About the Homer Reader
The Homer Reader is a free parallel Greek–English edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey: the full Greek text of both poems beside a public-domain English translation, with click-to-parse morphology, a Greek lexicon, exact vulgate line citation, and a growing apparatus of maps, marginal scene summaries, timelines, and genealogies. There is no ad, no paywall, and no account.
Its sources
The Greek text comes from T. W. Allen’s 1931 edition of the Iliad and the Loeb Odyssey (1919), both via a licensed export and the Perseus Digital Library. The English is A. T. Murray’s Loeb translation by default, with Samuel Butler’s and Alexander Pope’s as alternates — all long in the public domain under US copyright rules. Word lookups draw on the LSJ lexicon and Cunliffe’s Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, with Autenrieth’s school dictionary as a second, simpler pane. Every source, its edition, and its exact licence terms are on the Texts & Licences page — this page only introduces them.
How to read the apparatus
The maps, scene summaries, timelines, and genealogies are drafted with AI assistance and then reviewed by hand, book by book. Until a book has been reviewed, it carries a Draft badge, wherever it appears in the reader — the badge means exactly what it says: read the underlying text and translations with full confidence, but treat that particular summary, identification, or family-tree link as provisional until the badge is gone. As of this build, the character apparatus has been reviewed. Every place identification also carries its own certainty tier — certain, traditional, speculative, or mythical — and any identification that comes from later tradition rather than the poems themselves says so and names that tradition; nothing is asserted the poems don’t actually say.
Why the apparatus, and why now
Pairing the Greek and English is not new; pairing either with a real apparatus — maps keyed to the text, marginal summaries, a day-calendar, genealogies — is. This edition’s apparatus is built in the tradition of Robert Strassler’s Landmark editions of the Greek historians, a series that has covered Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian, Caesar, and Polybius but never Homer; it tries to do for the two epics what that series does for history — put the apparatus a careful reader actually wants right next to the text, instead of in a separate commentary volume. This is an independent project, not an entry in that series.
Who's behind it
The Homer Reader is a project of the Lyceum, an ongoing effort to put classical texts online free, in full, and honestly annotated. It happens to be a particularly good year to sit down and read Homer, whatever brought you here — the poems don’t need an occasion, but they don’t mind one either.