Pope writes in heroic couplets, pairs of rhymed iambic pentameter lines, and the form shapes everything. At Book 1, his "Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!" is elevated and ceremonial, with a word order English speakers would not use in any other context. The diction is archaic throughout: "foredoom'd," "what boots it," "dost thou." Rieu writes continuous prose with no line breaks and no rhyme, and his register sits much closer to modern speech. At Book 21, where Achilles dismisses a captive's begging, Pope keeps formal verse distance, while Rieu has Achilles say "Why make such a song about it?" That is conversational English, deliberately so. The two translations feel like different centuries because they are. Pope's 1715 translation was written for an English literary audience and openly adds polish, compression, and rhetorical symmetry. At Book 6, the leaves simile, he turns Homer's plain repetition of "generation" into a neat couplet antithesis: "Now green in youth, now withering on the ground." The Greek is more plainly cumulative, and Rieu follows that pattern more closely: "one generation grows, the other fades." Rieu, writing in 1950 for Penguin's general readership, prioritizes clarity and forward movement. He loses the formal weight Pope provides, but he keeps the story moving without interruption. Pope gives readers a prestige English poem; Rieu gives readers the narrative with minimal friction. Each removes something the other keeps.
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!
Anger — sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that accursed anger, which brought the Greeks endless sufferings and sent the mighty souls of many warriors to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and a feast for the birds; and Zeus' purpose was fulfilled. It all began when Agamemnon lord of men and godlike Achilles quarrelled and parted.