Contents
- Opening pages
- 1INTRODUCTION.
- 2POPE’S PREFACE TO THE ILIAD OF HOMER
- 3THE ILIAD.
- 4CONCLUDING NOTE.
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Homer · 1715 · translated by Alexander Pope
The Iliad is the founding poem of Western literature: a story of the last weeks of the Trojan War, built around the quarrel between the Greek champion Achilles and his king, Agamemnon, and what pride and grief cost both armies. Composed in ancient Greece nearly three thousand years ago, it is a poem of battle, honour, divine meddling and, at its close, unexpected mercy.
Alexander Pope published this English rendering in heroic couplets between 1715 and 1720, and it made him famous and independent. It remains the great poet's-translation of Homer, brilliant, polished and unmistakably of its own age. This edition keeps Pope's verse, with the Victorian scholar Theodore Buckley's introduction and notes on Homer's life and the long debate over who composed the poem, and offers a modern-English version of the prose alongside the original text.
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