Sample from the Opening of the Poem

BOOK I.

Of the biiter contention between hero and king; of pestilence on earth and strife
in heaven.

THE wrath of Achilles the Peleus-begotten, O Song-queen, sing,
Fell wrath, that dealt the Achaians woes past numbering;
Yea, many a valiant spirit to Hades’ halls did it send,
Spirits of heroes, and cast their bodies to dogs to rend,
And to fowls of ravin,—yet aye Zeus’ will wrought on to its end                            5
Even from the hour when first that feud of the mighty began,
Of Atreides, King of Men, and Achilles the godlike man.
Which of the Gods into hate and contention drave these twain?
The son of Latona and Zeus, for his wrath was the war-king’s bane,            10
That he sent forth a plague through the host, and the people were smitten and died;
For Atreides rejected the prayer of his priest when Chryses cried,
When bereft of his daughter the sea-swift ships of Achaia he sought,
To deliver from thraldom his child, and a countless ransom he brought;
And the wreaths of Far-smiter Apollo in holy hands he bare
On a golden sceptre, and cried unto all the Achaians there,                                    15
And to Atreus’ sons, the arrayers of war-folk, uttered his prayer:
   “Ye sons of Atreus, Achaians battle-harness-dight,
May the Gods vouchsafe you, which dwell in the halls of Olympus’ height,
To smite Troy-town, and to win safe home from your war-toils done:
But take ye my ransom, give back my child, my darling one,                         20
For dread of Far-smiter Apollo, Zeus Allfather’s son.”
Then shouted the other Achaians thereto in favouring wise
To have respect to the priest, and to take the ransom-price.
But it pleased not the spirit of Atreus’ son, Agamemnon their lord,
For he shamefully drave him forth, with a stern and a masterful word :                25
   “Let me not find thee, old man, by the hollow galleys more,
Neither tarrying now, neither wending again to the ship-fringed shore,
Lest of the wreath of the God and his sceptre thy help be small!
I will not give her up:—nay, sooner shall old age find my thrall
In Argos, afar from her fatherland-home, in our palace hall,                         30
While yet at the loom she doth pace, and arrayeth her lord’s bed there.
Begone, and provoke me not—that thy feet safe homeward may fare!”
   And the old man quailed at his eyes, and shrank from the threat half spoken
By the shore of the thunderous-tumbling sea he went heart-broken:
Far thence he went, and alone that old man cried in prayer,                                 35
Cried to Apollo the King, whom Lêto the fair-tressed bare:
   “Hear, Silverbow, who art warder of Chryse and Killa’s fane,
Hear, thou who in might of thy godhead o’er Tenedos’ isle dost reign!
Smintheus! if ever I wreathed thy temple in lovely wise,
If ever I burnt unto thee on thine altar goodly thighs                                            40
Of bulls and of goats, vouchsafe this boon to the stricken in years—
May thine arrows requite the Danaan men for these my tears!”
So spake he with prayer and strong crying, and Phoebus Apollo heard;
And adown from the crest of Olympus he swept with soul wrath-stirred.
His bow on his shoulders he bare, and his quiver, the doom-enfolder:                  45
Clashed they and clanged they, the shafts on the wrathful Archer’s shoulder,
At the swoop of him earthward: his coming was like to the onrush of night.
Down sat he aloof from the galleys; he sped forth a shaft on its flight :
Terribly rang the twang of the silver lightning-bright.
First on the mules of the host and the fleetfoot hounds it came,                          50
Thereafter his bitter-keen dart at the Danaan men did he aim,
Smiting them: flared evermore the close-thronged death-pyres’ flame.

Review Comment

A translation from Australia, Way’s line-by-line translation of the Iliad, earned praise from his contemporaries—“he is unquestionably the most Homeric of English translators of Homer since Chapman” (qu. Young 135)—but the truly wretched quality of the English verse tells us more about popular Victorian taste in Homer translations than anything else.

Readers who would like to sample Volume I of Way’s translation (Books I to XII) should use the following link: Way Iliad.

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