Which translation of The Iliad should you read?

A landmark of English poetry that made Pope’s fortune, and unmistakably an eighteenth-century one. He recasts Homer’s battle-fury in polished heroic couplets of dazzling craft, every line balanced and burnished. It is formal, elevated, and freer with the sense than a scholar would like, so read Pope for the music of English verse and the taste of his age, not as a clear window onto the Greek. Free and public domain.

Famously judged by the scholar Richard Bentley: “a pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer.”

Homer told as a plain English novel. Butler turns the Iliad into brisk, clear prose on the theory that ordinary readers want the story, not the metre, and it is an easy, free way in if verse puts you off. You lose the poetry entirely, and his Victorian idiom shows its age, but the narrative drive is real and the meaning dependable. The same steady hand that did his prose Odyssey.

A long-standing free prose version; companion to his better-known prose Odyssey.

The grand modern standard. Fagles writes long, driving free-verse lines with real sweep and force, and Bernard Knox’s superb introduction and notes make the Penguin edition a complete package. It runs a touch elevated and expansive rather than plain, and longer than the Greek, but it reads aloud magnificently and carries the poem’s grief and violence at full weight. A rich, safe choice for a first Iliad.

The dominant classroom and general-reader Iliad since 1990; acclaimed audiobook by Derek Jacobi.

The scholar’s Iliad. Lattimore keeps a long six-beat line that mirrors the Greek almost verse for verse, preserving the formulas, the epithets, and the word order as far as English allows. The result is less fluid and more demanding than Fagles, and it can feel deliberately strange, but no widely read version stays closer to what Homer actually wrote. The one to read beside the Greek, or when fidelity matters most.

The University of Chicago edition; the benchmark for faithful English Homer for seventy years.

The modern reset, as her Odyssey was. Wilson writes a quick, clear iambic pentameter matched line-for-line to the Greek, so nothing bloats, and her plain, exact diction strips away centuries of grandeur to make the war feel immediate and terrible again. Her introduction and notes are outstanding. Some readers miss the old sweep, but for a first Iliad you will actually read aloud, this is the one.

Her 2023 Iliad followed the acclaimed 2017 Odyssey; widely reviewed and taught.