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The Iliad in Greek and English
The Homer Reader sets Homer’s Greek beside an English translation, line by line, book by book — built for readers working through the Iliad in the original, not just skimming a summary in English.
Built for reading the Greek
- Every Greek word is clickable: a popup shows its dictionary form, grammatical parse (person, number, tense, mood, case), and full entries from the LSJ and Cunliffe’s Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect.
- Citation uses the traditional vulgate book-and-line numbers (e.g. Il. 1.1) — numbering gaps and lines the manuscript tradition marks as suspect (athetized) are preserved exactly as transmitted, never smoothed over.
- Choose the English column’s translation — A. T. Murray’s Loeb prose, Samuel Butler’s prose, or Alexander Pope’s verse — or compare two side by side.
- A full-text search across the Greek and every translation, and a standalone Greek lexicon for word-frequency and concordance work.
Looking for the Odyssey instead? The Odyssey in Greek and English works the same way.
Questions
What Greek text of the Iliad is used?
T. W. Allen’s editio maior (Oxford, 1931), from a licensed TLG export — see Texts & Licences for the full citation and the note on the four lines Allen omits at 8.548, 550–552 (supplied here from the vulgate and marked athetized).
How are the Greek and English lined up?
A. T. Murray’s translation is aligned to the Greek at fixed points within each book; the traditional vulgate book-and-line numbering (e.g. Il. 1.1) is never renumbered, including its gaps and bracketed, athetized lines.
Can I look up any Greek word?
Yes — click any word in the Greek column for its lemma, grammatical parse, and full LSJ and Cunliffe dictionary entries, or browse the standalone Greek lexicon.