Lattimore writes in free verse with long, sprawling lines that try to follow the movement of the Greek hexameter. His diction sits in a formal, slightly archaic register: in Book 1 he writes "hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls," where the inversion and the heavy nouns carry weight across the line. Butler, working in prose, runs the same material into forward-moving sentences with a cleaner word order: "Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades." Butler's rhythm is declarative and relatively quick. In the Book 21 passage, Lattimore gives Achilles "Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny," where the repetition of "also" and the slow placement of "strong destiny" at the line's end give the speech a ceremonial drag. Butler's version moves faster and drops that weight. Lattimore worked to keep Greek epithets, repeated formulas, and the oral texture of Homer intact. This produces passages that feel performed, even ritual, but the syntax can strain English. In the Book 9 speech, his version keeps both paths of fate structurally parallel across two full sentences, which matches what the Greek does. Butler removes that parallelism: "If I stay here and fight, I shall not return alive but my name will live for ever" collapses the two fates into a single sentence. The gain is readability; the loss is the formal weight the Greek puts on the choice. Butler's prose reads more like a novel; Lattimore's verse asks you to slow down and hear the lines as something spoken aloud to an audience.
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which puts pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.
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.