The Homer Reader The Iliad & Odyssey · Greek and English

Texts and licences for the Homer Reader

Texts & Licences

This reader presents Greek texts, English translations, and reference works. Their sources — and, where a source requires it, its licence terms — are credited below.

Greek Lexicon (LSJ & Cunliffe) CC BY-SA 3.0

The word popups and lemma entries draw first on the Greek–English Lexicon of Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, revised by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 9th ed. 1940; supplement 1996), and second on Richard John Cunliffe's A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (1924), a dictionary compiled specifically from Homeric usage.

The machine-readable LSJ edition used here is the XML transcription prepared by the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States licence. Cunliffe's lexicon (1924) is in the public domain in the US.

Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Revised and augmented by Henry Stuart Jones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940. Machine-readable version: Perseus Digital Library, Trustees of Tufts University. CC BY-SA 3.0 US.
Cunliffe, Richard John. A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect. London: Blackie & Son, 1924. Public domain (US).

The CC BY-SA licence requires that any derivative work be distributed under the same terms. This application's LSJ data is a subset and derivative of that work; users who redistribute it must carry this attribution notice and the same CC BY-SA licence.

English Translations Public domain

Every book carries a public-domain English translation, judged eligible under US copyright rules: A. T. Murray's Loeb Classical Library prose translation (1919/1924–25) as the primary text, with Samuel Butler's prose translation (1898/1900) and Alexander Pope's verse translation (1715–26) available as alternate voices, which the reader can show side by side in a compare view. The list below is generated directly from the corpus registry, so it always matches what the reader carries.

Murray's translation is reproduced from the Perseus canonical-greekLit corpus, which carries it as TEI XML with milestone-anchored footnotes. Perseus's TEI encoding — the markup, milestones, and file structure — is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, per the repository's licence file; this site uses that encoding and carries this attribution accordingly.

Butler's and Pope's translations are long out of copyright and are drawn from public-domain digitisations. They do not carry the same milestone structure as Murray's Perseus text; each is aligned to the Greek independently (Pope's alignment is book-anchored only, with no intra-book proportional gutter — see the site's build notes).

The files used here are pinned to a specific commit rather than tracking the corpus as it moves, so a rebuild is always reproducible; the exact revision, per-file checksums, and source paths are recorded in sources/INVENTORY.md. If you hold rights to any text shown here and wish it removed, please get in touch.

Kosmos Society Revision of Butler CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

A fourth English text, carried under a Creative Commons licence rather than as public domain: Samuel Butler's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey as revised by Soo-Young Kim, Kelly McCray, Gregory Nagy, and Timothy Power for the Kosmos Society of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University. It is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0, and is reproduced here without change: the revisers' bracketed Greek, their bracketed insertions and their notes are all kept. A reader setting can hide the bracketed Greek words from view; it hides nothing else.

The revisers number every fifth line and many lines between. The reader breaks the English at each of those numbers and sets each group beside the Greek lines it translates; it does not divide a group any further, and it prints a line number beside the English only at line 1 and every fifth line, as the Greek column does. Where Kosmos prints a number twice, out of order, after a book's last words, or for a line this Greek text lacks (Il. 9.460, in lines 9.458–461, which Allen omits), no group breaks there.

In 84 places (40 in the Iliad, 44 in the Odyssey) Kosmos prints a number a few words before or after the point where its Greek line begins in the English. There the reader starts the group at the right word instead. Each of these was checked against the Greek; no word of the translation is changed. The list is kept in the site's source, in pipeline/homer_pipeline/kosmos_break_corrections.json.

Homeric Iliad and Homeric Odyssey. Translated by Samuel Butler; revised by Soo-Young Kim, Kelly McCray, Gregory Nagy, and Timothy Power. Kosmos Society, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University. kosmossociety.org/homeric-iliad/; kosmossociety.org/homeric-odyssey/. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Vulgate Line Numbering

The Iliad and the Odyssey are cited by book and vulgate line number (e.g. Il. 1.1), the traditional lineation inherited from the ancient scholarly editions and preserved unbroken since. Numbering gaps and bracketed/athetized lines (verses the manuscript tradition marks as suspect) are preserved verbatim, never renumbered — a line's number is a citation, not a sequence count.

Murray's translation carries its own milestone markers from Perseus's TEI encoding, used to align the English to the Greek at fixed points within each book (see the parallel-column gutter). Butler's and Pope's translations are aligned independently, as noted above.

Greek Text

The Greek text of the Iliad is T. W. Allen's editio maior (Oxford, 1931); lines athetized by Allen carry the obelos and render bracketed, and the four lines Allen omits at 8.548–552 are supplied from the vulgate, marked as athetized. The Greek text of the Odyssey follows the text printed in A. T. Murray's Loeb edition (1919), as digitized by the Perseus Digital Library.

Roughly half of Murray's footnote markers show his original note text rather than a bare citation number, recovered from first-printing Loeb scans (Odyssey 1919, Iliad 1924–25; archive.org, verified US public domain) and matched to Perseus's TEI markers by page running-heads and citation number, shipped only where the match is high-confidence. Markers without a confidently-matched note keep the bare citation number. Speech-span data derive from the DICES database (CC BY 4.0).

The Allen text was extracted at build time using the Diogenes tool against a licensed copy of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) corpus. The TLG's digital corpus is a licensed, subscription resource — it is used here only as a build-time export tool and is not itself redistributed.

Recitation Audio CC BY

"Hear this passage" plays David Chamberlain's recitation of the Greek text, streamed directly from his archive.org uploads — this site never copies or rehosts the audio files. Coverage is honest and partial: all 24 books of the Iliad (with a handful of small recorded gaps within a few books) and the first seven books of the Odyssey; the play control simply does not appear where no recording exists. Each chunk plays only the line range its button states — there is no per-line seeking within a recording.

Chamberlain, David. My Reading of Homer (work in progress). Recordings licensed CC BY 3.0 or 4.0 per item (see each recording's archive.org page for its exact version).

Maps CC BY

Map tiles: Consortium of Ancient World Mappers (CAWM), licensed CC BY 4.0.

The scene-panel coastline is derived from Natural Earth (public domain).

Illustrated Plates

The larger illustrated panels on the Maps page (the Troad and the Trojan Plain) are original drawings made for this project — an SVG renderer drawing its own line work over surveyed geometry, not a scan, trace, or redrawing of any published map or figure. The coastlines, islands and rivers come from the open datasets credited below; the reconstructions drawn over them are ours.

Where a plate's geometry encodes a scholarly claim — the Bronze Age shoreline of the Trojan plain, the tumuli identified on the ground, the status of the "hot and cold springs" of Iliad 22 — the underlying facts (a shoreline position, a date, a survey result) are drawn from the cited studies below. Facts are not copyrightable; the expression in those studies' own maps and figures is, and it is never reproduced or traced here — only cited as a source for our own, independently drawn line.

Kraft, John C., İlhan Kayan, and Oğuz Erol. "Geomorphic Reconstructions in the Environs of Ancient Troy." Science 209 (1980): 776–82.
Kraft, John C., George Rapp, İlhan Kayan, and John V. Luce. "Harbor Areas at Ancient Troy: Sedimentology and Geomorphology Complement Homer's Iliad." Geology 31, no. 2 (2003): 163–66.
Cook, J. M. The Troad: An Archaeological and Topographical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Luce, J. V. Celebrating Homer's Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Rose, Charles Brian. The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Wolkersdorfer, Christian, et al. "Hydrochemical Investigations to Locate Homer's Hot and Cold Springs of Troia (Troy)/Turkey." CATENA 200 (2021): 105070.

The plates' coastlines and islands are contoured from the water-body mask of the Copernicus DEM GLO-30, a 30 m global elevation model, traced and simplified for these plates: "produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved". "The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30."

The plates' relief contours are derived from SRTM elevation data, served as terrarium-encoded Tilezen/Mapzen Terrain Tiles: SRTM data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.

The plates' river courses — Scamander, Simoeis, Granicus, Aesepus, Satnioeis — are taken from © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed ODbL 1.0. The river geometry in the plate data files is a derivative database under that licence and is offered under the same terms.

Place coordinates follow Pleiades, licensed CC BY 3.0.

Morphological Data Open

Morphological analyses (lemma, gloss, grammatical parse) are produced by the Morpheus morphological analyser as distributed with Diogenes, using Autenrieth's Homeric dictionary as an additional glossing source where noted. See the Diogenes and Perseus project pages for applicable terms.

Application Code MIT

The pipeline and web application source code (Python and TypeScript/Svelte) are released under the MIT Licence. Data files derived from CC BY-SA sources are excluded from this grant and remain subject to CC BY-SA.

Site by John H. Boyer.