The Odyssey
Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus is still trying to get home. Calypso's island, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the descent to the dead, and finally Ithaca — where a hall full of suitors awaits, and Penelope has been weaving and unweaving her loom for years to hold them off. The companion epic to the Iliad, plus the original Greek and a new modern-English translation.
“The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound.”Book I — translated by Alexander Pope, 1725
Reading Formats
Five Parallel Editions
PROSESamuel Butler · 1900
A brisk, plain-spoken prose rendering — Butler notoriously argued the Odyssey was written by a young Sicilian woman; whatever one makes of that, his prose reads fast and clean.
VERSEAlexander Pope · 1725–1726
Pope's follow-up to his Iliad, completed with help from William Broome and Elijah Fenton — rhymed heroic couplets throughout.
VERSEWilliam Cowper · 1791
Blank verse, published alongside his Iliad as a matched pair — plainer and closer to Homer's own register than Pope's couplets.
GREEKOriginal Ancient Greek · ed. A. T. Murray, 1919
The Homeric Greek itself, from the Perseus Digital Library's canonical text (the 1919 Loeb Classical Library edition) — public domain.
MODERNClaude (Anthropic) · 2026
An original modern-English prose translation, complete in all 24 books, made directly from the Greek — no reference to any existing translation.
24 Books
IThe Gods in Council
IITelemachus Calls an Assembly
IIITelemachus Visits Nestor at Pylos
IVTelemachus and Menelaus at Sparta
VCalypso
VINausicaa
VIIThe Palace of Alcinous
VIIIThe Phaeacian Games
IXOdysseus and the Cyclops
XAeolus, the Laestrygonians, and Circe
XIThe Land of the Dead
XIIThe Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis
XIIIOdysseus Returns to Ithaca
XIVOdysseus and the Swineherd Eumaeus
XVTelemachus Returns
XVIOdysseus Reveals Himself to Telemachus
XVIIOdysseus Begs in His Own Hall
XVIIIThe Fight with Irus
XIXOdysseus and Penelope
XXPortents Before the Storm
XXIThe Trial of the Bow
XXIIThe Slaying of the Suitors
XXIIIPenelope's Recognition
XXIVPeace Restored
About These Texts