About

Of the plays written by the five Athenian dramatists whose names we still have, about forty-four survive. Not forty-four out of fifty — forty-four out of something near four hundred and fifty. Everything else is gone: lost in the fire, not recopied, or simply not chosen by whoever was deciding what a schoolroom needed. What we have is not the best of it. It is the residue.

That is a small enough number to read in a lifetime, and most people who intend to never do, because there is no obvious order and no sense of how much is left. This site is the ledger. Forty-six works — every complete Greek play, both epics — and a record of which ones you have read, in whose translation, and how many times.

Why the translator is the point

Reading the Odyssey in Lattimore at nineteen and in Wilson at forty is not reading the same book twice. Most reading trackers cannot express that: a book is read or unread, and the second pass overwrites the first. Here a reading is an event with a date and a translator attached, and the translator is the largest thing on the row.

The syllabus

Odysseus Through the Ages is nine works across seven stages and 2,700 years, following one character from Homer to a Cambridge historian writing in 1954 — through Sophocles, who thought him a liar; Virgil, who wrote from Troy’s side; Dante, who put him in hell for it; and Tennyson, who may or may not have been praising him. It is a way in. The canon is still there afterwards.

What this site will not do

It will not tell you how many pages to read today. There is no streak, no deadline and no pace — the unit here is the decade. It will not show you book covers or sell you an edition; nothing on this site earns a commission today, and if that ever changes the disclosure will appear in the same commit as the first link. It will not summarise a work you have not read.

Corrections

Much of the catalogue is verified by hand — production dates, survival counts, which translation was published in which year — and some of it will be wrong. hello@winedark.app reaches a person. Every descriptive line on the site is original prose written for it; the dates and the arithmetic come from standard references and are recorded, with their sources, in the seed files.

Wine-Dark is made by Noble Fluency LLC, which also makes Seven Ages and Longlisted. The name is Homer’s, and nobody is quite sure what colour he meant.