey story that followed.

Guided by the poet Virgil, Dante descends through the nine circles of Hell, encountering the damned and the demons that torment them. It is the most vivid and imaginative map of the afterlife ever conceived.

An ageing gentleman, his mind addled by chivalric romances, sets out on horseback to right the world's wrongs, mistaking windmills for giants and inns for castles. Cervantes invented the modern novel — and gave it a heart.

Satan, cast out of Heaven, resolves to corrupt God's newest creation: humankind. Milton's epic gives the Devil the best lines and transforms the story of the Fall into a towering argument about freedom, obedience, and the cost of knowledge.