Lattimore writes in long, rolling lines that aim to reproduce something of the hexameter's weight. His diction sits at a formal, slightly archaic register: "hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls / of heroes" keeps the Greek word order and stacks nouns and modifiers in a way that feels ceremonial. Lombardo's lines are short and punchy. His opening, "Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, / Black and murderous," moves in quick beats and uses plain adjectives a contemporary reader would reach for in speech. In the Athena passage, Lattimore gives "that thing of fury, evil-wrought, that double-faced liar," while Lombardo writes "He's nothing but / A shifty lout." The gap in register is wide. One version sounds like a formal recitation, the other like someone talking. Lattimore trained as a classicist and kept close to Greek syntax, even when that produces awkward English. The payoff is that readers can sometimes feel the Greek structure underneath. In the leaves passage, his "As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity" preserves the original's symmetry. Lombardo cuts that mirroring: "Human generations are like leaves in their seasons" is smoother but drops the parallel construction that Homer uses to set the two things side by side before developing them. Lombardo reads well aloud, and his Achilles speech in Book 21, "You die too, friend. Don't take it hard," has the flat, cold delivery the scene calls for. Lattimore's "So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it?" keeps more of the Greek's rhetorical shape but sounds stiffer in English.
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, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.