Homer's Odyssey has been translated a thousand times — but never once given a true interlinear, where you read every Greek word in Homer's own order and see exactly what it means. We're making it, book by book — Books 1–6 are complete and free to read, with more on the way, and you can help press the rest into being.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear The Odyssey — and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like — a few dollars helps, or fund the whole of Book 7 and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
The oldest adventure story in the West, and still the best — a soldier trying to get home from a war, with everything in sea and heaven standing in his way.
Ten years since Troy fell, and Odysseus still has not come home to Ithaca. His son has grown up fatherless among boorish suitors eating the household bare; his wife holds them off with a trick of weaving. On Olympus, grey-eyed Athena at last moves to bring him back. Book One is the machinery of the whole poem clicking into motion.
This is where the great epithets live in their original music — the wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered Dawn, Athena of the flashing eyes. Read it in Homer’s Greek and you hear the hexameter that singers performed from memory for centuries before anyone wrote it down, each formula a handhold in a vast oral song.
You learn how storytelling itself was invented — how a hero is made by his hunger for home. And with the Greek open beside you, you stop reading about Homer and start reading Homer.
Making an interlinear The Odyssey is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book 7 gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy — you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true The Odyssey that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the The Odyssey opens — no other mail, ever.
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