Every term we feature a rare and interesting item from our collection.

Trinity Term 2026

The Odyssey of Homer
translated by Alexander Pope
(in collaboration with William Broome and Elijah Fenton)

If, over the summer, you find yourself stuck in an airport departure lounge or hanging around on a station platform, plagued by delays and cancellations, spare a thought for Odysseus, who took ten years to get home from the city of Troy (at the opening of the Dardanelles in the top northwestern corner of what is now Turkey) to Ithaca (an island off the west coast of Greece). On the way he encountered the hideous man-eating Cyclopes, had half his crew turned into pigs by the witch Circe, visited the realms of the dead, eluded the enticing song of the Sirens, successfully navigated between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, and was kept for seven years as a sex-slave by the nymph Calypso. These and other ordeals and adventures, including what happened when he finally managed to get home to Ithaca, are recounted by Homer in the ancient Greek epic, the Odyssey.

In 1725-1726 the poet Alexander Pope published his verse translation of the Odyssey in five volumes. He had already published a translation of Homer’s Iliad, which tells part of the story of the siege of Troy, in six volumes between 1715 and 1720; this had cost him a great deal of labour and anxiety, but also earned him a good deal of money. For the Odyssey, he enlisted the help of two collaborators, Elijah Fenton, who contributed four of the twenty-four books into which the Odyssey is divided, and William Broome, who contributed eight; thus only half of Pope’s Odyssey is actually the work of Pope himself. He may have found himself in urgent need of money, as he was having a villa built on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, and thus obliged to get the work finished more quickly than he had envisaged when he first conceived the project. Or he may have been distracted by the unsettled nature of the political climate and literary factions of the time. Whatever his reasons for taking on collaborators, Pope omitted to mention this in the proposals which he was issuing to potential subscribers (whose commitment to take copies would guarantee the finances of the edition), but the truth leaked out, to the detriment of Pope’s reputation, and Pope was gradually forced to admit it. Despite this, the Odyssey sold well and earned Pope about £5,000; he said he paid Broome £500 and Fenton £300 for their part in the enterprise, which may seem disproportionate given that they had done half the work of translating, but it was probably Pope’s name that ensured the work sold well, as he was already a renowned poet and translator.

Elijah Fenton was described by Pope as ‘a right honest man. He is fat and indolent; a very good scholar; sits within, and does nothing but read or compose.’ He wrote one very successful play, Mariamne, and some poetry which was indifferently received; he and Pope seemingly remained on good terms, as when he died in 1730 he held a tutoring post which he had obtained partly through Pope’s influence. William Broome, however, was more resentful of Pope’s attempts to obfuscate how much of the Odyssey was in fact Broome’s work, and complained that he was ‘ungrateful’. Pope’s retaliation was subtle: in the second version of his mock epic The Dunciad, complete with pseudo-academic commentary, he writes that being embroiled in Irish politics is Jonathan Swift’s doom, ‘And Pope’s, translating three whole years with Broome’ – but the notes tell us that here the poet is mocking himself, ‘for whoever imagines this a sarcasm on the other ingenious person is greatly mistaken’, Pope’s satisfaction with Broome being shown by the fact that he paid him ‘the full sum of five hundred pounds’, plus a hundred pounds’ worth of free copies of the book. After Broome complained, Pope removed the reference in the revised edition of the Dunciad published in 1736, but relations between them remained frosty.

This copy of Pope’s Odyssey was given to Somerville by Mary Lascelles, who was Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at the college 1932-1960, and a distinguished scholar of Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson and Walter Scott.

Previously featured volumes