The Chicago Homer

Book excerpt: Richimond Lattimore's elegant and exceptionally faithful line-by-line translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey introduced these classics to a new audience of English readers. Now The Chicago Homer presents an easily searchable, web-accessible database of Homer in the original and in Lattimore's translations. The Greek texts of the Homeric Hymns and the poems of Hesiod are also included, along with English translations by Daryl Hine, providing students and scholars with unparalleled access to the whole of Early Greek epic. In addition to providing Greek and English texts in an interlinear display, The Chicago Homer gives complete information (tense, mood, voice, case, gender, and number) on the morphology of each Greek word. Invaluable for students learning Greek, this information is also important to researchers investigating the frequency or distribution of grammatical phenomena; only The Chicago Homer provides these data in readily searchable electronic form. But the most distinctive feature of The Chicago Homer is its ability to analyze and display the wealth of repeated phrases -- such as" rosy-fingered dawn" and "swift-footed Achilles" -- that are considered to be the hallmark of Homeric poetry. For the first time in any medium, The Chicago Homer presents a complete index of all repeated phrases in Early Greek epic. These phrases may be sorted by a number of criteria, including length, frequency, who spoke them, and the words they contain. Most impor