Lombardo writes in short, punchy lines that favor contemporary American speech. His opening gives "Black and murderous," two blunt adjectives where Green has "calamitous," a more formal, Latinate word. Lombardo cuts freely: his Book 6 leaves passage runs four lines to Green's four, but Lombardo removes the specific image of the wind scattering leaves to the ground, keeping only the seasonal cycle. His Achilles speech in Book 9 opens with "If I stay here and fight" and moves fast, without Thetis's name or the phrase "two contrary spirits," both present in the Greek. The rhythm throughout is conversational, close to spoken English, and line breaks fall on natural pauses rather than on syntactic units from the original. Green stays closer to the Greek line count and keeps more of Homer's content on the page. In Book 9, he includes "two contrary spirits" and names silver-footed Thetis, details Lombardo drops. His diction sits between archaic and contemporary: he keeps the epithet "grey-eyed Athēnē" and writes "whole-hoofed horses," which is accurate to the Greek compound but unusual in modern English. He also retains the Greek spellings of names throughout, a choice aimed at readers interested in how the poem sits in its original context. The Athena speech in Book 5 shows this clearly: Green's version runs longer and includes "raving madman, a sick piece of work, a two-faced / liar," where Lombardo has only "A shifty lout." Green adds more color; Lombardo moves faster.
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.
Wrath, goddess, sing of Achilles Pēleus's son's
calamitous wrath, which hit the Achaians with countless ills—
many the valiant souls it saw off down to Hādēs,
souls of heroes, their selves1 left as carrion for dogs
and all birds of prey, and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled
from the first moment those two men parted in fury,
Atreus's son, king of men, and the godlike Achilles.