Chapman writes in long rhyming couplets with a loose, expansive feel. His line "The wind in autumn strows / The earth with old leaves" (Book 6) takes the Greek's spare image and stretches it into two full lines, adding "autumn" where Homer has none. The register is early modern English, with inversions and contractions that mark it as Jacobean verse. Reck uses shorter, unrhymed lines in a contemporary register: "wind spins them to the ground, but the forest / brings new ones forth again" keeps close to Homer's syntax without archaism. Chapman's rhythms are muscular and declamatory, built for reading aloud in a hall. Reck's are quieter, closer to plain speech. Neither translator uses prose; the formal difference is couplet weight against open-ended free verse. Chapman treats the source text as raw material and adds freely. In Book 5, he compresses Athena's long speech into a tight judgment: "He is inconstant, impious, mad," a line with no direct equivalent in the Greek, which describes Ares more obliquely. That compression has energy but removes the detail Homer gives about Ares's specific broken promise. Reck stays closer to the speech's structure and gives Athena's rebuke its actual content, including her accusation that Ares is "that double-crosser." In the Book 9 fate speech, Chapman adds "t' abridge my life for praise," a moral gloss Achilles does not quite speak. Reck removes that addition and stays with the two-path structure the Greek presents. Chapman gains rhetorical force; Reck gains fidelity to what the character actually says.
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.
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' maniac rage:
ruinous thing! it roused a thousand sorrows
and hurled many souls of mighty warriors
to Hades, made their bodies food for dogs
and carrion birds—as Zeus's will foredoomed—
from the time relentless strife came between
Atreus' son, a king, and brave Achilles.