Quick Instructions
To see the English translation of any Greek word, just let your mouse pointer hover over it. To see an English translation of the entire text, click on "In English" and a new window will open. If you resize both Explorer windows, they will fit side by side on a widescreen monitor. (But don't use the English text more than you have to!)

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This site was designed to be a learning environment for students as well as a reading room for scholars. The large print Greek is easy on the eyes. The Internet has returned us to the scrolling method of reading texts, which lends itself particularly well to the project at hand.

The most valuable component of this website is the English translation which appears as a "tool tip" whenever you rest the cursor on a word of Greek. Each word translation has been individually formulated in context, without any mechanical repetition, and every effort has been made to suggest the broadest possible spectrum of meaning. This is not a crutch or a crib but rather an attempt to delve more deeply into the language.

Anyone wishing to teach themselves Greek should consider purchasing a copy of Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek. It is not difficult to learn the language of the Iliad using this website in conjunction with Pharr's textbook. As you gain confidence, pick up Autenrieth's A Homeric Dictionary and the two-volume Iliad in the Loeb Classical Library. The other option is to begin with John's Gospel, which has the advantage of being familiar in translation. Then add Smyth's Greek Grammar and the abridged version of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon. (Liddell's daughter was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland.) Eventually, you will want to invest in the unabridged Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ, ninth edition). All these works are readily available from online booksellers.

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The editions of these texts are my own. I am sure to have made editorial decisions that are misguided or incorrect, and for that I ask patient indulgence and would appreciate feedback in the form of e-mails.

As for the text of the Iliad, I have tried to carry it forward into the new millennium by taking it backward in time. The digamma (Ϝ = English w) has been restored wherever the meter indicates that a digamma originally intervened. On rare occasions, an initial sigma (σ) has been restored as well. If the digammas make the poem look archaic and strange, that is not necessarily a bad thing: the Iliad should never seem too comfortable or familiar. But there is a limit to acceptable strangeness, which is why I have not restored the digamma to Ilium itself, which is properly Fῑλιος (pronounced "Wheelius").

Regardless of the historicity of a "Peisistratean Recension" of the text of the Iliad, it is reasonable to assume that the epic was transcribed for the purpose of officially sanctioned recitations by Homeric rhapsodes at the Panathenaea Festival. The digammas would have been eliminated at that time, if they had not already disappeared from the rhapsodic tradition of Western Greece. (How those Athenian transcriptions affected the balance of Ionic to Aeolic forms is another question.) As we are well aware from the publication history of Shakespeare's plays, such a process does not result in a single, authoritative version. The Alexandrian librarians who edited the Iliad (Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus) had variants to deal with when establishing the text as we know it today.

Modern emendations and modern punctuation have been avoided wherever possible, especially in the case of commas, which are usually an unwelcome intrusion upon the exquisite system of particles that give both clarity and effervescence to the epic hexameters. (If you need convincing, go through the Oxford text of the Iliad and count how many times the second word following a comma is the particle δε.)

The laborious conventional system of accentuation has here been pared down to a minimum, being retained only where it is necessary to differentiate long vowels from short (indispensable for reading the poetry), to disambiguate words whose meanings change according to accentuation (such as τις/τίς) and to indicate words that take an accent unpredictably (not following the simple rule that the word accent falls on the third-to-last syllable, unless the last syllable is long, in which case it falls on the next-to-last syllable).

If the classics are to be read intelligently by a wide audience, we must streamline the teaching of ancient Greek. The alternative is to follow the example of the monkey trapped with its hand in a pot because it refuses to let go of anything.

This is a time of crisis for the Humanities. In colleges and universities across the country, Classics departments are being dismantled or simply left to die of attrition as professors retire without being replaced. We are once again entering upon a Dark Age when classical learning is regarded as irrelevant to the poorly understood needs of an increasingly violent and irrational world. Like the Irish monks of the 8th and 9th centuries, we must go quietly about the task of preserving the keystones of classical civilization before they are forever lost amid the chaos.

We are fortunate to have the Internet, which can serve as a 21st-century scriptorium, open around the clock to visitors from across the globe. But the Internet, too, is vulnerable, depending as it does upon electricity (fossil fuels) and the uncensored flow of cyberinformation across political boundaries, which is why printed texts are still crucially important. Feel free to print out these pages for reference and distribution. Copy and paste the Greek text into Microsoft Word and reset the font size to 14 for best results.

My PhD is from Boston University (1994, dissertation Parallelism in the Iliad) and my approach to textual matters was formed there by Stephen Scully and Donald Carne-Ross -- two authentic men of letters who taught me to respect the words in and of themselves, "pressing each one like a plump grape," as Professor Carne-Ross put it so memorably on one occasion.