Some scholars claim it was here Odysseus dallied for seven years with the goddess Calypso.

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But it is also Odysseus himself, by his very example, who has seduced them into showing him such favours.

ECONOMIST: Homer

Odysseus eventually made it through the narrow straits between the two monsters, but not without losing six of his best sailors.

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Mr Armitage has penned a version of Homer's second epic which deals with the long-delayed homecoming of Odysseus from the Trojan wars.

ECONOMIST: Homer

"There is a second territory ... and that is secondary traumatic stress injury, " says Shay, the author of Odysseus in America and Achilles in Vietnam.

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Scott Huler retraces the travels of his literary inspiration, Homer's Odysseus.

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Just over a year later, the good ship Hellas is not faring much better than Odysseus and his crew, veering from one near-disaster to the next.

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Local legend has it that Odysseus loitered here for seven years before he decided he really ought to be getting back to his family on Ithaca.

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It's a way of binding ourselves, much as, in The Odyssey, Odysseus asks his men to lash him to the mast so he can guide the ship past the Sirens.

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