The Odyssey Companion

Sources & Citation Policy

Last updated July 4, 2026

A guide is only as good as what it stands on. This page explains how The Odyssey Companion handles quotation, citation, and fact — and lists the sources behind every page on the site.

How we quote the poem

Every quotation from the Odyssey on this site comes from Samuel Butler's 1900 prose translation. Butler died in 1902; his work is safely in the public domain in the US, UK, and EU. We cite by Book number — "Odyssey, Book 9 (Butler translation)" — so that anything we say about the poem can be checked against the text in minutes.

Where precision matters, we verify book and line references against the Greek text in the Perseus Digital Library. But the words you read here are Butler's, and only Butler's.

Modern translations: described, never quoted

The major modern English translations — Emily Wilson (2017), Robert Fagles (1996), Robert Fitzgerald (1961), and Richmond Lattimore (1965) — are copyrighted works. We compare and recommend them in our translation guide, and we may cite a single famous rendering as a matter of record — Wilson's "complicated" for polytropos, with attribution — but we never reproduce their lines. If the poem is quoted on this site, it is Butler's prose.

Film facts: announced, not speculated

We state only what has been officially announced about the 2026 film: it opens in theaters July 17, 2026; it is directed by Christopher Nolan; it was shot with IMAX film cameras; and the principal cast, as reported in official and press materials. We do not present speculation about the film's plot as fact, we do not use posters, stills, or promotional assets, and we do not borrow campaign language. Everything else on this site is about Homer.

Scholarship: named on the page

When an interpretation rests on a scholar's work, we name that scholar inline, on the page where the idea appears — not in a bibliography nobody reads. Where we paraphrase, we say so. We do not invent references, and we do not present our own readings as scholarly consensus; interpretive passages are marked internally and edited by a human before publication.

The source list

Primary texts

  • Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler (1900). Public domain. Our base text for all quotations, available through Project Gutenberg — whose branding we remove from commercial assets, as their license requires.
  • Perseus Digital Library — Homer, Odyssey. Greek text with A. T. Murray's translation. Used to verify book and line references; not quoted.

Translations referenced, never quoted

  • Emily Wilson, The Odyssey (W. W. Norton, 2017)
  • Robert Fagles, The Odyssey (Penguin, 1996)
  • Robert Fitzgerald, The Odyssey (1961)
  • Richmond Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer (1965)

Scholarship and commentary

  • Emily Wilson's public essays and interviews on translating the Odyssey and its women — behind our framing of Penelope as a strategist and Calypso and Circe as forms of power.
  • Joel Christensen, Homer scholar — 2026 CUNY interview on how the Odyssey "changes radically depending on your role in life," on nostos (homecoming), and on identity restored through recognition.
  • St. John's College essay on Penelope as "the Odyssey's creative thinker."
  • Durham University scholarship on the classical underworld as a "memoryscape" — memory, the dead, and what must not be forgotten.
  • TED-Ed, "Everything you need to know to read Homer's Odyssey" — a reference for accessible framing, not a source of claims.

Film facts

  • The film's official site: release date of July 17, 2026, and the fact that it was shot with IMAX film cameras.
  • Official and press materials naming the principal cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron.

Background reference

  • Uncontroversial facts about Homer: an epic of 24 books and roughly 12,000 lines, born of an oral-formulaic tradition, traditionally dated to the 8th century BCE, and a sequel-in-setting to the Iliad. Dating and authorship remain open scholarly questions; we never state them as certainties.
  • UK and EU copyright terms — life of the author plus 70 years — the basis for our public-domain decisions.
  • Project Gutenberg license and trademark policy — the basis for stripping Project Gutenberg branding from commercial editions of the underlying public-domain text.
  • Amazon KDP public-domain and AI-content policies — the basis for how our annotated reading edition is differentiated, and for our internal AI-use log and human-led editing policy.

Corrections

If a Book number is wrong, a fact is off, or an attribution is missing, write to us — contact details are on the About page. We fix errors and note the change. That standing offer is not a formality; it is the point of this page.