Ten years of one man trying to get home from Troy, told out of order: the first four books are about his son looking for him, and Odysseus himself tells the middle of his own story at a dinner party.
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Every run of seven words or more that appears both here and in another book on this shelf, merged into the longest passage they have in common. The Odyssey shares wording with 1 of the other 37. This is quotation, or a common source, or one translator doing both — not a resemblance inferred from vocabulary.
Thus he spoke and Mercury, guide and guardian, slayer of Argus, did as he was told. Forthwith he bound on his glittering golden sandals with which he could fly like the wind over land and se…Book 24 and Book 5
Of the sixty counted across the shelf, the ones this book names most. A name is counted wherever it is written, whoever is speaking. Each one has a page of its own listing every chapter, in every book, that carries it.
Translator: Samuel Butler, 1900. Source: Gutenberg 1727.
The text here is Samuel Butler’s prose translation, 1900, public domain, from Project Gutenberg ebook 1727, set unaltered.
Butler also argued, at length and to general derision, that the Odyssey was written by a young Sicilian woman. The translation is not the worse for it.
Public domain, and free to read, copy and quote. Nothing on this page is written by anyone living: the words are the translator’s and the counts are the text’s.