Guides

Wine-Dark is built on a small, hand-verified catalogue: the forty-six Greek works that survive, the translations we would actually send you to, and who did each one. These guides are written from that catalogue and nothing else — the survival counts, the canon, the verdicts on the translations. No invented biography, no filler.

• Choosing your Odyssey: which translation to read

  A guide to the five Odyssey translations we keep in print — Wilson, Fagles, Lattimore, Lombardo, Rieu — what each does, and which reader it is for.

• Choosing your Iliad: which translation to read

  A guide to the five Iliad translations we keep in print — Fagles, Lattimore, Lombardo, Fitzgerald, Alexander — grandeur or plainness, and who each is for.

More guides — one for each of the surviving playwrights, from Aeschylus to Menander — are being written from the same catalogue, and go live as they are finished.