The Iliads of Homer: Translated According to the Greek
1888
The Iliads of Homer: Translated According to the Greek
1888
Translated by George, 1559? Chapman
The Iliad begins not with the launch of a thousand ships but with a single word: wrath. Achilles' anger at Agamemnon's theft of his war-prize Briseis sets in motion a chain of events that will kill the best of the Greeks and the bravest of Trojans alike. This is not a simple tale of heroes and monsters but a shattering portrait of how pride and grief tear apart men who should be allies. Homer's gods are petty, meddling, and all too human, watching their favorites die with what seems like distant amusement. Yet amid the carnage, moments of tender grief emerge: Priam pleading for his son's body, Achilles remembering his father's love, the women mourning what war will take from them. The Iliad asks an unbearable question: what is any of it worth, when death comes for everyone, hero and coward alike? It has no easy answers. It only has the terrible beauty of the fight.
Editions
X-Ray
“…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible”
— Homer
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.””
— Homer
“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.””
— Homer
“Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.””
— Homer
“Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.””
— Homer
“We men are wretched things.””
— Homer
“Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.””
— Homer
“Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall””
— Homer
“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.””
— Homer
