Read The Odyssey in Daily Email Installments
Ten years after Troy fell, its cleverest survivor is still not home. Homer's epic of shipwreck and monsters, patience and disguise, and the longest homecoming in literature — the poem the whole Western storytelling tradition descends from, one short installment a day.
One installment a day: 201 days — about six and a half months. Pause, rewind, or stop anytime.
Start reading — freeWhy read The Odyssey?
The Odyssey is the original adventure serial: a hero introduced by reputation before he ever appears, a story told out of order through flashback, a household under siege waiting at home, and an audience kept hungry across twenty-four books. It was composed for episodic performance — a singer, a fire, one stretch of the story a night — which makes daily email closer to its native format than any printed edition.
Everything is here already: the Cyclops and the Sirens, Circe and Calypso, the descent to the dead, the bow only one man can string. But the poem's real subject is a marriage — the twenty-year patience of Penelope, who runs her own campaign of delay at home, and a reunion scene that four thousand years of literature has never bettered.
We serialize Samuel Butler's classic prose translation — plain, fast, and novelistic, the version that reads least like homework. Butler uses the Roman names (Ulysses, Minerva, Jove); each installment breaks inside a single book of the poem, with a “Previously” recap so the thread never drops.
What an installment looks like
Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, oh daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.
So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Ulysses, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country, was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got him into a large cave and wanted to marry him. But as years went by, there came a time when the gods settled that he should go back to Ithaca; even then, however, when he was among his own people, his troubles were not yet over; nevertheless all the gods had now begun to pity him except Neptune, who still persecuted him without ceasing and would not let him get home.
Questions
How long does it take to read The Odyssey?
About eight and a half hours straight through (117,409 words). By email, it's 201 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — finished in about six and a half months.
Is this the version the Christopher Nolan film is based on?
The film draws on the same poem — there is only one Odyssey. We serialize Samuel Butler's public-domain prose translation. If the movie made you want to finally read the real thing, this is the lowest-effort way to actually do it.
Why does it say Ulysses instead of Odysseus?
Butler, like most Victorian translators, uses the Roman forms of the names: Ulysses for Odysseus, Minerva for Athena, Jove for Zeus, Neptune for Poseidon. The story is identical; you'll stop noticing within a week.
Is a 2,700-year-old poem hard to read?
Not in this form. Butler translated it as plain prose on the theory that it's a page-turner, and he was right — his Odyssey reads like an adventure novel. There's no verse to scan and no apparatus to consult.
Do I need to read the Iliad first?
No. The Odyssey recaps what it needs from the Trojan War as it goes — it was composed for audiences hearing it fresh. If you love it, the Iliad makes a natural next serial.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Pick your delivery hour, confirm your email, and installment 1 of 201 arrives with the next send. Free, and unsubscribe anytime.
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