About Iliad · Odyssey

Iliad · Odyssey is a small, independent reading room for Homeric Greek. It exists so a student, teacher, or curious reader can see a verse in the original, hear it in Latin letters, and check a continuous English rendering without flipping between three books.

The project is published by Valentin Dodonov. The transliteration engine, the five-line stanza layout, the facing PDF, and the editorial notes on this site are original work. The Greek text of the Iliad and the Odyssey is ancient and in the public domain. The English column uses Samuel Butler’s 1898 prose, which is likewise in the public domain.

What you can do here

• Transliterate a passage you paste yourself (up to 500 words) and download a PDF.
• Read the full Iliad and Odyssey, twenty-four books each, in five-line groups.
• Compare Homeric spelling with a consistent scholarly Latin transcription. The rules are explained on the method page.

Sources

The Greek follows the Internet Sacred Text Archive’s Homeric pages, which reproduce a standard printed text with green line numbers stripped for reading. Odyssey 11, which that archive cuts short, is completed from the Perseus canonical Greek text. Butler’s English is aligned from the Perseus “card” edition so that each five-line Greek group sits beside a complete sentence, not a fragment torn from the middle of a phrase.

This is a reading aid, not a critical edition. Line counts can differ slightly from an Oxford Classical Text. Spelling, punctuation, and Butler’s Victorian diction are kept close to the sources rather than modernised.

How the site is funded

There are no advertisements. Hosting is paid for by Valentin Dodonov and by readers who choose to give a small donation.

Contact

Questions about the text, the transliteration, or privacy are welcome at the contact page or capital93@gmail.com.