The Iliad of Homer - Tapa dura

"Perhaps closer to Homer in every way than any other version made in English." -Peter Green, New Republic "The feat is so decisive that it is reasonable to foresee a century or so in which nobody will try again to put the Iliad in English verse." -Robert Fitzgerald "Each new generation is bound to produce new translations. [Lattimore] has done better with nobility, as well as with accuracy, than any other modern verse translator. In our age we do not often find a fine scholar who is also a genuine poet and who takes the greatest pains over the work of translation." -Hugh Lloyd-Jones, New York Review of Books"

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 new maps round out the book. The result is a volume that actively invites new readers into Homer's poem, helping them to understand 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.