The Odyssey, Books I-XII

Autograph manuscript
(II/3/4)

Butler’s education at Shrewsbury School gave him an excellent grounding in Classical languages and literature, which he pursued at St John’s, graduating with First Class honours in 1859. Thirty years later, rereading the Odyssey in the original Greek, Butler developed doubts about the authorship of the poem and endeavoured to resolve them by translating it (along with the Iliad) into English prose.

This is one of two autograph manuscripts of Butler's translation, dating from the early 1890s, and covers Books I-XII of the Odyssey. (The second, complete manuscript is now in Acireale, Sicily.) You can see the style of Butler’s work in progress, with additions and improvements squeezed between the lines or cut out and pasted over the top. The red crayon lines mark phrases and passages that crop up in the Greek versions of both the Odyssey and the Iliad – which Butler interpreted as evidence that the poems had different authors.

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