Lombardo writes in free verse with short, punchy lines and a contemporary register. Pope writes in heroic couplets, the rhymed iambic pentameter that dominated English poetry in his era, and in a formal, elevated diction. The difference is immediate in Book 1: Lombardo opens "Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, / Black and murderous," where the line break makes "Black and murderous" land as a blunt two-word judgment. Pope gives "Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!" The inverted syntax and the rhyme with "spring" and "sing" create a ceremonial entrance. In Book 21, Lombardo's Achilles says "You die too, friend. Don't take it hard." Pope's version runs to a full couplet: "Die then, my friend! what boots it to deplore?" The gap in register across those two lines tells you almost everything about how each translator heard Greek epic. Lombardo cuts for speed and directness. He removes the extended simile structure from the leaves passage in Book 6, giving "Men too. Their generations come and go" where Pope writes out the full movement: "Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; / Another race the following spring supplies." Pope adds detail and symmetry the Greek carries; Lombardo drops the elaboration and trusts the bare statement. Pope, writing for early 18th-century readers who expected verse to be polished and rhetorically complete, often adds material for the sake of the couplet's balance. In the Book 9 fate speech, Pope's "My fates long since by Thetis were disclosed, / And each alternate, life or fame, proposed" is smooth but adds a summarizing clause Homer does not include. Lombardo stays closer to the Greek's plain conditional structure.
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.
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!