The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer

Hector is the bad guy.
Penolope is the devoted wife.
And Ulysses is a man against the gods.

This data set (a.k.a "study carrel") was created from Samuel Butler's prose translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey as found at Project Gutenberg.

Both of the stories consist of twenty-four books ("chapters") for a total of 273,000 words. By comparison, the Bible is about 800,000 words long, and Melville's Moby Dick is about 218,000 words long. The text is relatively easy to read with a Flesch score of 76 where 0 means nobody can read it and 100 means anybody can read it. Readability scores are based on the lengths of words, lengths of sentences, and the overall size of the underlying vocabulary.

In short, the Iliad is the story of the Trojan War where the good guys (the Greeks) try to bring back the wife of Menelaus (Helen) who has been kidnapped by the bad guys (the Trojans). In the end Hector (the baddest of the bad guys) gets killed by Achilles (the goodest of the good guys.) And after ten years of battle, everybody finally sails home.

Except Ulysses. Alas, Ulysses's ship gets blown off course by the gods, and such begins a second ten-year long adventure. While Ulysses is making his way home -- via kings, sirens, and monsters -- his devoted wife (Penelope) and his dutiful son (Telemachus) are fending off suitors who are trying to marry Penelope for her money. In the end Ulysses returns home, fights off the suitoirs, and everybody lives happily ever after. Such is the story of the Odyssey.

These themes can be illustrated in quite a number of ways. For example, see the word clouds of the most frequent unigrams (single words), bi-grams (two-word phrases), and computed keywords, below:

unigrams

bi-grams

keywords

Similarly, if I apply a technique called "topic modeling" to the books, then I might say the books are about the following themes, which can be compared to the whole or charted over time. In other words, the books might be about "man", "trojans", "achaeans", "achilles", "sea", "ulysses", "horses", and "alcinous". More specifically, half of the two books are about man-house-men-father-ulysses-home-people-gods. Moreover, the two books are distinct. The first (Iliad) is about "trojans", and the second (Odyssey) is about "man".

topics

topics over time

For more detail, see the computed summary.

Eric Lease Morgan <eric_morgan@infomotions.com>
August 13, 2025