Lattimore writes in a long, loose line, usually six stresses, that keeps the forward movement of Greek hexameter without forcing rhyme. His register sits between formal and plain: "the live timber / burgeons with leaves again" (Book 6) reads as elevated but not archaic. Pope writes in rhymed heroic couplets, which were the prestige verse form in early eighteenth-century England. His register is consistently formal and ornate. Where Lattimore gives Achilles "my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting" (Book 9), Pope gives "Short is my date, but deathless my renown," a tight, polished epigram. The couplet form produces compression and symmetry; Lattimore's line produces expansion and accumulation. Lattimore prioritizes word-for-word closeness to the Greek and preserves Homer's repeated epithets and compound phrases. He keeps Athena as "grey-eyed," retains the structure of Achilles' two-fate speech, and follows the Greek sentence order where English allows it. This fidelity means his lines can feel heavy or syntactically awkward. Pope treats the Greek as raw material for English poetry of his own era. In Book 21, Lattimore renders Achilles' taunt with blunt directness: "So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it?" Pope turns the same lines into theatrical rhetoric: "Die then, my friend! what boots it to deplore?" Pope adds rhetorical punch and loses the flat brutality. Lattimore retains the brutality and loses the rhetorical shape.
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.
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurled to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!