The Odyssey
Ὀδύσσεια
EditionTranslated from the original Greek
Ten years after Troy, one man is still trying to get home, while strangers eat his house bare and court his wife.
Also in the library: the complete Korean translation.
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About the book
Troy has fallen and the other Greek captains are home or dead. Only Odysseus is missing, held for years on a remote island by the nymph Calypso, while more than a hundred young lords from Ithaca and the islands nearby move into his house, eat his herds, and press his wife Penelope to marry one of them. His son Telemachus sets out to learn whether his father is alive; Odysseus, released at last, is shipwrecked, tells the tale of his wanderings to a sea-going people, and comes home in disguise as a beggar.
This complete English translation is made directly from the Greek text printed by A. T. Murray (1919). It is set in prose, keeps every one of the source’s 1,186 paragraphs with its first line number, and keeps Homer’s fixed epithets and repeated lines the same each time they return. There are nineteen short notes.
Highlights
- Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who wandered far and long after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.
- No other Odysseus will ever come here; it is I, such as you see me, who have suffered evils and wandered far and come in the twentieth year to my native land.
- But the fate of black death took Argos as soon as he had seen Odysseus, in the twentieth year.
Contents
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Colophon
Translated from the original Greek. Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.Full colophon
The Odyssey
Original title · Ὀδύσσεια
Author · Homer
Translator · Ether Library
Composition · Greek hexameter epic, probably of the eighth or seventh century BC.
Source text · A public-domain digital transcription of the Greek text in A. T. Murray, Homer: The Odyssey, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1919). Translated directly from the Greek.
Extent · Complete and unabridged · twenty-four books · 12,107 lines · 1,186 paragraphs, as in the source, each marked with its first line number · nineteen short translator’s notes
Copyright · The original work and the 1919 edition are in the public domain.
This translation · Translated from the Greek by Ether Library. The English text is © Ether Library and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0): you may copy and share it for noncommercial purposes, with attribution.
Edition · English edition 1.0 · October 2026
Typography · Set in Lora (SIL Open Font License 1.1). Cover painting and design by Ether Library.
Original in the public domain · English translation CC BY-NC 4.0
Ether Library · No. 0014