Homer
The Odyssey — ten years to get home, and a house full of men eating the estate
Ὀδύσσεια · Composed in the eighth or seventh century BCE, at the end of a long oral tradition and probably with the help of writing; the dating is argued about and no manuscript is anywhere near that old. The story is set a decade after a war conventionally placed in the twelfth century BCE, so the poem is already looking back several hundred years at a world it half-remembers and half-invents.
A soldier takes ten years to sail home from a war that already took ten. He loses every ship and every man he started with. Meanwhile his wife holds off a hundred and eight suitors who have moved into his house and are eating it empty, and his son goes looking for news of a father he has never met. When he finally lands on his own island he arrives alone, asleep, and disguised as a beggar — and spends the second half of the poem finding out who in his own household can be trusted.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
A. T. Murray (1866–1940) made the Loeb Odyssey in 1919, printed facing the Greek this site uses — source and translation are two halves of one book, which is why they line up exactly. IT IS PROSE. Homer's hexameter is gone, and that is the largest single thing lost here: the poem's speed, its line-end pauses, and the way a formula lands in the same metrical slot each time are all invisible in English prose. Murray's register is deliberately archaic — 'thou' and 'thee', 'aye', 'verily', inverted word order — which was old-fashioned in 1919 and is stranger now. That archaism is a real barrier and worth naming plainly, but it is not merely fusty: it is trying to reproduce a genuine feature of the Greek, which was never anybody's spoken language and sounded old and elevated to its first listeners too. Where Murray is very good is accuracy. He keeps the epithets rather than varying them for English taste, so the formulaic texture survives, and he does not smooth over the passages that embarrass modern readers. SAMUEL BUTLER'S 1900 PROSE VERSION IS THE MORE INVITING READ and is not used here; the reason is a rights problem rather than a judgement, and it is set out in the note on provenance.