Homer entire
The whole Homeric corpus in one voice — the Iliad and the Odyssey entire, and with them the thirty-three Homeric Hymns, the Battle of Frogs and Mice, and the Epigrams: everything that came down under Homer's name. The Greek stands beside every line, with a glossary of every name and a cross-reference index that follows a figure from Troy to Ithaca and into the hymns.
What makes this different
A few things, taken together, set this edition apart. Click any to expand.
The whole corpus, not the two epics alone.
Almost every Homer in English is the Iliad, or the Odyssey, or the two bound apart by different translators. This gathers what antiquity actually handed down under his name: both epics complete, the thirty-three Homeric Hymns — including the great narrative hymns to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes and Aphrodite — the mock-epic Battle of Frogs and Mice, and the sixteen Epigrams from the old Life of Homer. The Hymns and the rest are the Homerica: later work carried under his name since antiquity, and labelled as such here rather than quietly folded in or quietly dropped.
The formula kept, not smoothed away.
Swift-footed Achilles is swift-footed every time; Dawn is rosy-fingered every time; the arming scenes and the messenger speeches repeat word for word as the Greek repeats them. Homer is a formulaic poet, and the repetition is the machinery of the verse, not a fault for a translator to vary away. Every standing epithet has one English rendering, fixed at first occurrence and held across all fifty thousand lines.
Line for line, from the Greek.
One hexameter, one English line, in order — no rhyme, no compression of verse into prose. Translated by reading the Greek directly: the Monro–Allen Oxford text of the Iliad, Murray's Odyssey, Evelyn-White's Hymns and Epigrams. No prior English version was used as a bridge, and the Greek sits facing the English so any line can be checked against it.
A scholarly apparatus alongside.
Books and hymns keep their standard citation numbers, so Iliad 9 or Hymn 2 is where you expect it. A glossary carries every named figure — Achilles and Hector, Circe and Calypso, the three names of the Greek army — and a cross-reference index follows a person or an image across the corpus: Heracles in the Iliad and in Hymn 15, Hermes in the Odyssey and in the hymn that invents him.
Free to read, and complete.
The full text, the facing Greek, the glossary and the chronology are all here and all free to read. Nothing is held back for a selected edition; the Battle of Frogs and Mice and the shortest of the hymns get the same treatment as the wrath of Achilles.
More about this edition Homer's life as a timeline Source on GitHub