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.

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).

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.