The Iliad of Homer

Author: Homer

"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.

Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 11/15/2011
Pages: 608
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780226470498

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 11.3
Point Value: 25
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 12787 / Iliad

About the Author

Richmond Lattimore (1906-1984) was a poet, translator, and longtime professor of Greek at Bryn Mawr College. Richard Martin is the Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor in Classics at Stanford University.