Rieu writes in prose, Green in verse, and that single difference shapes everything else about how each reads. Rieu's sentences are modern and direct: "The family of man is like the leaves of the trees" moves fast and sounds like conversation. Green preserves the line-by-line shape of the Greek and marks it with a slightly elevated register: "As the generation of leaves, so is that of mankind" is formal without being archaic. In the Book 9 passage, Rieu writes "there will be eternal glory instead," a clean declarative sentence. Green writes "I'll lose my homecoming, but gain imperishable renown," keeping closer to the Greek word "kleos" by reaching for "renown." Green also uses the transliterated Greek spellings, Achilles becoming "Achilleus," Hera becoming "Hērē," which adds a scholarly texture to almost every line. Rieu's prose aims at a reading public with no Greek. His Book 21 passage cuts Achilles' speech to its emotional core and smooths the syntax into something a reader can follow at speed. Green keeps the speech's full rhetorical moves: "Yet over me too hang death and all-mastering destiny" preserves the boast and the resignation in the same breath, close to the Greek structure. What Rieu loses in compression is the poem's oral texture, the sense that lines were built to be heard one at a time. What Green loses is the ease a prose reader brings to unbroken paragraphs. Green's footnote in the Book 1 passage (marking "their selves" with a superscript 1) indicates a critical apparatus behind the translation, which tells a reader something about what kind of book they would be holding.
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.
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.