Butler writes plain prose, no line breaks, no fixed rhythm, aimed at moving a reader through the story without ceremony. His diction is late-Victorian but not ornate: "Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees" sits close to ordinary speech. Chapman writes in rhyming couplets with long, galloping lines, and his register is Elizabethan in texture. "The wind in autumn strows / The earth with old leaves then the spring the woods with new endows" has audible momentum but also archaic syntax that requires re-reading. The same leaves passage in Butler takes a sentence; in Chapman it takes two and a half couplets shaped by the demands of rhyme. A reader who wants to sit with the sound of the poem will find Chapman gives that; a reader who wants to move quickly through a scene will find Butler easier. Butler treats readability as primary. He cuts the elaboration that Greek verse and Chapman both carry. In Book 21, Achilles taunts his captive with "I too, see you not how I am great and goodly?" which is direct and cold, matching the Greek's bluntness. Chapman adds rhetorical weight: "a fair young man, and rarely magnified" has a performer's expansiveness, drawing out the speech for effect rather than fidelity to length. Chapman came before modern Greek scholarship and worked partly from Latin intermediaries, which shows in passages where he adds lines not in the Greek. Butler, writing at the end of the nineteenth century with access to established philology, stays closer to the structure of the original but removes almost all rhythmic energy in doing so.
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.
Achilles' baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that impos'd
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls loos'd
From breasts heroic; sent them far to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave:
To all which Jove's will gave effect; from whom first strife begun
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis' godlike son.