Odyssey

The Odyssey, attributed to Homer and transmitted from the archaic Greek oral tradition into its written form by roughly the seventh or sixth century BCE, is, with the Iliad, one of the two foundational epics of Greek myth and religion, the principal narrative source for material on Odysseus's journey, the gods' interventions in mortal affairs, and much of the wider mythological world ancient Greek religion drew on. Its strength as a source is that it is a primary text, the earliest and most complete surviving account of much of the material it contains, and the work against which later ancient and modern retellings are measured. Its limit is that it is a literary epic composed for performance, not a religious or historical document written to record cult practice, so a claim about actual ancient Greek ritual, as opposed to mythological narrative, needs a source that treats cult practice specifically rather than epic poetry alone.