Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

You can, of course, learn the Greek lan­guage as it’s spo­ken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spo­ken in antiq­ui­ty — and as it was, until fair­ly recent­ly in his­tor­i­cal time, taught to stu­dents in the mod­ern West. But it’s a fair­ly dif­fer­ent endeav­or again to learn Greek as Homer spoke it. The fact of the mat­ter is that no human being ever real­ly spoke like Achilles, Agamem­non, Odysseus, Pene­lope, or any of the oth­er char­ac­ters in the Ili­ad and Odyssey. Home­r’s many lit­er­ary achieve­ments through these works include the cre­ation and com­mand of a kind of syn­the­sized poet­ic Greek, com­bin­ing qual­i­ties of region­al Ion­ic and Aeolic dialects with var­i­ous forms and expres­sions that were out­dat­ed even in the eighth cen­tu­ry BC. If it served the meter, Homer used it.

Need­less to say, when most of us attempt to read Homer aloud in the orig­i­nal, we get it all or most­ly wrong, even if we’re famil­iar with mod­ern Greek. We’d have to spend a long time indeed in the world of clas­si­cists before hear­ing a more accu­rate record­ing than the one above, deliv­ered by a YouTu­ber called Thomas Whichel­lo.

On his chan­nel, Whichel­lo spe­cial­izes in per­form­ing ven­er­a­ble lit­er­ary texts with a pro­nun­ci­a­tion and cadence as close to peri­od-accu­rate as pos­si­ble, often in the orig­i­nal lan­guage, some­times with his own musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment. He’s done read­ings of the Bible, Shake­speare, Keats, and Wilde, but none so far has been so pop­u­lar as his ren­di­tion of the first book of the Ili­ad, accom­pa­nied by sub­ti­tles of Home­r’s text and an Eng­lish trans­la­tion.

A Greek here in 2026 with no par­tic­u­lar knowl­edge of the clas­si­cal lan­guage may under­stand a quar­ter of the indi­vid­ual words Whichel­lo uses, and maybe half of them in cer­tain pas­sages. Actu­al­ly being able to fol­low the sto­ry, how­ev­er, is anoth­er mat­ter. Still, you can get a sur­pris­ing amount out of the video even if you under­stand noth­ing at all, since Whichel­lo is aim­ing not just for lin­guis­tic accu­ra­cy, but also emo­tion­al res­o­nance in his deliv­ery. Ignore his glass­es, but­ton-down shirt, micro­phone, and win­dow frame, and you could almost be sit­ting around a camp­fire with him near­ly 30 cen­turies ago. Note, also, that the com­menters include gen­uine clas­si­cists who call his the best read­ing they’ve ever heard — as well as view­ers, cre­den­tialed or oth­er­wise, eager to hear him name all those mighty Achaean ships in Book 2.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch All 18,225 Lines of the Ili­ad Read by 66 Actors in a Marathon Event For an Audi­ence of 50,000

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Learn Ancient Greek in 118 Free Lessons: A Free Online Course from Bran­deis & Har­vard

The Ancient Greeks: A Free Online Course from Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty

Lis­ten to The Epic of Gil­gamesh Being Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight Read in Their Orig­i­nal Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish by an MIT Medieval­ist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.