Facing Iliad and Odyssey: Homeric Greek, scholarly Latin letters

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
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I wanted to read Homer looking at the Greek, without already knowing every letter-shape, and without a laptop-only three-column page that falls apart on a phone. I could not find that layout, so I built one.

It has the full Iliad and Odyssey, in groups of five lines (the usual printed-Homer habit). Each group is Homeric Greek, a scholarly Latin-letter transcription, and Samuel Butler’s 1898 English. On a computer those are three columns; on a phone the same English sits under the five lines so a wrapped sentence does not drift onto the previous verse.

The homepage is a paste box (up to 500 words, one verse per line) using the same transcription rules. Nothing you paste is sent to a server. There is also a facing-page PDF download.

Transcription is the usual scholarly kind, not modern-Greek phonetics: ē/ō for η/ω, h for rough breathing, ï for diaeresis (so Πηληϊάδεω → Pēlēïadeō), th/ph/ch, and nasal gamma (ἄγγελος → angelos). Details are on the method page.

Greek is from the Internet Sacred Text Archive. English is Butler, public domain. Butler is prose, so it is not verse-for-verse; a long English sentence can still sit beside a short Greek group. I aligned it to Perseus line markers and then split each paragraph across the five-line groups it covers, but it will never look like a Loeb.

Happy to hear corrections on the transcription, especially edge cases (iota subscript, diphthongs, movable nu, and anything I have mangled in the XML).

There is also a Sung page with modern reconstructions of Iliad 1.1–21 and Odyssey 1.1–21 in hexameter, Greek on screen as it plays. These are not ancient recordings.

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This looks potentially very useful. But I notice that the English is sometimes disconcertingly out of whack with the Greek. E.g. in the first Iliad group would it be better to shift “from the day on which” etc. to the end of the section, so as to match the organization of the original? (This despite the lack of punctuation in Butler’s English here.)

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Thanks, that was a real mismatch. In the Greek, “from the day on which” belongs with ἐξ οὗ at 1.6, so I have moved it to the start of the next group. The first five lines now end with Zeus’s will, as they should.

Butler is still prose, so the English will not line up as neatly as a Loeb. Where a sentence clearly belongs with a later line, I will keep shifting it.