About the Odyssey
The poem
The Odyssey is a Greek epic poem of around the 8th century BC, attributed to Homer — a poet about whom almost nothing is known for certain. It runs to twenty-four books. It was made to be performed aloud rather than read, and the shape of it shows: repeated phrases, set scenes, a story that keeps telling you where it is going. With the Iliad, it is one of the two works Western literature starts from.
The story is simple to state. Troy has fallen, and Odysseus, king of Ithaca, has spent ten years failing to get home — held by a nymph, hunted by the sea god Poseidon, and losing every ship and every man he sailed with. At home his wife Penelope is besieged by suitors eating their way through the estate, and his son Telemachus has grown up without him. The poem picks the story up in its last year and follows it to the door: the long way back, the beggar's disguise, and the reckoning in the hall.
After the Iliad
The Iliad is not the Trojan War from beginning to end. It covers a few weeks of the war's tenth year — Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon, and what that costs — and it stops before the wooden horse and the sack of the city. Troy is still standing on the last page; the poem closes with the funeral of Hector.
The Odyssey opens roughly ten years after Troy finally fell, twenty years after Odysseus left Ithaca. You do not need anything in between, because the Odyssey hands you the missing years itself — out of order, and always in someone's mouth.
Menelaus and Helen, at Sparta in Book IV, remember the horse and describe the scattered, ruinous voyages home. In Book VIII a blind singer performs the fall of Troy at a feast, not knowing that Odysseus is at the table, and the man whose stratagem it was — who rode inside the horse — hides his face and weeps. And in Book XI the dead tell the rest: Agamemnon on being murdered at his own homecoming feast, Achilles on being dead, Ajax refusing to speak at all.
This translation
The translation here is by Samuel Butler, the Victorian novelist behind Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. He came to Homer late in life, publishing a prose Iliad in 1898 and this Odyssey in 1900. Prose, not verse — brisk, plain and unfussy, closer to a novel than to a poem. It moves, and nothing in it needs decoding.
One thing to know before you start: Butler uses the Roman names for the gods and heroes, so Odysseus is Ulysses, Athena is Minerva and Poseidon is Neptune. Our summaries and notes use the Greek names, and both are listed side by side in the characters & places guide.
Butler also held, and argued at book length, that the Odyssey was written by a young Sicilian woman. Scholars have never gone along with it. Hold the theory lightly and enjoy the translation — the two are separate things.
The text and this site
The text of all twenty-four books comes from Project Gutenberg ebook #1727, Butler's translation, which is in the public domain in the United States. The words are his; we have only split them into books and set them for reading on a screen.
What this site adds is its own: the summary at the head of each book, the one-line contents entries, and the notes on characters and places. Those are written here, and they are meant to be read alongside the poem rather than instead of it.
It is free, and it stays out of your way — no ads, no accounts, nothing to sign up for and nothing to dismiss, and no tracking. It is a Shadow Brain project.