Lombardo writes in verse, Butler in prose, and that single difference shapes how each reads from the first line. Lombardo's opening is clipped and direct: "Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks / Incalculable pain." Short lines, plain words, contemporary American register. Butler runs longer and smoother: "Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures." The phrasing is formal without being archaic, but it moves at a narrator's pace rather than a performer's. In the Book 21 passage, Lombardo gives Achilles four short sentences that feel almost spoken aloud. Butler gives him a single longer sentence, calmer in rhythm, which changes how Achilles's cruelty lands on the ear. Lombardo cuts for immediacy. In the leaves passage he drops Glaucus's rhetorical question and the place-name that follows, keeping only the image and its application: "Men too. Their generations come and go." That removal loses context but keeps momentum. Butler stays closer to the sequence of the Greek, including the spring imagery and the phrase "as the old are passing away," which carries more of the original's elegiac weight. Lombardo's Athena calls Ares "a shifty lout," which has no precise equivalent in the Greek but captures the contempt in Homer's compound epithets. Butler's "villain incarnate" is more formal and more literal. Each translator accepts a different trade-off between fidelity to Homer's texture and ease for the modern reader.
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.
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.