With my pre-20th century pick, I'm taking Homer's Odyssey. It's got some beautiful poetic imagery, a complex narrative style, but mostly it's just a damn good tale: Odysseus (or Ulysses) leaves for home after 10 years at the Trojan war, where his tactics were largely responsible for the Greek victory. But he ends up inciting Poseidon's wrath, which is obviously a bad thing when you're planning on travelling by sea. He gets swept from island to island, sometimes stopping briefly, other times delayed for years, before finally escaping to his home and slaughtering all the suitors who had been courting his wife while he was away. Odysseus is an unusual heroic character; while he's a decent warrior and an excellent archer, his defining trait is his use of deceit to get out of difficult situations.
If anyone is looking to pick this up, of the few translations that I've read, I really liked the recent Robert Fagles translation.
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