Poetry Codex

Ancient Greek & Roman

Homer

fl. c. 8th century BC

Homer is the name tradition gives to the poet, or poets, credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two foundational epics of ancient Greek literature. Nothing reliable is known of his life; ancient sources disagree even on his birthplace, and many scholars believe the poems as we have them are the culmination of centuries of oral epic tradition rather than the work of one man.

Whether historical individual or convenient legend, "Homer" is credited with shaping the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus into the verse that became the bedrock of Greek and later Western literature and education.

This archive presents multiple English translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey side by side, so that the different choices each translator made — prose versus verse, plain diction versus ornate — can be compared directly. H. B. Cotterill's line-for-line translation of the Odyssey in English hexameters (1911) is among the Odysseys held here.

The Pylos Combat Agate: on an almond-shaped stone of banded agate, a warrior lunges over a great body-shield to drive his sword at the neck of a second, crested warrior, while a third lies dead beneath them
Actual size

Before Homer

The Pylos Combat Agate

Minoan Crete, about 1450 BCE
Banded agate, 3.4 cm long

A warrior who has already struck down one enemy lunges over a great body-shield and drives his sword at the throat of a second, gripping the crest of the man’s helmet. The whole fight is cut into a sealstone smaller than a thumb, so finely that the muscles of the fighters and the patterns of their kilts can be read only under a lens.

It was buried with a man of rank, the so-called Griffin Warrior, beside the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, and found in 2015 by the University of Cincinnati excavation led by Sharon Stocker and Jack Davis. Encrusted with limestone, it was first taken for a bead; cleaning revealed the scene in 2017, and it is now counted the finest engraving known from the Aegean Bronze Age.

The Iliad would not be written down for another seven centuries, yet its world is already here: champions in single combat, crested helmets, the tall shields Homer still remembers in Ajax’s shield “like a tower”, and Pylos itself, the city of old Nestor.

Photograph: Palace of Nestor Excavations, Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati.

Major Works (22)

  1. The Homeric Hymns — translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914)
  2. The Homeric Hymns — translated by George Chapman (c. 1624)
  3. The Homeric Hymns — translated by Andrew Lang (1899)
  4. The Iliad — translated by Theodore Alois Buckley (1873 printing)
  5. The Iliad — translated by Samuel Butler (1898)
  6. The Iliad — translated by George Chapman (1611)
  7. The Iliad — translated by William Cowper (1791; Southey’s edition, New York 1860)
  8. The Iliad — translated by Edward, Earl of Derby (1864)
  9. The Iliad — translated by Thomas Hobbes (1676)
  10. The Iliad — translated by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers (1911)
  11. The Iliad — translated by A. T. Murray (1924)
  12. The Iliad — translated by Alexander Pope (1715–1720)
  13. The Iliad (Way) — translated by Arthur S. Way (1886–88)
  14. The Odyssey — translated by S. H. Butcher and A. Lang (1879)
  15. The Odyssey — translated by Samuel Butler (1900)
  16. The Odyssey — translated by George Chapman (1614–15)
  17. The Odyssey — translated by H. B. Cotterill (1911)
  18. The Odyssey — translated by William Cowper (1791)
  19. The Odyssey — translated by William Morris (1887)
  20. The Odyssey — translated by A. T. Murray (1919)
  21. The Odyssey — translated by Alexander Pope, with William Broome and Elijah Fenton (1725–1726)
  22. The Odyssey (Way) — translated by Arthur S. Way (1904)

Poems (38)

  1. The Battle of Frogs and Mice
  2. Epigram I: To the Dwellers at Cyme
  3. Epigram II
  4. Epigram III
  5. Epigram IV
  6. Epigram V
  7. Epigram VI
  8. Epigram VII
  9. Epigram VIII
  10. Epigram IX
  11. Epigram X
  12. Epigram XI
  13. Epigram XII
  14. Epigram XIII
  15. Epigram XIV
  16. Epigram XV
  17. Epigram XVI
  18. Epigram XVII
  19. Book VII, 153: On Midas
  20. The Battle of the Frogs and Mice (Batrachomyomachia)
  21. To Cuma
  22. In his Return to Cuma
  23. Upon the Sepulchre of Midus Cut in Brass, in the Figure of a Virgin
  24. Cuma, refusing to eternize their State, Though Brought Thither by the Muses
  25. An Essay of his begun Iliads
  26. To Thestor’s Son inquisitive about the Causes of Things
  27. To Neptune
  28. To the City of Erythræa
  29. To Mariners
  30. The Pine
  31. To Glaucus, Who was so Miserably Sparing that he Feared All Men’s Access to Him
  32. Against the Samian Ministress or Nun
  33. Written on the Council Chamber
  34. The Furnace called in to sing by Potters
  35. Eiresione, or the Olive Branch
  36. To certain Fisher-Boys, pleasing him with Ingenious Riddles
  37. Iliad I (Dryden)
  38. Iliad VI: The Last Parting of Hector and Andromache (Dryden)

See Homer in the full archive →