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← The Kansas City Classical Society John Flaxman's outline engraving for the Iliad, 1793
John Flaxman — Ilias, 1793

The Iliad

Homer, c. 750 BC, in Samuel Butler's prose — the Society's companion and reading edition

The member's edition. The leader's edition adds notes for whoever opens the discussion: what the poem is doing in each book, where Butler's plain prose helps and where it hides something, the episode of <em>A Perpetual Feast</em> that goes with the book, and a question to start a fight.

Read it

Butler's Iliad is in the public domain. The whole poem is on this page, book by book, with every harder word glossed where it stands; the same text sits in the Society's library, the Armarium, under iliad-butler.

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Listen free

Peter Dann's solo reading of Butler's prose for LibriVox (their version 2, 2024): twenty-four tracks, one a book, fourteen hours. It is the same translation as this page, so you can read and listen together. It plays here, keeps your place in every book, and works from the lock screen on an iPhone or Android phone.

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Read this part on this page →

    Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; in the public domain. Peter Dann reads Butler's 1898 text with the Latin names (Jove, Minerva, Ulysses); this page prints the Perseus revision with the Greek names, so the words differ there and nowhere else. Each book is a 64 kbps MP3 of 11 to 24 MB: on a phone plan, start it on Wi-Fi.

    Kindle + Audible

    Whispersync links a Kindle book to its Audible narration: own both, and your phone keeps one place between them, so you can read at home and pick up by ear in the car where you stopped.

    Butler's Iliad read by Roger Rees on Audible (abridged)

    For the car the Society's nomination is Butler's own prose read by Roger Rees (NewStar, 1998; about six hours, and abridged: Audible's only Butler with a human reader). For the whole poem by ear, the unabridged recordings are of other translations: Robert Fitzgerald's verse read by Dan Stevens (on Audible, about fourteen hours) is the one members who want verse should take, and Peter Dann's free LibriVox reading above is complete and is Butler. Butler's text is pennies on Kindle in several editions; whether a Kindle copy pairs with a narration is Amazon's to say: on the Kindle book's page, look for Add Audible narration.

    Hear it discussed

    A Perpetual Feast, Wes Callihan and Andrew Kern. The Society's key resource for the Iliad: twenty conversations (2015–2018) from the CiRCE Institute in which Wes Callihan, who taught the epics at Schola Classical Tutorials for thirty years, and Andrew Kern talk about Homer and whatever Homer makes them think about. The first season circles the poem (translations, the books about it, hospitality, memory, suffering, what pagan poetry is to a Christian); the second walks the Iliad itself, its structure, its heroes, Achilles' anger, Agamemnon's failure, the last books. Hear an episode before the meeting it goes with, or let it run while you drive. The show is free wherever podcasts are; the leader's notes below cite it by season and episode.

    Open the podcast →
    1. S1E1 Talking Homer with Wes Callihan and Andrew Kern (19:37, with before you begin)
      Why the show has the name it has, and why two grown men would talk about one poet for years: the case for reading the Iliad at all.
    2. S1E2 Favorite Translations, Reading Homer for the First Time, and Homer's Poetic Dialect (1:07:12, with before you begin)
      Which translation to hold in your hand and what each one costs you; what a first reading should and should not try to do.
    3. S1E3 Books About Homer, Poetic Diction, and More (1:10:32, with the shelf)
      The books about Homer worth owning, and how the poem's stock phrases and epithets work on the ear.
    4. S1E4 On Pagan Lit and Christianity (45:01, with Book I)
      The old question for a Christian society reading a pagan poem: what is Troy to Jerusalem? The hosts answer with Basil and Augustine rather than with suspicion.
    5. S1E5 On Hebrews, Greek, and Homer's Relationship to Scripture (1:08:11, with Book I)
      The Greek of the New Testament and the Greek of Homer; why a reader of Hebrews is already half a reader of the Iliad.
    6. S1E6 How to tell the difference between the siren and the muse (1:30:52, with Book II)
      Homer's invocation of the Muses before the Catalogue of Ships, and the difference between a voice that feeds you and a voice that eats you.
    7. S1E7 On Internal Harmonies and Homeric Homecomings (54:31, with Book VI)
      Hektor's homecoming to Andromache, the harmony of a soul and a house, and what the poem knows about the inner life.
    8. S1E8 How Great Poets Come to Be (1:23:34, with Book IX)
      Achilles singing the kleos of heroes in his tent is the poem's picture of the poet; the hosts ask what makes one.
    9. S1E9 On Hospitality, Travel, and Tradition (49:15, with Book VI)
      Wes Callihan's own journey to the plain of Troy; Glaukos and Diomedes trading armor because their grandfathers were guest-friends.
    10. S1E10 Why Memory Matters (53:57, with the memory deck)
      Why the Society keeps lines by heart: the poem was sung from memory for centuries before it was written, and the hosts argue that memory is contemplation, not drill.
    11. S1E11 On Suffering and Violence in Homer (50:10, with Books XI–XVII)
      The battle books, where every death has a name and a father: what the violence is for, and how the great books help a reader carry suffering.
    12. S1E12 The importance of the setting in the Iliad, Christ's fulfillment of the Greek ideals, and much more (36:44, with Book XXIV)
      Troy, the ships and the plain as the poem's stage, and the hosts' boldest claim: that the Greek ideals Achilles and Hektor fail to reach are met in Christ.
    13. S2E1 Introducing Season 2 (32:48, with before you begin)
      The second season's plan: to walk the Iliad in order, and what the first season settled.
    14. S2E2 On the Art of Translation (and more) (33:35, with a note on the text)
      What a translator owes the poem and what he owes the reader; worth hearing beside Butler's own preface, which chose the reader.
    15. S2E3 What is Hero in Homer? (29:47, with Books V–VIII)
      Diomedes, Hektor and Ajax each stake a claim to the word; the hosts try to define it from Homer's models and not from ours.
    16. S2E4 The Structure of the Iliad (36:12, with Book IX)
      Whether the poem really falls into three parts (the quarrel, the day of Hektor, the return of Achilles), and what the embassy of Book IX does to that shape.
    17. S2E5 The Evolution of Achilles' Anger (42:39, with Book XVI)
      How Achilles' anger changes from Book I to Book XVI, where he sends Patroklos out in his armor and prays a prayer Zeus only half grants.
    18. S2E6 The Results of Agamemnon's Inadequacy (41:25, with Book XIX)
      Agamemnon's leadership, or the want of it, from the quarrel to his speech blaming Delusion: what a bad king costs the people under him.
    19. S2E7 The Iliad's Final Section (35:29, with Books XXII–XXIV)
      The tragedy of the ancient worldview, how much credit Hektor deserves, and Zeus's meddling, through the death of Hektor and the ransom of his body.
    20. S2E8 The Ongoing Feast of the Iliad (34:01, with after you finish)
      Homer's handling of time, the arc of the whole, and why the poem is a feast that is never eaten up: the right last word.

    The Iliad is the oldest book in the Society's library and the one the rest keep answering. It is not the story of the Trojan War but of fifty-odd days in its tenth year, and of one man's anger: Achilles is dishonored by his king, withdraws, and lets his own side be slaughtered until his dearest friend is killed in his armor; then he returns, kills Hektor, and is brought back to himself by the father of the man he killed. Everything is in it: the gods meddling and weeping, the catalogue of ships, Hektor's farewell to his wife, the forging of the shield, the funeral games, and the last book, in which an old man kisses the hands that killed his son.

    This is the whole poem, in Samuel Butler's prose of 1898, and the Society's companion to it in one page. Butler, the novelist of The Way of All Flesh, wanted Homer read as a story and not construed as a lesson; his plain, quick English is the Society's featured translation because a first reader can keep going in it and a tenth reader still hears the poem through it. The text here is the Perseus Digital Library's revision by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy, which puts back the Greek names (Hektor, Achaeans, Zeus) and keeps a handful of Greek words a translation cannot carry: kleos, daimôn, dêmos, timê. Each is glossed where it stands.

    The key resource beside the text is A Perpetual Feast, the podcast in which Wes Callihan and Andrew Kern talk about Homer and nothing but Homer: twenty conversations from 2015 to 2018, the second season a walk through the Iliad itself. Its shelf is below, with the episode that goes with each stretch of the poem; the leader's notes point to it book by book. Before each book is a short note on what happens; after it, the turn of the book in plain words, who is in it, the lines worth keeping, the harder words glossed, the Great Ideas it touches, the Scripture it leans on or stands against, books in the Armarium to read beside it, questions for the meeting, and (in the leader's edition) notes for whoever opens the discussion. At the foot of the page are the indexes for the whole poem, the Potent Quotables and the memory deck.

    A note on the text

    The text is Samuel Butler's prose translation (Longmans, Green, 1898), in the revision made for the Perseus Digital Library by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy, which restores Greek forms of the names (Zeus for Jove, Hektor, Achaeans, Patroklos) and keeps a few Greek terms where English blurs them; those are glossed. The Armarium's units are Perseus's cards, each named for the first Greek line it covers (iliad-butler:1.1), and this page recuts them at sentence ends so that no card breaks mid-sentence. Nothing is cut. A link from the Society's page lands on the same card in the library.

    Persons

    Everyone in the book, alphabetically by surname, with the parts they are in.

    The Great Ideas

    Each of Adler's Great Ideas the book touches, with the parts where it does. Ideas marked in gold are from the Society's own Syntopicon Addendum and link to it.

    Scripture

    Every quotation and clear allusion, in canonical order, with the King James text.

    Glossary

    Every harder word, A to Z, glossed in the sense it has here. Each links to the place it is used. Rarity is measured by how seldom the word turns up in English at large; the commonest words are never glossed.

    Lines Worth Keeping

    Every line the Society marked, in order.

    Potent Quotables

    The book's most-quoted lines, as first-letter study cards: read the first letters and say the line, then check it against the full text.

    The Armarium Shelf

    Books in the Society's library that the companion sends you to, and which parts send you there.

    Memory Work

    The Potent Quotables, and every line worth keeping ( of them), as decks for the Mnemonicon.

    Download the Potent Quotables or the whole deck, then in the Mnemonicon choose Import and pick the file. Importing both adds nothing twice.

    To study the glossary's words with spaced repetition, open the Vocabularium.

    ↑ Contents
    The Iliad