Building Homer an English Palace

For my class reading of the first 100 lines of Book I of the Iliad, I finally had an excuse to pull down a translation I've been meaning to read for years: Alexander Pope's. I figured this was a good time for a test drive. I pulled it out of the slipcover and cracked it open.

The Homeric Cause of War

The first 100 lines of Book I of the Iliad don't really discuss the cause of the Trojan War. The action in this part of the poem happens 10 years into that war, and here Homer discusses the start of a quarrel in the Greek camp.

This conflict is about the will of the gods: 

"Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!"

In Homer's explanation, divine will causes human conflict, and humans reflect the will of the gods. Human motives play a part, but the gods work through them. Humans have a double motivation, and arguably, their own will acts inside the will of the gods like a boat steering on a powerful river.

The most concrete cause of the Greek conflict is Agamemnon dishonoring Chryses. This sparks the plague of Apollo. Homer asks which offended god started this quarrel, and answers his own question: Apollo. 

Pope's Translation

Pope presents at the beginning of each book an "Argument," which serves as a summary of the book's text.

I had to look up what Pope meant by "Argument." It’s not an argument in the sense I would normally use the word. It reminded me of the little synopsis you get in an opera program, something that lets you know where the story is headed before the curtain rises. Milton did the same sort of thing in Paradise Lost, so Pope’s readers would have recognized the convention immediately.

Reading silently doesn't really work with this translation. It works better reading it aloud. That's true of all poetry, but for a few different reasons in this case. You have to slow down, because the compact regularity makes it easy (for me) to lose track of what's being said. The regularity lulled me, and I stopped following the sense.

The sentences are sometimes difficult to follow. I always reached the rhyme, and mentally put a period there and stopped. Sometimes the thought continued beyond the rhyme. Reading aloud helped, because I couldn't just skate over the poetic line. I had to understand where the sentence continued going, its logical trajectory. The occasionally inverted word order didn't help. Pope likes to tuck his verbs at the end of the sentence: "Achilles’ wrath ... heavenly goddess, sing!" In English, we don't like to wait for action verbs. Reading silently was less effective at following the sense. Reading aloud made me hold the beginning of the sentence in my noggin until Pope finally let me know what was happening.

One of Pope's own lines came back to me: "The sound must seem an echo to the sense." He wrote those words in An Essay on Criticism (1711), before he began translating the Iliad. It holds true here. The voice and the ear unlock the flow of Pope's translation work.

The story behind the translation became almost as interesting as the poem to me.

Pope’s Iliad, published in six volumes between 1715 and 1720, quickly acquired a reputation independent of its usefulness as a translation. Samuel Johnson, writing in "Life of Pope," called it "the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen," a judgment that treats the work less as a transparent rendering of Homer than as an achievement of English poetry in its own right.

He took the project on while still a young man in his twenties. The money he earned literally changed the trajectory of his whole life. Pope sold the translation by subscription, which meant readers paid in advance and received the books as they appeared. A remarkable number of prominent people signed up. It was like 18th-century crowdfunding!

The usual figure given for Pope’s profit is around £5,000. The number is impressive, but what interests me more is the freedom it bought him. He no longer had to depend on an aristocratic patron. Translating Homer helped buy Pope the freedom to be Pope. He could write whatever he wanted.

He also made Homer sound thoroughly like Pope. Homer’s meter is dactylic hexameter. Pope didn't try to reproduce that. He put the poem into heroic couplets, rhymed iambic pentameter, which means that before we even get to diction or syntax, Homer has already entered an eighteenth-century English-sounding world.

Modern translators make different bargains with the poem. Lattimore, Fagles, and Wilson generally leave more of Homer’s repetition, formula, and bluntness visible. Pope keeps shaping everything toward balance, rhyme, finish, and grandeur. 

So Homer’s opening (Lattimore's translation):

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus ...

becomes:

Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful springOf woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!

This is not Homer sounding ancient in English. It is Homer passing through Pope’s talented poetic ear, and filtered down through his pen. Like a skilled organ interpreter playing Bach, Pope makes Homer his own. The result is grand, musical, polished, and unmistakably a product of the eighteenth century. He doesn’t sound like a bard improvising before an ancient audience. He sounds like someone built Homer an English palace, and let him move in.

Bibliography:

"Alexander Pope." Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alexander-pope. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026."Alexander Pope." Translating Homer: From Papyri to Alexander Pope, University of Michigan Library, https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/translating-homer--from-papyri/alexander-pope. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026."Argument (Literature)." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_%28literature%29. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026.Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore, University of Chicago Press, 1951.Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Alexander Pope, notes and introduction by Theodore Alois Buckley, Project Gutenberg, 1899, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/6130-h.htm. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026.Johnson, Samuel. "Pope." Lives of the English Poets, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5101/5101-h/5101-h.htm. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026."John Milton." Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-milton. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026.Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69379/an-essay-on-criticism. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026."Translating Homer." Homer in Print: The Transmission and Reception of Homer’s Works, University of Chicago Library, https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/homer-print-transmission-and-reception-homers-works/translating-homer/. Accessed 5 Oct. 2026.