The Odyssey
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 bears on it where one does, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
Butler's Odyssey 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 odyssey-eng4.
Listen free
Peter Dann's solo reading of Butler's prose for LibriVox (their version 4, 2024): twenty-five tracks, Butler's prefaces and then one a book, about eleven hours. It is the same translation as this page, so you can read and listen together, and the same voice that reads the Society's Iliad. It plays here, keeps your place in every book, and works from the lock screen on an iPhone or Android phone.
Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; in the public domain. Peter Dann reads Butler's 1900 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 8 to 20 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 Odyssey read by Mark Nelson on Audible (unabridged)For the car the Society's nomination is Butler's own prose, unabridged, read by Mark Nelson (about twelve hours): the same words as this page, with the Latin names. Members who want verse have Robert Fitzgerald's read by Dan Stevens and Emily Wilson's read by Claire Danes, both on Audible. 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 CiRCE Institute's podcast on Homer, in which Wes Callihan and Andrew Kern talk about the poet and whatever he makes them think about. Its second season walks the Iliad; the episodes here are the first-season conversations that bear on the Odyssey, on sirens and muses, on homecoming, on hospitality and on memory. Hear one before the meeting it goes with, or let it run while you drive. The show is free wherever podcasts are.
Open the podcast →- 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 and what each costs you; why Butler's prose is a fair first door and what verse keeps that prose lets go. - S1E6 How to tell the difference between the siren and the muse (1:30:52, with Book XII)
The Sirens promise knowledge and give bones; the long conversation on what a true muse asks of a listener is the Society's best companion to the Sirens' song. - S1E7 On Internal Harmonies and Homeric Homecomings (54:31, with Books XIII to XXIV)
Nostos, the homecoming the whole poem is named for: what it means to come home as a different man to a house that has gone on without you. - S1E9 On Hospitality, Travel, and Tradition (49:15, with Books I to IX)
Xenia, the law of the guest, is the poem's moral spine: every house Telemakhos and Odysseus enter is a test of it, and the Cyclops and the suitors fail it from opposite ends. - S1E10 Why Memory Matters (53:57, with Books VIII and XI)
Odysseus weeps when the bard sings his own story, and the dead remember; the episode on memory as the ground of a culture goes with both scenes.
The Odyssey is the other Homer: not fifty days of anger on a plain but ten years of trying to get home, told out of order, half of it by the hero himself at a stranger's table. It begins with a boy who does not know whether his father is alive, follows that father from a goddess's island through the Cyclops, Circe, the dead, the Sirens and the sea, and lands him on his own shore disguised as a beggar in his own house, where a hundred young men are eating his substance and courting his wife. The last third of the poem is the slowest and the best: a man watching his household, deciding who is loyal, and waiting for a bow.
This is the whole poem in Samuel Butler's prose of 1900, the Society's featured translation, as it is for the Iliad: plain, quick English that a first reader can keep going in and a tenth reader still hears the poem through. Butler loved this book above the other and argued, half seriously, that a woman wrote it; the argument is in his Authoress of the Odyssey, and you need not believe it to notice how much of the poem is women: Athena, Penelope, Calypso, Circe, Nausikaa, Arete, Helen, Eurykleia. The text is the Perseus Digital Library's revision by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy, which restores the Greek names (Odysseus, Zeus, Telemakhos) and keeps a few Greek words English blurs: nostos, the homecoming; kleos; dêmos; xenia is Butler's hospitality throughout. Each is glossed where it stands.
A Perpetual Feast, the Society's key resource for the Iliad, is mostly about that poem; but four of Wes Callihan and Andrew Kern's first-season conversations bear squarely on this one, on the siren and the muse, on homecomings, on hospitality and on memory, and they are on the shelf below with the books they go with. 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 (A. C. Fifield, 1900), in the revision made for the Perseus Digital Library by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy, which restores Greek forms of the names (Odysseus for Ulysses, Zeus for Jove, Telemakhos, Athena) 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 (odyssey-eng4:1.1), 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.