Homer Iliad in Greek

A reconstruction in the archaic East-Ionic majuscule of the seventh–sixth centuries BC, rendered from Eulogikon's canonical text. It strips the later layer that text carries — the Byzantine accents, breathings and word-division, and the modern print apparatus — and to the bookhand letterforms (capitals, scriptio continua, iota adscript, proclitic nasal assimilation) it adds the one feature that marks the oldest orthography: the digraphs ΕΙ and ΟΥ are written Ε and Ο wherever they spell a long monophthong from contraction or compensatory lengthening (ΞΕΝΟΣ, ΧΕΡΑΣ, ΤΟ, ΕΣ), before that digraph had generalised; genuine inherited diphthongs are kept (ΒΟΥΣ, ΛΕΙΠΩ). Whether a given ΕΙ/ΟΥ is collapsed is decided word by word — from the Homeric morphology and the cited etymologies of Cunliffe's Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, never by surface guess; where the value is debated the digraph is kept, so every error is a conservative omission and never the collapse of a genuine diphthong. Each change is a stated, reversible rule, so it can be read line for line against the standard edition, linked below — a declared reconstruction, not a documentary text, and no text is altered or destroyed in the making. Standard edition →