Choosing your Iliad: which translation to read
The Iliad is the older of the two Homeric poems and the harder one: fifteen thousand lines about a few weeks of a war that was already nine years old when the poem begins, and that the poem never shows ending. This guide covers the five translations we keep in print, and the single question that separates them.
As with the Odyssey, there is no best Iliad. There is grandeur and there is plainness, the poem sung and the poem stated, and the translator you choose decides which of those you get. Below is what each of the five does, and the reader each one suits.
The first word is anger
The Iliad names its subject in its opening word — mēnis, the wrath of Achilles — and then holds to it. Not the fall of Troy, which the poem leaves to later hands; not the wooden horse, which is nowhere in it. The subject is one soldier’s refusal to fight, the deaths that refusal causes among his own side, and what it finally costs him to come back. A translation that reaches for the whole Trojan War has already lost what the poem is about.
Everything narrows to that quarrel. The gods take sides and meddle; the fighting is described with a butcher’s precision, every death particular and named; and the poem closes not on a victory but in a tent at night, an old king and the man who killed his son sharing a meal. Its last event is a funeral.
Fifty-one days, and a whole world
The action spans about seven weeks in the tenth year of the siege — 15,693 lines for fifty-one days. What fills them is not plot but plenitude: the long catalogue of ships, the similes that step off the battlefield into fields and weather and animals, the set-piece speeches, the armour described rivet by rivet. The poem is slow on purpose, and a translator must decide whether to carry that weight or lift some of it off.
That decision is not neutral. Lighten the Iliad and it reads faster and loses its gravity; keep the weight and it asks more of you and gives back more. The five versions below sit at different points on exactly that line.
What a translator has to carry
The mechanics are Homer’s throughout: the six-beat line no English metre matches, the fixed epithets, the names that can hold their Greek shapes — Akhilleus, not Achilles — or take the forms English readers already know. But the Iliad leans harder on two of them than the Odyssey does. Its repetitions are relentless, whole passages returning word for word, and a translator either lets them stand as the poem’s pulse or thins them for variety. And its violence is constant and exact; how plainly that is put on the page is the difference between a war poem and a pageant.
This is where the five part company — not over how faithful to be, but over what to be faithful to.
The five we keep in print
Each recommended translation is named by its translator, with its verdict and the reader it fits. What you are choosing between is kinds of faithfulness, not degrees of it.
Which translation
No ranking — they answer different questions. 5 in print:
- Robert Fagles · Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
Free verse in long driving lines — the same register as his Odyssey.
Choose it if you want momentum above all, or you are reading it out loud to somebody.
get the book - Richmond Lattimore · University of Chicago Press
Six-beat lines tracking the Greek clause by clause, with the epithets and repetitions left intact.
Choose it if you are reading with the Greek beside you, or you want to see the formulaic machinery rather than have it smoothed away.
get the book - Stanley Lombardo · Hackett Classics
Free verse in short, blunt lines; a modern battlefield idiom.
Choose it if you want the soldiers to sound like soldiers rather than like heroes.
get the book - Robert Fitzgerald · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Lines leaning on blank verse, formal diction, and the Greek names in Greek forms — Akhilleus, not Achilles.
Choose it if you want a poet’s Iliad and do not mind relearning the spellings.
get the book - Caroline Alexander · Ecco
Line for line, plain diction, the repetitions left standing rather than varied for elegance.
Choose it if you want the poem’s plainness rather than its grandeur.
get the book
Which one for you
For momentum, and a version made to be read aloud, Robert Fagles drives the hardest. For the Greek line tracked clause by clause, Richmond Lattimore is the standing literal standard. Stanley Lombardo makes the soldiers sound like soldiers rather than heroes; Robert Fitzgerald gives you a poet’s Iliad in the Greek spellings; and Caroline Alexander holds to the poem’s plainness, line for line, where the others reach for the grand.
Choose the faithfulness you want. The Iliad has come through every English it has ever been put into, and it will come through yours.