Lombardo's Iliad is verse with short, broken lines and contemporary American speech. He cuts hard. The opening invocation runs six lines where the Greek runs seven, and he reorganizes the syntax into clipped English clauses: "Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, / Black and murderous." Diction is blunt and modern. Athena calls Ares "a shifty lout." Achilles tells the dying Lycaon "Don't take it hard." Lombardo, a classics professor at Kansas known for performing the poem aloud, drops Homeric formulas and epithets when they slow the line, and trims similes to their core image: the leaves passage loses the Ephyre detail entirely and ends on "Men too. Their generations come and go." Good for readers who want speed, force, and a battlefield voice that sounds like soldiers talking. Readers wanting Homer's full texture should look elsewhere.
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.