Homer Audiobooks

Nobody can say with certainty who Homer was, and that uncertainty is part of the fascination. Tradition places him in the eighth century BC, an Ionian poet from the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, blind and travelling, reciting to audiences who already knew the stories. Modern scholarship treats those accounts as legend, and many researchers now read the Iliad and the Odyssey as the work of more than one hand, shaped across generations of oral performance before anyone wrote them down.

What is not in doubt is the influence. The two epics gave ancient Greece a shared vocabulary of heroism, glory and honour, and Plato could state flatly that Homer had educated Greece. Dante had Virgil call him the sovereign poet. Alexander Pope, introducing his own translation of the Iliad, simply granted him the title of greatest.

The language is itself a composite, a literary Greek blending Ionic and Aeolic features that nobody ever spoke at home. It was built for the voice, for rhythm and repetition and the long unspooling line, which is exactly why these poems belong in your ears rather than on your lap.

The two Homeric epics reach us in very different recordings. The Odyssey uses Robert Fagles’ celebrated 1996 translation and is read unabridged by Ian McKellen across a little over thirteen hours. It is one of the great marriages of voice and text: McKellen gives Odysseus a cunning warmth, and the sorceresses, the monsters and the long-delayed homecoming all land with stage-trained precision.

The Iliad is the harder, colder poem, and by a wide margin the one our listeners have reviewed most. It turns on a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in the final year of the siege of Troy, and its power lies in how small that quarrel is set against what it ends up costing.

Choose The Odyssey for story and wonder, The Iliad for fury and grief. Both are waiting below, with ratings and listener notes.