Pope renders the Iliad in heroic couplets: rhymed iambic pentameter, end-stopped, polished, and decorous. The diction is high eighteenth-century English, with personifications ("Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore"), Latinate names (Jove, Minerva, Pluto for Zeus, Athena, Hades), and abstractions Homer does not use. Pope compresses and expands freely. The opening fourteen Greek lines become eight English ones, while Glaucus's leaves simile gains balanced antitheses ("They fall successive, and successive rise") that have no exact Greek counterpart. Achilles's brutal speech to Lycaon in Book 21 keeps its cruelty but acquires courtly poise: "Die then, my friend! what boots it to deplore?" This suits readers who want Homer as English poetry in its own right, and who enjoy Augustan verse. Anyone after Homer's plainness or speed should look elsewhere.
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!