"Helen's beauty, Odysseus's cunning, Hector's noble courage, Achilles' vulnerable heel, Ajax's madness, Agamemnon's murder"—as the author notes in his introduction, all have become proverbial.

Proverbial and well-known as the incidents and characters are, however, the skill of distinguished poet and scholar Robert Graves brings fresh life to this story of the Trojan War.

As Mr. Graves writes, "This is perhaps the first modern attempt to make the whole story... into a single short book for boys and girls." With emphasis on telling the whole story, he follows up the genealogies of the characters, tells the incidents leading up to the epic clash and the aftermath, and makes an exciting narrative while not sacrificing thoroughness of detail to the dramatic story line.

To do this Robert Graves does not merely modernize the Iliad and the the Odyssey, but uses accounts by all the various Greek and Latin authors. The illustrations, especially drawn for this edition by well-known English artist C. Walter Hodges, are a perfect complement to this most exciting of all adventure stories.

From the dust jacket