If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once the timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.   In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.   Renown classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and texual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation.   This is the Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.