Homer's Iliad: In a Classical Translation

~ PREFACE ~

[T]ell your non-literate countrymen that Shakspere is Homeric, and they will get none the clearer idea of Shakspere; tell them that Homer is Shaksperean and they will comprehend more about Homer than if they turned over a shelf-full of his commentators.

–EDMUND LENTHAL SWIFTE, Homeric Studies (1868)

THIS AS I DETERMINE , is the first translation of Homer into a twelve-syllable—dodecasyllabic, iambic hexametric—line. It further appears to be the most sustained dodecasyllabic work in English. The translation, as much by requirement of meter as by design, is intermittently archaic, i.e., licensed (as in poetic license). As with Homer’s dactylic hexameter, meter here also commands, and much is done in its name. However, the line between metrical requirement and design is—as it should be—fine.

The resultant idiom, without seeking to replicate Homer, yet provides whatever sense can be recovered or supposed of the Iliad’s manner, antiquity, and peculiarities of style. The work is not "Homer’s Iliad in a New Translation—as most new Iliads are styled—but Homer’s Iliad in a Classical Translation." By its title and execution, it reflects the emphases and ethos of my two prior publications, the second styled: The Shipwreck Sea: Love Poems and Essays in a Classical Mode (Clairview, 2019). This Iliad translation and the emphases of its introduction are without precedent in the long annals of Homeric translation.

This work is an outgrowth of my The Lesbian Lyre: Reclaiming Sappho for the 21st Century (Clairview, 2016)—a book as much about the translation of Homer and epic as of Sappho and lyric. It is an outgrowth of that book’s preoccupation with the manner of translation and its programmatic impetus, i.e., how a translation of Greek or Latin poetry should be made and why. The manner of this Iliad is traditional and, for that reason, formal. More specifically, my earlier translations of Sappho and other Greek lyric poets were rhymed and metered. The present work, by contrast, is in a twelve-syllable predominantly iambic ( figure /) line, highlighting poetic diction (i.e., the selection and arrangement of words) and select archaisms (i.e., the old-fashionedness of word and word arrangement). The work’s metrical analogue is the infrequently used iambic hexameter (iambic pentameter the norm). The meter chosen, if not created, for this translation thus complements its purposefully unusual and archaic/venerable qualities. In fact, the meter, exceeding the more traditional iambic pentameter by two syllables per line, allows for a robust polysyllabism reflecting Homer’s own. A reproach to characteristically sparse (i.e., excessively monosyllabic) and often unimaginative (or too imaginative) modern, modernist, or post-modern idiom, the present translation seeks to recall and find a place in the estimable literary past.

The four-part introduction makes the case for the translation’s customized diction and idiom. These are designed to elevate the language of Homeric translation from the banalities of the past seventy years and more (in effect, since Lattimore’s Iliad, 1951). Banality includes flatness of expression, most often marked by excessive monosyllabism. It results from lack of effort, imagination, and often of the Greek language itself in those who purport to translate. Excessive monosyllabism has also been the fate of recent translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid.

I. A Personally Taken Translation serves as predicate for the translation anew of a work perhaps more frequently translated than any other. Such a translation necessarily offers something noteworthy, even remarkable: here a regularized style-elevating meter and, for all of that, novelty other than for its own sake. Unlike recent Iliads in a new translation, this in a classical translation offers newness in venerability. It is a translation newly allegiant to what is properly antique (and so viewed) but, for the past three generations at least, never rendered as such. Old enough to be new, the work is intermittently antique and artificial—in the root sense of art-making. It thus conveys something of the nature of Homer’s original—be it so faint, yet clearly audible, as the cosmic microwave background trailing the Big Bang. Homer’s Greek, to be sure, is artificial through and through; considered archaic even in its own time. These qualities have been consistently acknowledged and appreciated by readers of Homer in Greek. Since Lattimore and, arguably, Pope, they have been all but lost to readers in translation.

A substantial part of this work was completed in 2020, the apocalyptic year of COVID and its anarchic racial-warfare and Cancel Culture companions. The work’s conclusion in 2023–2024 amid the Israel-Hamas War bore witness throughout the world to harrowing on-campus displays of anti-semitism, anti-Americanism, and the assault on Western values. Yet, in my every rendered line I felt the world, like the Iliad itself, reconstituted and preserved. Such was my personally taken response to the dissolution from which this Iliad emerged—a work, like its original, seeking the fixity and order of art, even as all crumbled about me. This is what art does, as they who most value it know.

II. Homeric Language: As Rich as English Might Aspire to Become proposes an English translation reflecting, without seeking to imitate, the richness of Homeric idiom. Toward that end, Part II makes the case for an intermittently archaizing diction and style responsive to the extreme antiquity of Homeric materials, including: the Greek language and its Indo-European provenance, multi-generational characters, internally recounted legends, physical objects (some validated by archaeological finds), and the ubiquitous evocation of time out of mind via references to Oceanus/ Ocean. The Titan son of primordial Earth (Gaia) and Heaven (Ouranos), Oceanus is an earth-encircling flow. He and wife Tethys are parent to all earthly waters and water divinities. The Iliad’s gods frequently pay visits to Oceanus. Oceanus prominently encircles the all-encompassing Shield of Achilles. And the Trojan river Scamander, son of Oceanus, supernaturally battles with Achilles. Such materials seek the translation idiom best reflecting them. The idiom here used is thus stylized, reverential. It eschews the hip, the colloquial, and the common. It is yet contemporary to the considerable extent that regularized meter and poetic license allow. The result is an elevation of language and style, a decided turnaround from translational decline, again, since Lattimore.

III. Dactylic Hexameter: The Meter of Homer and Classical Epic (In Brief) explains the workings of dactylic hexameter and the kindred formularity of Homeric language. Part III further touches on Homeric meter vis-à-vis English meter, noting that iambic pentameter, the heroic meter of English, is not necessarily best suited to the translation of dactylic hexameter, the heroic meter of Greek. Metrical language, whether in Greek or English is, again, and from start to finish, artificial—a Kunstsprache ‘art language’—which is to say a self-referential, metrically dictated, artistically wrought construct. We recall in this connection the root etymological meaning of art (Gr. root *ar- / Lat. art-): ‘fix, fasten, fashion, place, position, set in order’ (e.g., Eng. articulate).

By its nature then, Homeric language gives further credence to this translation’s ideolect, illustrating author William Fitzgerald’s dictum that poetry is the place where language performs, and so poetry shows us most clearly what a language can do, and what it likes to do. The question, then, is whether one wants a translation of Homer that reads like poetry, in a suitable register exhibiting the incidents of poetry, or like an appliance-installation manual. The issue is one of decorum. This is not a revisionary but a reversionary translation, one old enough to be new, restoring a certain translational authority, as befits him, to Homer.

IV. Homeric Artificiality in Translation: Rightness of Result uses Homeric meter, dialogue, character posturing, and the Iliad’s pervasive alliteration as cases in point. As Part II makes the case for an archaic idiom based on Homer’s essential antiquity, Part IV makes the case for a relatedly artificial—i.e., art-making—idiom based on the wealth of the Iliad’s stylized speeches (especially in battlefield contexts) and other linguistic contrivance, including word order and alliteration. As alliteration is a pervasive Homeric device, it behooves the translator to make something of it, as in Gr. poieō/poiētēs ‘make’/‘maker, poet’. Such making resides in a comparably alliterative translation—not, to be sure, in each instance where Homer is alliterative, but wherever resourceful English allows, with the net result of Homeric effect overall. That in fact is the overall goal of this translation: Homeric effect occasioning English poetic appreciation.

– JMD, NEW YORK CITY, 2025

I.

COMMENTARY

~ INTRODUCTION ~

I. A Personally Taken Iliad

IN THE INTRODUCTION to his translation of Virgil’s pastoral poetry—Virgil: The Eclogues (1980)—Cambridge University classicist Guy Lee (1918–2005) observes that at all events the [translated] English line must have a certain strangeness, not to say awkwardness, about it. Poetry is often the unfamiliar, the different, the mysterious, even the slightly odd. By the same token, a twelve-syllable line, as here, not necessarily divisible into discrete four- or six-syllable phrases (or words)—i.e., into thirds or halves—stands on what may called a metric periphery. It is the first prescription, that of difference, that guides my work; and the second, that of metric reach, that characterizes it. Otherwise, Homer’s Iliad in a Classical Translation would have been but another Homer’s Iliad in a New Translation , had it been at all. The different . . . even the slightly odd in translation is what a Homer-reflective Kunstsprache ‘art language’ rightly includes; while on the periphery is where artful usage—and Kunstsprache itself—properly resides. The idea of strangeness hearkens back to Aristotle’s Poetics where τὸ ξενικόν (pron. to xe-ni-kon ′) ‘that which is strange’ is deemed an essential incident of poetry. The path here taken thus appears more untrodden than initially imagined: the first rendering of Homer into a twelve-syllable (dodecasyllabic) line, the line itself uncommon to English epic translation and, even then, testing rhythmic expectation.

Lee further notes that a translation of poetry is open to objection at virtually any point; it can always be criticized for not being the original—or for being, or not, much else besides. Responding to what is not . . . the original, critics inveigh against what is both too greatly or too little colorful—as they have done from Chapman, Pope, Dryden, and onward. Colorful is, of course, to be distinguished from careless, erroneous, willfully idiosyncratic, or decidedly bad.

This translation will escape neither censure nor praise. Reflecting my vision of the need at hand, the work is, in both senses, visionary. Alternatively, as Homer’s archaism did not trouble his own or long-subsequent audiences, this Homer troubles today’s reader to bear that in mind. Thus, a modicum of curiosity-rousing strangeness, including elevated language, the judicious use of archaisms, and sometimes inverted word order, are much what an evocative translation of epic poetry requires (both aesthetically and metrically). The need at hand further includes the translator’s creating the meaning and manner of Homer in himself, and then . . . creat[ing] an audience like himself to hear him. It is a matter of cumulative argument (think Lucretius). Indeed, the welcome rein of a fixed meter offers what Robert Bridges (Poet Laureate, 1913–1930) calls desirable irregularities and opportunities for unexpected beauties. We recall in this connection the delights taken by the young Marcel in the archaizing style of his idolized Bergotte:

I could not, it is true, lay down the novel of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the story alone, as in the first dawn of love, when we go every day to meet a woman at some party or entertainment by the charm of which we imagine it is that we are attracted. Then I observed the rare, almost archaic phrases which he liked to employ at certain points, where a hidden flow of harmony, a prelude contained and concealed in the work itself would animate and elevate his style; and it was at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of the vain dream of life, of the inexhaustible torrent of fair forms . . . . I now no longer had the impression of being confronted by a particular passage in one of Bergotte’s works . . . but rather of the ideal passage of Bergotte common to every one of his books. . . . Like Swann, they would say of Bergotte: "He has a charming mind, so individual, he has a way of his own of saying things, which is a little far-fetched [un peu cherchée] but so pleasant."

Bergotte’s style, says Proust, is instantly known; one need not consult the title page for the author’s name. Are we surprised? It is reverence for the bygone, for what is lost, that signals Proust’s own enterprise—a remembrance of things past (or the search for lost time). That past or loss is intimately deep—chasmic—whether psychologically, archeologically, or philologically determined. The search involves signals for which we listen and expect to hear.

The warriors of Homer’s Iliad, with discernible origins in the courtly settings and storytelling traditions of Mycenaean palace culture (c. 1500–1200 BC), are singularly savage and fury-driven. They are narcissistic, rapacious, acquisitive, and gluttonous. They delight in slaughtering both foe and hecatomb—nominally an offering of a hundred cattle (or other beast)—and as readily promise hecatombs in furtherance of wish-fulfillment. Pray or pledge, and out shambles a beast for sacrificial slaughter (and dinner). Consider the extreme case of Achilles’ heaping the pyre of Patroclus with cloven carcasses, beast and human alike (Il. 23.185-202).

At the same time, the Iliad’s warrior class possesses, and is redeemed by, a refined sense of beauty, be it of the female body or material objects in their vast array, the objects typically described in minute and appreciative detail, with an emphasis on provenance. The warriors, moreover, are often deeply sympathetic, ennobled by both loyalty to one another and an understanding of life’s inevitable and brutal brevity. They thus ever strive for something greater and longer-lived than themselves. They fixate on kleos ‘glory, fame’—kleos aphthiton ‘imperishable glory’ in the singular case of Achilles (Il. 9.464 [413]). I say fixate because their preoccupations are what ultimately render their lives artistic, i.e., fixed, enduring. It is for fixity of remembrance—to be fixed in memory—that the Iliad’s heroes strive, the battlefield the forge on which their teeming mettle is quickened, pounded, and shaped. As American poet and essayist Jones Very (1813–1880) observes, We respect that grandeur of mind in the heroes of Homer which led them to sacrifice a mere earthly existence for the praise of all coming ages. They have not been disappointed.

The hero’s need for remembrance is foil to his mortality. If, like the gods, he had eternal life, he would not need eternal remembrance (see Il. 12.340-346). Moreover, the Iliad’s heroes are prodigious talkers—over sixty percent of the Iliad consisting of directly quoted speech. They voice their passions and pains, reproaches and praises, might and misgivings, descents and ancestral deeds. They reflect addressing their own great-hearted spirits. Never at a loss for words, they reveal their humanity and seek to grasp and vindicate the present and its transience. This, too, is mitigation of savagery. As Thomas Mann has said, Gigantic courage is barbaric without a well-articulated ideal to guide it. Only the word makes life worthy of a human being. To be without word is not worthy of human being, is inhumane.

Homer’s heroes are ξενικοί ‘strange’ to us for these reasons as well, however much we empathize with their ultimately mortal and immediately understandable conditions and concerns. The means by which they are dissimilar and removed yet require recognition. Indeed, the Iliad’s archaic language, even if not entirely understood by the Iliad’s original audiences, has been recognized as a common feature of the poem’s distancing effect. For our purposes, dissimilarity and distance are conveyed through an English idiom customized to both the poem’s milieu and its protagonists’ manner and circumstance—an idiom here formal in diction and generally exhibiting incidents of high style. The case, in more recent literary guise, is made by poet-author Dana Gioia vis-à-vis Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), where Longfellow tries to invent a medium in English (including meter) to register the irreconcilably alien cultural material he presents.

These devices remind the listener that Hiawatha’s mythic setting is not of this world. There are other devices, including syntax, lineation, diction, and rhetoric that give Hiawatha its distinctive style. So also this translation of the Iliad. Generally elevated diction, intermittent archaisms, and occasionally inverted word order seek to convey—by their strangeness, glancing off-centeredness, or peripherality—the distance and idiosyncrasy of Homer’s Greeks, in time and manner of expression. As linguist-Homerist Geoffrey Horrocks has observed, Archaic rules of syntax in the language of epic are due entirely to the fact that they are absolutely fundamental to the art of oral composition of dactylic verse. A similar rule should inform the language of epic in translation, if it is somehow to reflect or intimate the original. In dactylic verse, as here, it is meter that governs. The present translation, through such moderately Englished devices, seeks to convey a sense of Homeric tone which seeks, if you will, to make a fit between Homer’s Greek and the English of this translation. The metrically conditioned English of this translation effects an enlargement of usage, reflecting what meter either prompts or requires.

My twelve-syllable line, an enlargement of the more customary ten-syllable pentameter, is unconventional, even as it is original to Homeric translation. To be sure, it is centered—between a sometimes short-ended pentameter (often epithet-omitting) and long-ended heptameter, or fourteener—the latter given to unwieldiness (as with Chapman, due both to line length and Chapman’s own lack of restraint). Also original/inventive is my blend of metrical feet within the line—e.g., iambs ( figure / ), trochees ( / figure ), spondees ( / / ), dactyls ( / figure figure ), anapests ( figure figure / ), etc.—from phrase to phrase and pause to pause, though iambs predominate (English being English). It is the phrasing itself, often enjambed, and its regulating pauses that allow or even encourage such variations within lines of a predetermined length. However original or inventive the blend, the resultant regulation is decidedly traditional; this at a time when there is no longer agreement concerning what, in fact, constitutes an English poetic line. Thus, Charles Stein’s Odyssey (Berkeley, 2008), with lines ranging anywhere from three to twenty syllables and back again. Subsequent translations of Homer (and Virgil), while not as aggravated, show a similar disregard of form, rhythm, and sound. The variable feet of this translation assure a changeable and lively step (if you will), preventing the lockstep of metrical form as traditionally used, e.g., the nearly unbroken trochaic tetrameter of Hiawatha (splendid epic that it is) and the uniformity, predictable enough, of iambic pentameter no less than of regularized iambic hexameter: figure / figure / figure / figure / figure / figure /. Variable feet within an exacting twelve-syllable fix acquire an aggregate uniformity. They are conceptually tantamount to a publisher’s right-justified margin, creating the false but agreeable impression of uniform spacing between words, whether in a line or on the page.

Disavowing a common or quotidian Homer, I have, in Thoreauvian manner—as an expression of men’s second thoughts—made a classical translation, endowing it with what I believe to be the finesse, elevation, and authority of the original. Such translation further bespeaks a vision and temperament nowadays begging to incur disfavor. So be it. Speaking of the creative impulse, American painter Washington Allston (1779–1834) admonished: Trust to your own genius, listen to the voice within you, and sooner or later . . . she will enable you to translate her language to the world, and this it is that forms the only merit of any work of art. More colloquially put, as there is yet no definitive English translation of Homer, this Iliad may seek advantage among the contenders.

That the Iliad has never been translated into a twelve-syllable line is not necessarily the reason for my choice of meter. Rather, when I initially tried my hand at the poem’s opening seven lines—for illustrative purposes in The Lesbian Lyre—a twelve-syllable line resulted. Satisfied with that much, I resolved to continue. Indeed, I hold it as an article of faith—reversing the poet Horace’s precept concerning the story-telling start of an epic poem—that in judging epic translation one does not begin in medias res ‘in the midst of things’ but ab initio ‘from the start’. An epic translation’s start is the bellwether. As goes the start, so goes the rest. Thus encouraged by my rendering of lines 1–7, I was keen to sustain the endeavor. Moreover, as The Lesbian Lyre combatively took other epic translations to task, I determined to show how the Iliad might be differently or better done, though translating the entire work was far from my initial intent.

Here, then, is my opening:

SING, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son,

The cause accursed of Achaean pains uncounted.

Many a hero’s mighty soul did it hurl down

To Hell, the mighty themselves making meal for dogs

And banqueting for birds. Thus Zeus’ intent advanced,

From when the two contending parted first as foes,

Agamemnon, king of men, and dread Achilles.

The point of such translation is a matter of decorum—i.e., the language appropriate or fit to the manner of the original (see further Appendix I at www.poemoftroy.com). In sum, the language of translated archaic Greek epic is fittingly neither common nor colloquial—notwithstanding the practices of modern translators and their approving reviewers—any more than is the language of Homer’s own Greek. No Yo, Achilles here. The language of Homer is stylized, lapidary, and transporting. It should thus be rendered. We further note, as especially concerns diction, that poets tend ever to denigrate what has gone before, suggesting that poetry before theirs was not only dull and wrong but also especially artificial [in the pejorative sense] and falsely poetic. The negative epithet ‘poetic diction’ tends always to be applied to the poetry preceding one’s own.

Wanted for the decorous translation of Homer is less dumbing down and more a sense of what appealed to both Homer’s audience (c. 750 BC) and those able to appreciate his language and the language of his adapters for nearly a thousand years thereafter. I refer to the Greek poet Quintus of Smyrna (3d or 4th century AD) (Smyrna now Izmir, Turkey), who composed an extant Posthomerica (After Homer) in fourteen books, starting from where the Iliad left off (the funeral of Hector) and continuing to the end of the Trojan War (Quintus likely intending to replace earlier accounts lost by his time). The Posthomerica is written in the dactylic hexameter of Homer and very much in Homer’s idiom. Nothing dated or out of style about Homeric usage close to a thousand years after the Homeric heyday. Given the unparalleled artistic afterlife of Homer in Homer-imitative Greek, it befits Homeric translation to convey what aspects of Homer it may.

My translation of the Iliad’s opening lines differs somewhat from that offered in The Lesbian Lyre. This is consistent with the premise that works of art are essentially works ever in progress, even when seeming finished or perfected (Lat. perficio/perfectum ‘accomplish/accomplished through’). A comparable situation, as we suppose, inhered in the Iliad’s own extensive oral development, through to its written transcription and textual codification. In a computer glitch occurring in Book 15, the present author lost some twenty-five completed lines, from the document itself and from all backup. They were of course redone, approximating but hardly duplicating the original. More broadly speaking, revision was the constant companion of this translation.

In a lengthy poetic translation, the process of revision, before and possibly even after publication, bespeaks the constant give and take between (1) fidelity to the original; (2) the contending dictates of one’s chosen form (assuming form in the first instance); and (3) finish or finesse in translation. A translation can, within limits, be at once faithful and beautiful. Indeed, an excellent translation is, in its own right, an excellent poem, conveying the sense of excellence in its source or of the ancient poet’s composing likewise in English today. Accordingly, the language of Greek epic translation—as I endeavor to make the language of this translation—should seek to be rich, resourceful, and entertaining, recommending its original as such.

Praising the landmark Iliad of Richmond Lattimore (1951), classicist and translator William Arrowsmith (1924–1992) tellingly notes that

this is to my mind the finest translation of Homer ever made in the English language. It could be improved only by Lattimore’s revision of his work, a revision which I very much hope he will have the opportunity to make. For the meantime, it is quite enough that we should have an Iliad which again and again gives one the feeling of the Greek on the page, which, when it reads itself, is a creation as exciting as we can hope for in translation and which allows us to have the Iliad as a classic in the English language.

Thus, and for as consummate as Arrowsmith deemed Lattimore’s Iliad, he yet allowed for its imperfections, for the prospect of its revision—the endeavor ever ongoing, the give and take unceasing, the work ever in progress. We note in this connection that poet William Cowper (1731–1800) undertook—for worse more than better—a substantial revisal of his 1791 blank-verse translation of the Iliad, beginning the second edition (according to his second Preface) almost immediately after publication of the first. Similarly, the dictionally elevated and archaizing Robert Bridges published his greatest work, The Testament of Beauty (a poem in four books), in 1929. It was followed in 1930, the year of his death, by a second revised edition.

Arrowsmith’s appraisal of Lattimore, without overt reference, reflects the thinking of the Roman author and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD), who notes in the preface to his multivolume Natural History that he

should like to be accepted on the lines of those founders of painting and sculpture who, as you will find in these volumes, used to inscribe their finished works, even the masterpieces which we can never be tired of admiring, with a provisional title such as Worked on by Apelles or Polyclitus, as though art was always a thing in process and not completed, so that when faced by the vagaries of criticism the artist might have left him a line of retreat to indulgence, by implying that he intended, if not interrupted, to correct any defect noted. . . . Not more than three, I fancy, are recorded as having an inscription denoting completion—Made by so-and-so. . . . This made the artist appear to have assumed a supreme confidence in his art, and consequently all these works were very unpopular.

Apelles was the most famous painter in antiquity; Polyclitus, a famed sculptor. The words worked on by Apelles or Polyclitus render Pliny’s Apelles faciebat aut Polyclitus ‘Apelles or Polyclitus was making/creating it’ (faciebat the imperfect or past continuous action tense of Lat. facere ‘to make’). Thus, the artist was making it, was in the process of making it, was working on it, when he deemed it finished; the imperfect tense indicating, if you will, that the work remained imperfect, i.e., unperfected, incapable of perfection, or necessarily incomplete, regardless the extent worked on. Works of art (in Platonic terms) thus always fall short of their fully expressive potential—unknown upon the work’s commencement or putative completion—which is to say, fall short of their heavenly paradigm. They thus remain unfinished—as even the most consummate artist appreciates.

In the present work, there is an epic amount and variety requiring finish. The shorter a translation or original work, the more resistant to disfavor. Imperfections need otherwise be indulged, that the forest be not missed for the trees. In the sole masterpiece that Michelangelo ever signed—his Pietà (1498–1499)—we find on the sash across Mary’s chest MICHAEL-A[N]GELUS BONAROUS FLOREN[TINUS] FACIEBA[T] (‘Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Florentine, was making this’.) By the same token, one opines that Leonardo notoriously left so many of his works unfinished, realizing he would never bring them to perfection. Only in the rarest case, continues Pliny, does one encounter the inscription ille fecit ‘he made it, finished it’ (fecit the perfect or past completed action tense of facere ‘to make’). This, opines Pliny, bespeaks a supreme artistic confidence in the finished (supposedly truly finished) work. Of such a kind is the meticulously described Hephaestus-wrought Shield of Achilles (Il. 18.534-691). Otherwise, as poet and Homer translator William Cowper colloquially insists, refusing to have his work tidied to modern tastes, Give me a manly, rough line, with a deal of meaning in it. . . . There is a roughness on a plum, which nobody who understands fruit would rub off, though the plum would be much more polished without it.

This, for present purposes, is to say that in a roughly 2,700-year-old epic poem of 15,693 lines, composed in a Kunstsprache—by definition entirely artificial, yet as entirely perfect as any language might be—translation invites an entirely artistic approach and necessarily imperfect result. It is a matter of similitude, no different in its way from the cinematographic re-creation of earlier times via period costumes, re-created sets, modes of transportation, manners and manners of speaking, and all manner of appurtenance. To such verisimilitude—to such deception—we time and again submit. Judiciously used archaisms and related idiosyncrasies are, in fact, verbal costume—mise-en-scène—distancing and lending credence to period and character; and, incident to character, dialogue. For Milman Parry (1902–1935), whose researches revolutionized our understanding of the oral formulaic nature of Homeric poetry, Homer was almost unapproachably strange and distant. Only by recognizing that distance could he be understood. For Parry, distance and inaccessibility stood at the root of Homer’s meaning.

On the other hand, when translators contemporize with anachronistic daring or idiosyncrasy—Logue’s Iliad, Headley’s Beowulf—they are deemed devilishly clever. The critics, intent on displaying their own flamboyance, parse and parade the peculiarities for all to gawk at. The difference in response reflects modernist preference: out with old, however appropriate; in with new, however outrageous. Il faut épater le bourgeois—today as during the birth of modernism in the early twentieth century. A 2020 review article of The Lesbian Lyre concludes that Duban’s insistence upon discipline, decorum, and formality in poetry is part of his philosophy of life. It would need be, as such notions are nowadays deemed quaint, regressive, or simply obsolete. But let that be. I have sought to create a work old enough to be new—new by virtue of its datedness. Indeed, something of what is now considered dated need be preserved, as older, yet serviceable, uses succumb to the social media juggernaut. The rule is time-honored: when something is replaced, it is all too often lost—if not recollected with scorn.

As Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) states in an essay titled On Being Modern-minded (1950), "We imagine ourselves at the apex of intelligence, and cannot believe that the quaint clothes and cumbrous phrases of former times can have invested [Lat. vestis ‘clothing’] people and thoughts that are still worthy of our attention. A little humility is in any event required, given the more or less recently settled state of modern" English vis-à-vis the millennia-old perfections and preservations of an archaic Greek Kunstsprache. The desire to be contemporary, says Russell, is of course new only in degree; it has existed to some extent in all previous periods that believed themselves to be progressive. . . . The modern-minded man . . . has no wish . . . to have emotions which are not those of some fashionable group, but only to be slightly ahead of others in point of time. Declining both the modern and modish, the fashionable or contemporary, this work draws on a larger store, judiciously harvesting diction and syntax from the historical trove of English-poetic usage. Judicious is the operative term, signaling a language in the idiom and word-store of our forefathers, and their self-suggested nationality of phrase; with no more Archaism [sic] than has been time woven round Him [i.e., Shakespeare] whose language will never be archaic in English ears. By judiciously harvesting diction (above), I mean diction that is largely understandable to twenty-first century readers. Thus, e.g., despite but never maugre; erstwhile but never whilom; azure, empyrean, or firmament for heaven(s) but never welkin.

So also in the description of the rebellious commoner, Thersites, despite appears (archaically) as a noun. Thersites was

Disdained of the Danaans, held in their despite

(Il. 2.228)

I could as readily have written:

Disdained by the Danaans who quite despised him

or

Disdained by the Danaans, for they despised him.

The diction is virtually identical. However, I reject these formulations because the one chosen is more archaic-sounding and, thus, dictionally heightened. Despite (the noun) is archaic but, again, judiciously so, especially as it contributes to an alliterative pattern, while the participial balance—Disdained . . . held—helps order and facilitate the syntax. So, which shall it be in the matter of current versus archaizing word order: Tender Is the Night or The Night Is Tender? Sufficient Iliads in a new translation are readily available. This is not one of them.

This work, as earlier noted, stands as a reproach to Cancel Culture, the movement as of early 2020, gaining apace under the hashtag #DisruptTexts, tweeting its successes as they accrue. Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year, tweets a Lawrence High School English teacher—this in response to a tweet from her friend and colleague, Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash). Lawrence High School (as this Boston boy has known) is one of the traditionally poorest performing schools in Massachusetts. It is thus, unsurprisingly, pleased to jettison the ballast that would steady it. In the larger picture, its actions are the trickle-down of a now decades-long curricular decline in colleges and universities, where courses of once-recognized formational value are swept aside by the outpour of identity and oppression faddism. Who kills Homer? indeed.

II. Homeric Language: As Rich as English Might Aspire to Become

It is in the power of language that Jefferson was perhaps most impressed by Homeric song. Homeric language he instinctively felt to be as rich as English might aspire to become: it is not that I am merely an enthusiast for Paleography. I set equal value on the beautiful engraftments we have borrowed from Greece and Rome, and am equally a friend to the encouragement of a judicious neology; a language cannot be too rich.

–EMILY TOWNSEND VERMEULE, Jefferson and Homer

THE INTERMITTENTLY ARCHAIC quality of this translation falls, thus far, to the strangeness of the Homeric hero, and the disparity of his world and outlook from those of succeeding ages into our own. Also key is the antiquity of the Iliad and its materials—its vast antiquity, its own self-cognizant antiquity and timelessness, and that of the Greek dactylic-hexametric tradition in which it resides. Homer’s age of heroes, says Roderick Beaton, cannot be a realistic depiction of any world that actually existed. Rather, it incorporates elements drawn from many different times, that range across a span of astonishing depth from the sixteenth to the eighth centuries BCE . Homer’s past has similarly been deemed a bottomless well. As concerns the dactylic hexameter, the specialized diction and formulas embedded within it evoke a context that is enormously larger and more echoic than the text or work itself, that brings the lifeblood of generations of poems and performances to the individual performance or text. The near clockwork regularity of the hexametric close: — figure figure | — — rolling forth line after endless—or theoretically endless—line, bespeaks the constancy and depth of time itself. It is thus both archaic register and unfailing rhythm that conjure the sense of Homeric alterity—the otherness of epic perception, manner, and compositional style itself. Such factors warrant a translation old enough to be new. It is ultimately a matter of structure and aesthetic, of a translation, as in the case of Pope, irradiated by the poetry of the past and thus reworking it into a new-old language of epic poetry.

Homer, as further shown below, was archaic in his own time and appreciated as such. The same applies to Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, glorifying Elizabeth I (Gloriana), whose putative ancestor, the mythologically remote King Arthur, is Spenser’s perfected paradigm of the twelve moral virtues. As articulated by Shakespeare scholar Lucy Munro, with precept for the present work, the high style entails, e.g., the self-conscious incorporation into imaginative texts of linguistic or poetic styles that would have registered as outmoded or old-fashioned to the audiences or readers of the works in which they appear; a deliberately old-fashioned style as a calculated continuity or re-evocation; and the archaizing writer’s effort to reshape the past, to mould the present, and proleptically to conjure times yet to come . . . creat[ing] a temporal hybrid that looks forward to its own incorporation into a national and literary future. So B. R. McElderry, again as applied to the present work: Spenser’s English is largely the English of his day, enriched from legitimate sources and by legitimate methods. His vocabulary is largely the vocabulary of his contemporaries. His archaic and dialect forms belong to no specific age or section. They color but do not obscure the diction, and many unusual forms appear but once. And so Coleridge—punning, perhaps, on the extent of Spenser’s poetic license—calling Spenser licentiously careless . . . in the orthography of words, varying the final words as the rhyme requires. But no matter. Coleridge and all posterity affirm Spenser, Coleridge adverting to the indescribable sweetness and fluent projection of his verse, very clearly distinguishable from the deeper and more interwoven harmonies of Shakespeare and Milton.

Archaism and a well-researched antiquarianism pervade Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) (the Robin Hood legend), as antique diction sets the tone for Tennyson’s Idylls of the Kings (1859) (the Arthurian legend, as with Spenser). Medievalism—its chivalry, knight errantry, courtliness, spiritual quests, and magnanimity—has its conceits and expectations: the contemporary or colloquial are not among them. The same may be said of English poet Ernest Dowson’s one-act fantasy, The Pierrot of the Moment (1897). How else capture, but by archaism and poetic diction, the exquisite disquisition on love between Lady Moonbeam and a stock character of commedia dell’arte? The work is in winsome rhymed pentameters, out-Shakespearing the Dream—art language through and through. On these and other grounds the present translation is itself a latter-day Kunstsprache ‘art language’ consonant with the language that was Homer’s, which I have elsewhere described as an artificial idiom constructed out of archaic, dialectal, and invented forms, used both for their metrical utility and to give the effect of distancing the poetic language from everyday speech. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton are Kunstsprachen (pl.). Monumental poetry (and often prose) in any language is a Kunstsprache, the art of its language being what makes poetry monumental. Nor is art language an attribute of epic poetry alone. In sum, the Homer of this translation is fixed or set in the idiom of no particular time. It is thus a work for any time, even as the confection that is Homer makes him a poet for all ages. If, as Pound submits, a civilization was founded on Homer, the least a translation can do for Homer is afford him a modicum of aplomb.

Though Greek dialect forms or their likeness defies imitation, and my invented forms (or coinages) are few, metrical utility, as in Homer, dominates. As early recognized, In verse the thought is wedded to a certain cadence, rhythm, meter, perhaps even rhyme. The metrical system used is actively determinant of the course of thought. And further, translation is inseparable from measure. In translation from one language to another, a measure must govern the transference that occurs across the interval separating the languages. It is in reference to this measure that a translation can be judged good or bad or even not a translation at all. And finally, the great biographer and arbiter of poets and poetry, Johnson: To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule—a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for identity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without disappointing it. This is further to signal that the present translation is not like any cultural artifact . . . inevitably and specifically located in [its] own contemporary context; is not the product of the age into which [it is] born; and cares not for the demands of a contemporary audience. Its concern is not the contemporary concern of updating, but the opposite—the reasonable extent and desirability of purposeful stylization.

Indeed, the literary translator discards unnecessary considerations of an identifiable ‘target’ audience whose needs the translated text is hypothetically designed to meet. Moreover, because no poet is ever ‘a man speaking to men’ [Wordsworth], nor any poem nothing more than a ‘voice’ articulating a ‘meaning’, so likewise is it impossible to justify a translated poem appealing to the ‘reader’ for its currency, its validation, or its continuing life. Finally, there are translations . . . which ‘do not so much serve the work as owe their existence to it’—which I take to mean that certain translations (few, to be sure) seek to meet not the expectations of person or period but the translator’s own, given his own disposition and particular sense of the author and his style. This is especially true amid the ongoing artistic debasement early encouraged by twentieth-century modernism. To tailor the adage, one must be true to oneself, even if born to the wrong century.

Reverting from the current and past centuries to those of Greek epic development, it cannot be my purpose to remake or even rehearse the arguments for the divers and thoroughgoing antiquity, and levels of antiquity, of Homer—dating to 3,500 years ago, at the earliest. This has been cumulatively established from the early nineteenth century to date by comparative literary/linguistic, archeological/historical, artistic, and oral-compositional analyses—to say nothing of once customarily intuitive or concordance-aided endeavors. The convergence of such approaches is compelling, whatever the residual issues. The inquiry has exponentially advanced with the aid of computer and algorithmic analyses, by which any element of Homeric composition—formulaic usage and its variants; alternate case endings in line-specific positions; types and lengths of enjambment—may be statistically determined. The findings in their graphed or variously schematized layouts are dizzying. My purpose, then, is to offer salient indications of Homeric antiquity, most derived from the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, whereby to account for my own antique manner. While likely known to the specialist, such points will be welcome to the newcomer, for whom this introduction to an oldly translated Iliad is largely intended.

Antiquity here keeps company with prominence, perpetuation. We recall that Troy, controlling access to the Hellespont and beyond (see map), was a strategic commercial center and military stronghold—the Hellespont forming part of the continental boundary between Europe and Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), and later forming the de facto divide between the two. Troy was the greatest and most fabled city of antiquity, a magnet for conquest, the contest for its taking inevitable. Herodotus, at the outset of his Histories (5th century BC), views the Trojan War as the official cause of enmity between Asia and Europe, East and West. Indeed, the Trojan War, in its ten-year duration, multitude of combatants, divine machinery, and associated legends, is antiquity’s world-cataclysmic event, involving the clash of wealth-fabled civilizations—Mycenae/Europe/the West; Troy/Asia/the East—and of divine, semidivine, and superhuman protagonists of times long past. The Trojan War is also a quasi-historical event in classical Greek thought, the focal point of its mythology and ever the referential and imaginative source of Western literary thought. To the extent the Iliad has ever been viewed as a life’s guide to valor, self-sacrifice, enmity, reconciliation, compassion, and religious devotion, it is catechism and cataclysm both. In having Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, lead the gathered hosts of Greece in a united cause, Homer established the foundation of Hellenic nationality; in short, he invented Greece—even as Greece through Roman assimilation shaped Europe and inspirited Western civilization (Greek-permeated Latin the language of Europe for a thousand years). Accordingly, the modern, modernist, colloquial, or bloodlessly monosyllabic translation of Homer—a certain just nowness—little serves.

Homer, by our reckoning, is an archaic Greek poet (his floruit c. 750 BC). His subject matter, the Trojan War (mid-13th century BC), was to Homer himself remote—the days of yore, as it were (as was medieval knighthood to Spenser). Indeed, and by degree, much of the material in the intervening five centuries of oral epic development was also remote: the stories, their characters, and the ever-changing language in which they were conveyed. The closer to Homer’s own time, doubtless the less archaic; though archaic elements, long layered in, would survive for metrical, stylistic, or other reasons. But it is not solely the Trojan War and its mythologically imputed cause—the abduction of Helen—that are at play. An earlier Homeric consciousness, reflected in courtly comportment and aesthetic sensibility, may be traced to the Mycenaean Age of Greece (16th–13th centuries BC), also known as the Late Bronze Age. It was during this period that Mycenae (see map), a military stronghold in southern Greece and then-regional center of Greek civilization, held sway—as far south as Crete and westward to parts of Asia Minor.

The back-reaching antiquity of Homer includes principal and ancillary stories and characters (often recounted in epic digressions); the detailed descriptions of physical objects unknown to Homer’s (or later) time; set or formulaic descriptions of activities or procedures recurring from time immemorial; and especially the conduct and accoutrements of war (so much of the poem describing combat). These are variously mirrored in the diction and syntax of Homer’s Greek—conditioned, in turn, by epic meter en route to the perfections of Homeric poetry as eventually codified. As Richard Janko explains:

Since the oral tradition admitted change and new creation to supplement what was lost as it was handed down through the generations, the amount of archaism having its origin at any specific date will fall as innovations increase—innovations that will in their turn eventually become archaisms if the tradition persists. The rate of innovations might be altered by factors such as dialect or methods of training bards, but short of memorisation some would be inevitable.

There is, in sum, a constant, though never total, changing of the archaic guard throughout the process of epic generation—throughout any bard’s faciebat to the epic tradition’s fecit. Archaisms, adopted or displaced during centuries of oral recitational development, are a function of dialect or related factors such as word formation or morphology. Thus, the more serviceable an archaism to meter, formulaic expression, or other poetic consideration, the more likely to keep its place, to be layered in or embedded, however old.

As renowned archaeologist Emily Vermeule has noted, with precept for the present effort:

Each poet learned the traditional phrases of singers before him, often extremely archaic, for it is one function of epic to maintain and transmit an archaic heritage for the next generation. . . . The multiple voices that sound to us out of an epic like the Iliad bring a huge vocabulary, layers of new language piled on old language, former dialects and modern dialects, and the sense of many trained and probing minds. . . .

While we are accustomed to crediting Homer with Achilles as the story’s overwrought protagonist and consider this the developmental acme of an earlier more basic tale, we do not imagine the Iliad’s ancillary detail—including its ample digressions and their ancillary detail—spun of whole or recent cloth. These include the heroic reminiscences of the Iliad’s own heroes. They also include the lovingly profuse descriptions of both utilitarian and precious objects, whether of human or divine craftsmanship—these the ancestral pride (and sources of authority) of their epic-heroic possessors.

Thus, even as the Iliad describes a time far preceding that of Homer and his audience, the poem’s characters delight in recollecting times earlier yet, the specifics allusive and elusive both. The past, itself the predicate for storytelling, has a past or past-perfect, or pluperfect, of its own. It is in this sense that the Iliad is soaked in retrospect, showing no clear division between present and past, but a recurring notion of the concurrency of time. As one scholar notes: elements of the so-called heroic past were juxtaposed with elements of the contemporary world or even recreated in the present. In this manner, the elite created a ‘supra-quotidian’ world and a timeless order that transcended the differences between past and present. To take a prominent example, Agamemnon—imaginatively quoting Zeus and Hera in a rare instance of retrojective speech within a speech—conjures matter of epic-present importance. Agamemnon thus makes his case: Zeus, ruler of men and gods, was himself once deluded by Atē ‘Madness’ upon the births of Eurystheus and Heracles—the former birth hastened, the latter delayed. This serves as paradigm for what Agamemnon, ruler of men, claims was his own Atē in dishonoring Achilles (Il. 19.105-152). Heracles, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, is here described as one of Zeus’ own generation, bringing the timeless past into the epic-present; Heracles, the mightiest of the first generation of heroes and exemplum for Achilles himself. Reference to Heracles occurs throughout the Iliad, thus his paradigmatic and ultimately Troy-related feats. These include an earlier sack of Troy with a band of six vessels after Laomedon, Priam’s predecessor, cheats Heracles of wages (Poseidon earlier cheated). A latter-day Heracles, Achilles strives (by other means) for the kleos ‘glory’ of Heracles, i.e., for Hera’s kleos = Heracles.

Homer and his characters, including the gods, further delight in describing physical objects of great antiquity (or recent manufacture, as the case may be), e.g., Achilles’ description of the tree-cut sceptre (Il. 1.239245); Homer’s description of the Hephaestus-made sceptre passed through generations of gods and men to Agamemnon (Il. 2.103-113) (discussed below); Nestor’s antique Dove Cup (Il. 11.696-711) (discussed below); and, in a category of its own, the ekphrastic Shield of Achilles (Il. 18.522-702), newly made by Hephaestus. By the same token, Homer’s characters revel in tracing ancestry itself. Even while boasting valor and self-worth in the midst of combat, they engage in detailed genealogical accounts of heroic ancestors and former comrades-in-arms (e.g., Il. 6.130-234, 20.224-267). Nor is combat the sole—and realistically unlikely—occasion for recollection. War councils, with their meal settings and exhortations, also serve. The audiences closest to Homer doubtless greeted these accounts, or digressions, with varying degrees of familiarity, while we—and the centuries preceding ours—have encountered them with a certain bewilderment. Make what we may of them—with the help of scholarly notation—they create a deep and florid mytho-historical mise-en-scène.

Nestor, oldest and most garrulous of the Greeks at Troy, is a multi-generational warrior: Already had / He seen two mortal generations come and gone, / Earl’er flourished and prosp’rous in sandy Pylos. / Amid the third he ruled . . . (Il. 1.256-259). During his extensive lifetime, Nestor associated and fought with an earlier-storied generation of heroes—including Theseus, mythical king and co-founder of Athens; and Theseus’ companion Perithous (Il. 1.270), king of the legendary Lapiths, whose son Polypoetes leads a contingent to Troy (Il. 2.777-784). Nestor’s ramblings, whatever their deeper relevance to the immediate story, reinforce the sense of both Nestor’s old age and the deep and eventful antiquity of his experience. Not least, they invest a crusty long-winded but advice-esteemed warrior with entertainment value for the epic audience. Nestor at times recounts his days of yore in mind-numbing detail (e.g., Il. 11.744-919). Otherwise, he comes across as a long-winded and officious Polonius (Il. 23.342-388). We thus have Nestor—himself an archaic relic, if you will—relating matter archaic to his Iliadic comrades, doubly archaic to Homer’s audience, and by multiples more archaic to listeners since. In other cases, a days-of-yore digression is of immediate relevance to the story, as in Phoenix’s lengthy parable of Meleager and the Calydonian Boar Hunt, providing a paradigm for Achilles’ renouncing his rage and returning to battle (Il. 9.589-679).

Epic also has proximate means for conjuring a past more legendary and revered than its own present. Thus, the emphasis on heightened strength—as when a fighter wields a stone that no two men nowadays (i.e., in Homer’s own time) might lift:

And Hector grasped and uplifted a stone, lying

Before the gate, thick at the base, but deadly sharp;

Not readily might any twain, the best about,

Have hefted it, a wagon’s load, from off the ground,

As nowadays men are, but blithely he handled

It, quite alone; and crooked-counseling Cronus’

Son disburdened it.

(Il. 12.475-481, also 20.314-317; cf. 21.449-453)

Such is Homer’s recollection of the Iliad’s heroes and their aggregate past—the more remote, the worthier. The epic past thus self-referentially unfolds: the performance-present audience admiring remote epic heroes, themselves admiring heroes remoter yet, along an ever retrojected and ultimately mythological continuum, the lines blurred between epic poetry, history, mythology, and evanescent fairy-tale elements.

It is through Agamemnon’s capital city, Mycenae rich in gold, that deep time in the Iliad is most apparent (see Il. 7.209, 9.49-50, 11.47-48). As the seat of royal power,