Samuel Butler's Iliad

About This Translation

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was an English novelist and restless, contrarian critic, best known for the satirical Erewhon and the posthumous The Way of All Flesh. His prose Iliad appeared in 1898, two years before his companion Odyssey. He set out to render Homer into plain, readable English prose aimed squarely at ordinary readers rather than scholars — the story told straight through, without the friction of verse.

The Age That Made It

Butler's Iliad arrived at the close of the nineteenth century, as literary taste was turning away from ornate, "poetic" diction toward clearer, more natural English. Where the Lang, Leaf & Myers prose reached deliberately for a biblical grandeur, Butler went the opposite way: his stated aim was accessibility, an Iliad for anyone who "cannot read the original." He wanted Homer to sound less like scripture and more like a good, brisk piece of English narrative.

What's Distinctive, and What's Contested

Butler's version is among the most readable of the older translations — direct, quick, and free of archaic ornament, which is exactly why it has stayed popular online for more than a century. The trade-off is the one built into any prose Iliad: in gaining clarity and speed, it lets go of the meter, the pounding music, and the formulaic texture of Homer's verse. Whether that's the right exchange depends on whether you come to the poem chiefly for the story or for the sound.

How This Version Reads

Expect clear, plain, novel-like prose that moves quickly and never trips you — the most accessible of the public-domain options. It is an excellent first encounter for readers who want the events and the emotion without older verse in the way, with the understanding that the poetic dimension of the original is necessarily muted.