The Library · Open Doors

Resources

Almost everything this site describes can be read, searched, or leafed through for free — the open scholarly infrastructure around Homer is among the best for any ancient author. The doors below are ordered from "read the poems tonight" to "argue with the manuscripts."

Read the poems

• Project Gutenberg — the full public-domain translations: Butler's prose Iliad and Odyssey (the recommended first read), Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Butcher & Lang, and Lang, Leaf & Myers. Free to read, download, and quote.
• Perseus Digital Library (Tufts, directed by Gregory Crane) — the Greek texts with the Murray (Loeb) translations, word-by-word morphological tools, and the newer Scaife Viewer reading environment. The place to see what a line actually says.
• Open Greek & Latin / Scaife Viewer — open, structured editions of the public-domain Greek texts.

Study the tradition

• The Chicago Homer — a multilingual database of all early Greek epic with tools for tracking the formulaic diction that carries the oral tradition (why that matters).
• Homer Multitext Project (Casey Dué & Mary Ebbott, Center for Hellenic Studies) — high-resolution photographs and diplomatic editions of the Venetus A and other manuscripts, with their scholia: the transmission chain, browsable.
• Wikimedia Commons — public-domain imagery: Venetus A folios, Greek vases, museum photography.

See the objects

The physical evidence is scattered across a handful of rooms: the National Archaeological Museum in Athens holds the Dipylon oinochoe and the Mycenaean gold; the Museo Archeologico di Pithecusae on Ischia holds Nestor's Cup; the British Museum holds Troy material; the Marciana Library in Venice holds the Venetus A; Troy finds are in Berlin and Istanbul.

Go deeper on paper

The standard large commentaries are the six-volume Cambridge Iliad commentary (general editor G. S. Kirk, 1985–93), the three-volume Oxford Odyssey commentary (1988–92), and the ongoing Basel commentary on the Iliad (de Gruyter, 2015–). For one book: The Cambridge Companion to Homer (ed. Robert Fowler, 2004). The current critical texts of the Greek are Martin L. West's Teubner editions. And for the poems themselves in modern English, the translations page maps the field.

A note on copyright

This site quotes only public-domain translations at length; translations still in copyright (Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Lombardo, Wilson, Green, Alexander, Powell, Mendelsohn) are described and linked toward bookshops, never reproduced. If you build on Homer yourself, the same line is the safe one to walk.