Reading Homer · In English

Choosing a Translation

Every generation retranslates Homer, and the differences are not cosmetic: Chapman's thunder, Pope's couplets, Butler's plain prose, and Wilson's swift pentameter are four different poets wearing one name. Two facts organize the choice. The older translations are in the public domain — free for anyone to read, and the versions this site quotes. The modern ones are in copyright, so they are named and described below, and quoted only in passing.

A free reading path: start with Samuel Butler's prose (Iliad 1898, Odyssey 1900) — plain, novelistic, and the easiest way into the poems; then, if the poetry pulls you, go on to Chapman or Pope, whose characters the table below sketches. All are on Project Gutenberg, along with William Cowper's versions and the Victorian prose of Butcher & Lang and Lang, Leaf & Myers — see resources for the links.

TranslatorWork · YearFormCharacterStatus
George Chapman Iliad & Odyssey 1598–1616 rhymed fourteeners / pentameter couplets Grand, Elizabethan — the Homer that stunned Keats Public domain
Alexander Pope Iliad 1715–20 · Odyssey 1725–26 heroic couplets A magnificent Augustan poem in its own right, less a literal translation Public domain
Butcher & Lang Odyssey 1879 archaizing prose Deliberately biblical cadences; the Victorians' Odyssey Public domain
Lang, Leaf & Myers Iliad 1883 archaizing prose The Iliad counterpart to Butcher & Lang Public domain
Samuel Butler Iliad 1898 · Odyssey 1900 plain prose Novelistic, accessible — the easiest way in; Butler argued, idiosyncratically, that the Odyssey was written by a woman Public domain
Richmond Lattimore Iliad 1951 · Odyssey 1965 line-for-line verse Closely faithful to Greek word-order and formulae; the scholar's standard In copyright
Robert Fitzgerald Odyssey 1961 · Iliad 1974 verse Lyrical and elegant; long the literary standard In copyright
Robert Fagles Iliad 1990 · Odyssey 1996 dynamic free verse Dramatic and popular, with introductions by Bernard Knox In copyright
Stanley Lombardo Iliad 1997 · Odyssey 2000 colloquial verse Muscular and performance-oriented In copyright
Barry B. Powell Iliad 2013 · Odyssey 2014 verse The Oxford translations, by a scholar of the alphabet's origins In copyright
Peter Green Iliad 2015 · Odyssey 2018 verse Aims to be both accurate and speakable, with full apparatus In copyright
Caroline Alexander Iliad 2015 verse The first published Iliad by a woman; clear, restrained, faithful In copyright
Emily Wilson Odyssey 2017 · Iliad 2023 iambic pentameter Plain, swift, exactly line-for-line; the first woman to publish English translations of both poems In copyright
Daniel Mendelsohn Odyssey (recent) six-beat verse line A critic-classicist's version in a long line echoing the hexameter In copyright

Public-domain translations are quoted freely on this site, with citation. In-copyright translations are named, described, and quoted only under fifteen words, with citation — buy or borrow them to read further.

Which one, then?

For fidelity to the Greek, scholars still reach for Lattimore; for literary sweep, Fitzgerald; for drama read aloud, Fagles or Lombardo. Emily Wilson — the first woman to publish English translations of both poems — renders them line-for-line in plain, fast iambic pentameter, with a conscious eye to gender and to the poem's treatment of enslaved people; Caroline Alexander's Iliad (2015), the first published by a woman, is clear and restrained. Peter Green and Barry B. Powell aim at accuracy that can still be spoken; Daniel Mendelsohn's recent Odyssey stretches a six-beat line toward the hexameter's breath. There is no best Homer — there is a best Homer for the evening you are having.