®od^ ^.omertbe ju fctn, aud& nut aU lehtn, ift fc^en.-GoETHi HOMER THE ILIAD WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION A. T. MURRAY, Ph.D. PEOFESSOR OV CLASSICAL LITERATURK, STANFORD UNIVERSITIT, CALIFORNIA LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS MCMXXVIII CONTENTS OF VOLUME I Introduction Vil 2 Book I. 50 Book II. 116 Book III, 152 Book IV. Book V. 194 Book VI. 262 Book VIL 302 Book VIII. 338 Book IX. 382 Book X. 436 Book XL 480 Book XII, 544 INTRODUCTION In rendering the Iliad the translator has in the main followed the same principles as those which guided him in his translation of the Odyssey. He has endeavoured to give a version that in some measure retains the flowing ease and simple directness of Homer's style, and that has due regard to the emphasis attaching to the arrangement of words in the original ; and to make use of a diction that, while elevated, is, he trusts, not stilted. To attain to the nobility of Homer's manner may well be beyond the possibilities of modern English prose. Matters of a controversial nature have as a rule not been touched upon in the notes to this edition, and the brief bibhography is meant merely to sug- gest books of high interest and value to the student of the Iliad. Few of those which deal primarily with the higher criticism have been included, because the ti'anslator is convinced that such matters lie wholly outside the scope of this book. In the brief introduction prefixed to his version of the Odyssey the translator set forth frankly the fact that to many scholars it seems impossible to speak of Homer as a definite individual, or to accept the view that in the early period either the Iliad or the Odyssey had attained a fixed form. At the same time he laid stress upon the further fact that one of vii INTRODUCTION the significant results of the Homeric studies of recent years has been the demonstration (for it is nothing less) that the foundations upon which de- structive critics have based their work have been insufficient to support the superimposed weight—in short, that both the methods and the results of the analytical criticism of the nineteenth century were misleading. It seems fitting that he should now give, if not a confession of faith, at least a state- ment of the basic facts upon which his faith rests. These may be stated briefly in the following pro- positions. I. The proper method of approach to the Homeric problem, and the only one that can possibly lead to an understanding of Homeric poetry, is to recognize that in dealing with the Iliad and the Odyssey we have to do with poems each clearly evincing the constructive art of a great poet (whether or not the same for both poems is a separate question). We should study them as poems, and in order to under- stand them we must first of all apprehend clearly the poet's subject, not in any limited sense, but with all its imphcations. Given the Wrath as a theme, we must grasp clearly both the origin and the nature of that wrath, and must formulate a conception of the character of Achilles. For unless we are clear in our minds as to what manner of man he was we cannot hope to understand the ovXofiivij firji't'i or the poem of which it is the theme. Only when we have fully apprehended the nature both of the man and of his wrath, and have followed both through the preceding books, can we venture to take up such a problem, for instance, as that con- nected with the sending of the embassy in the ninth viii —a INTRODUCTION Iliad ; and if the poet has convinced us that the wrath was too fierce and awful a thing to break down at the first set-back of the Greeks ; if tlie situation at the end of Book VIII. in no sense cor- responds to what Achilles craves and in no sense satisfies his hate ; if we have found Achilles pour- trayed as one that will not be bought ; then the assumption that " in the original poem " the promise of Zeus to Thetis was at once followed by a Greek defeat, and that the whole content of the Iliad from the early part of Book II. to the battle scenes of Book XI. is a later insertion will be to us an im- probable one. Nor will it matter how many or how learned may be the scholars who hold that view. The poet has taught us better, and the poet is our guide. Similarly, in the case of the Odyssey, if we have clearly apprehended all that the Return implies the adventures of the hero on his actual journey home, the lot of the wife, beset by ruthless wooers in his absence, and of the boy, of whom we would know whether he will make head against those who seek to drive him from his heritage, and stand by his father's side as a worthy comrade when the great day of reckoning comes—if we have regard to all this and all else that is implied in the great story, then we shall look with incredulity upon those who would take from the original Odyssey the pourtrayal of these very things, and who ask us to see in the " first four books—the so-called " Telemachy — separate poem having neither beginning nor end, and quite inexplicable save as a part of the Odyssey. The Homeric criticism of the century foUomng the publication of Wolf's Prolegomena (1795), for all the INTRODUCTION keenness of its analytical studies, lost sight almost wholly of the poet as a creative artist. It is time that we came back to the poetry itself and to the poet, who alone can interpret it aright. II. No less necessary to a right understanding of the Iliad and the Odyssey is it that we should com- prehend the poet's technique, and especially the way in which this was conditioned by the fact that the poems were recited, not each in its entirety, but in successive rhapsodies. Here much work remiains to be done, but we may safely assume that each rhapsody had a starting-point and an end, and that it was intended to be intelligible even to those who had not heard what immediately preceded. When this fact is taken into consideration the difficulties caused by the council of the gods at the opening of the fifth book of the Odyssey, or by that at the opening of the eighth Iliad, vanish away. They are simply incidental to the method of presentation in rhapsodies, and while a strictly logical analysis may feel them as difficulties, they cannot justly be used as arguments against the integrity of the poems. For logical analysis is not necessarily the best criterion for judging a work of creative imagination. We should certainly not close our eyes to difficulties, but if what we learn of the poet's technique explains their occurrence, they cease to be stumbling-blocks. The above illustrations are but two out of a multitude that might be cited, and the more closely the poet's technique is studied, his manner of meeting and surmounting obstacles incidental to the presentation of his matter in narrative form, the problems con- nected with the opening and closing of successive rhapsodies, the necessity of narrating in sequence INTRODUCTION events which we should naturally think of as occurring simultaneously, etc.—the more closely we study these things, the less significance shall we be led to attach to purely logical difficulties. As a guide for the solution of the problem of the Homeric poems merely analytical criticism leads nowhither ; the phantasy of the artist, working under the laws governing the form in which his creation expresses itself, cannot be controlled by logic. Yet critics have seemed to hold the contrary view, and in the case of difficulties have not even asked why the poet chose the course which entailed them, or even whether any other course was open to him, but have at once concluded that no explanation is to be thought of except that some bungling hand has disturbed the original sequence of events. III. Incidental contradictions in detail occurring in the Iliad or the Odyssey may not legitimately be regarded as proofs that we have to do with the work of various hands, for the simple reason that such contradictions occur repeatedly in imaginative works, the literary history of which is so well known that the assumption of diversity of authorship is excluded. Those that occur in the Homeric poems are for the most part of such a nature that we may well doubt whether either the poet or his auditors were conscious of them. Only in the case of a contradiction so glaring as to demonstrate a radically different conception of the events or the characters of the poem should we be driven to the conclusion that we were dealing with the work of different hands, and even in such a case we should find it difficult to explain how the resulting chaos was allowed to stand. But such contradictions are not to be found in either poem. INTRODUCTION True, many, perhaps most, Homeric critics hold that the speech of Achilles to Patroclus at the opening of the sixteenth book of the Iliad is out of harmony with the fact that in Book IX an embassy had been sent to Achilles by Agamemnon proffering the return of Briseis and rich gifts besides, if he would aid the Greeks in their evil day.