I here draw attention to a number of the conscious decisions I made about the technical and idiomatic updating of E. V. Rieu’s text.1
1. The oral poet repeats epithets, phrases, sentences, speeches and even whole scenes throughout (see Introduction, p. xxviii), but Rieu did not always use exactly the same words just because Homer did. I have tried to settle on the same form of words for some of the most common repetitions, in most cases by selecting one of Rieu’s versions to impose across the board (but see 6 below). The Homeric way of introducing and closing speeches has also been restored; so too has the Homeric way of dealing with similes.
2. The unHomeric language of king, empire and modern warfare has been removed. ‘Royal’, ‘king’, ‘prince’, ‘imperial’, ‘officer’, ‘battalion’, ‘fleet’, ‘squadron’, etc., have been replaced by non-specific terms like ‘leader’, ‘contingent’, ‘ship’. ‘Heaven’ and ‘the heavens’, with their Christian connotations, have also gone, and I have tried (not always successfully) to avoid contemporary financial language like ‘payment’, with its implications of the exchange of coinage.
3. Rieu, a most courteous man, ascribed a similarly courtesy to Greek heroes, making them say ‘Please’ and ‘Would you ... ?’ when the Greek expresses a straight command ‘Do X’. The command form has been restored.
4. Rieu took the view that Homer often ascribed to gods what we would ascribe to nature, for example, or chance, and for lxiv notes on this revision that reason sometimes omitted them. But when Homer said the gods did something, he meant it: so in such cases divinities are restored.
5. Rieu used Homer’s terms for Greeks, of which there were three – literally, ‘men from Achaea’ (Achaeans), ‘men from Argos’ (Argives) and ‘descendants of Danaus’ (Danaans). These Homeric names have very considerable historical interest, most obviously because Homer does not call Greece or the Greeks by their received ancient and modern names, ‘Hellas’ and ‘Hellenes’. Homer does mention a region called ‘Hellas’ (e.g. 2.683, see map 4), though no one (to my knowledge) knows why that local name should later have become applied to all Greece.2 But since Agamemnon’s expedition did in fact consist of Greeks from what we know as the central and southern Greek mainland and islands (Mycenaean Greece), Homer’s ‘Achaeans’, ‘Argives’ and ‘Danaans’ have all been called ‘Greeks’ throughout this translation.3
6. The meaning of the repeated epithets is often disputed. As ancient commentaries make clear, even Greeks themselves were baffled by many of them. One has to take a position on this. So I differ from Rieu in some of the more common disputed epithets as follows:
agkulomêteô not ‘of the crooked counsels’ but ‘sickle-wielding’
aigiokhoio not ‘aegis-bearing’ but ‘who drives the storm-cloud’
atrugetoio not ‘unharvested’ but ‘murmuring’
eriounos (of HERMES) not ‘the luck-bringer’ but ‘the runner’
euruopa not ‘far-seeing’ but ‘far-thundering’
glaukôpis not ‘of the Flashing Eyes’ or ‘bright-eyed’ but ‘grey-eyed’
I have consistently translated dîogenês as ‘Olympian-born’, dîotrephês as ‘Olympian-bred’, helikôps as ‘dark-eyed’, and hêrôs as ‘warrior’. ‘Rosy-fingered Dawn’ and ‘winged words’, of course, stay. I have given up on mônukhes hippoi, ‘single-hoofed horses’, translating simply as ‘horses’; likewise euknêmîdes Akhaioi, ‘Greeks with fine greaves’, have usually become ‘Greek men-at-arms’ (though it is indeed historically very interesting that around 1200 BC Greeks were, apparently, the only soldiers to wear these leather or metal shin-guards).
7. As in Rieu, silent, interpretative glosses have been added to the text where they aid understanding; and names of fathers and epithets have occasionally been omitted, or changed for the sake of clarity (e.g. ‘Patroclus’ in place of ‘the son of Menoetius’). For a list of omitted fathers’ names, see Appendix 2.
8. The new chapter summaries and marginal notes will enable readers to keep a firm grip on a plot notorious for its digressions and sheer multiplicity of characters.
9. Line numbers in this revision are from Homeri opera I-II (Iliad), edited by D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920, third edition).