Synopses & Reviews
"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus / and its devastation." For sixty years, that's how Homer has begun the Iliad in English, in Richmond Lattimore's faithful translation—the gold standard for generations of students and general readers.
This long-awaited new edition of Lattimore's Iliad is designed to bring the book into the twenty-first century—while leaving the poem as firmly rooted in ancient Greece as ever. Lattimore's elegant, fluent verses—with their memorably phrased heroic epithets and remarkable fidelity to the Greek—remain unchanged, but classicist Richard Martin has added a wealth of supplementary materials designed to aid new generations of readers. A new introduction sets the poem in the wider context of Greek life, warfare, society, and poetry, while line-by-line notes at the back of the volume offer explanations of unfamiliar terms, information about the Greek gods and heroes, and literary appreciation. A glossary and maps round out the book.
The result is a volume that actively invites readers into Homer's poem, helping them to understand fully the worlds in which he and his heroes lived—and thus enabling them to marvel, as so many have for centuries, at Hektor and Ajax, Paris and Helen, and the devastating rage of Achilleus.
Synopsis
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone
About the Author
Though he is traditionally credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, there is no reliable information about an actual, historical Homer. In antiquity, he was an honored figure, despite little being known about his life or even his era; he was credited then with several other shorter works in addition to the two epics. Current scholarship tends to view the poems as the work of many hands over many years, with differing opinions on the role and importance of any single figure in their creation or promulgation.Richmond Lattimore (1906-1984) was a poet, translator, and longtime professor of Greek at Bryn Mawr College.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Translators note
Maps
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Book Five
Book Six
Book Seven
Book Eight
Book Nine
Book Ten
Book Eleven
Book Twelve
Book Thirteen
Book Fourteen
Book Fifteen
Book Sixteen
Book Seventeen
Book Eighteen
Book Nineteen
Book Twenty
Book Twenty-One
Book Twenty-Two
Book Twenty-Three
Book Twenty-Four
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary of Names