O

THE

ILIAD OF HOMER.

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE.

BY

W. G. CALDCLEUGH,

EASTERN TALES AND THE BRANCH AND OTHER POEMS."

PHILADELPHIA:

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

18 Oct. 6.

nia.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

PREFACE.

HOMER is the oldest profane writer of whom we have any knowledge. He is believed, according to the best accounts, to have lived about nine hundred years before the Christian era; this would make him coeval with some of the writers of the Old Testament, and give him a very high antiquity. He is reported to have been blind, but if so, his infirmity must have overtaken him at a late period of his life, for there is no author who has given us a more vivid description of the outer world. He describes nature with the greatest fidelity: beasts, birds, fishes, and even insects, so that his perceptive powers seem to have been. proportional to his knowledge of human character, in which, with the exception of Shakspeare, none can compete with him. His birthplace is unknown,-seven cities contended for the honor, and altars were erected and sacrifice offered to his memory.

His poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, have been handed down with the greatest veneration, and are believed to be almost as perfect as when first produced. Of these the Iliad has always held the first rank; the Odyssey is an account of the wanderings of Ulysses, and is compared by Longinus to the setting sun, or an achievement of Homer in his old age; yet his admiration of it was so great that he is careful to remind us that he is speaking of the old age of Homer.

But the Iliad he styles the sun in its meridian; for fire and sublimity, and beautiful and melodious versification, it

has never been equaled. It is true, there are other writers in whose works passages may be found not inferior to any in Homer, but there is none who has been able to sustain such an elevation of thought and language from beginning to end. He commences in the simplest manner, and, as he proceeds, gradually warms up, resembling, as it has been well said, the wheel of a chariot taking fire by its own rapidity.

The subject of the poem is wrath-wrath, the most terrible of the passions; the passion which almost transforms man into a demon, which is productive of so much evil, and which in the end so surely entails upon its possessor retribution and remorse. This moral the poet teaches in the most striking manner, showing how Achilles, in indulging his wrath, brought upon his countrymen a "myriad of woes," and upon himself the most bitter anguish. The story is very short: the Greeks are encamped before Troy, upon which they make war for the sake of Menelaus, whose wife the Trojan Paris has stolen away. Agamemnon, the general of the Greek forces, upon an unwarrantable pretext, robs Achilles of a beautiful captive maid; the chief in anger withdraws from his companions, praying to Jove that he would send destruction upon them. By the withdrawal of this distinguished warrior, the Greeks suffer great slaughter, and, with an offer of costly gifts, beg their champion to return. For a long time he refuses; but finally allows his friend Patroclus, clad in his armor, and accompanied by his Myrmidons, to take the field. The scale of battle is now turned, and the Trojans are driven back, but Patroclus is slain. The loss of his dear comrade deeply affects Achilles; and regarding the Trojans as the cause of his bereavement, he issues from his retirement, and, after prodigies of valor, succeeds in routing the enemy and slaying Hector.

On this slight basis Homer has reared his magnificent

creation. His hero is of course Achilles, a colossal character, as Mr. Gladstone rightly calls him, and whose superhuman exploits are, with great art, reserved for the latter part of the poem. This extraordinary personage was a study to writers of antiquity much in the same manner as the Hamlet of Shakspeare is to us, though no two beings ever possessed qualities so opposite. Achilles is a type of the perfect warrior, in an age when the softening influences of Christianity were unknown; he is fierce and implacable toward his enemies, yet capable of the warmest friendship, of which no finer instance was ever known than that which existed between himself and Patroclus; his generosity is unbounded, and his thirst for glory almost borders on insanity. Like all endowed with strong passions, he is much given to the melting mood: his interviews with his mother are always accompanied with tears; he weeps for Briseis and for Patroclus; and, after dragging Hector's corpse round Troy, he mingles his tears with those of the venerable Priam, when he comes begging that his son's body may be restored. His noblest trait is his sincerity; this, which is at once the result and cause of his great courage, gives him his ascendency over his fellow-men, and makes him more than a match even for those superior to him in intellect.

Who dares think one thing, and another tell,

My soul abhors him as the gates of hell.-POPE.

This is the prelude of his speech to the ambassadors, and through his whole career he fully exemplifies it. His religious sentiments are also strongly developed; he frequently sacrifices to the gods, and has a constant sense of their superintending care; nor, notwithstanding his impetuosity, is he destitute of self-control; he takes the advice of Minerva when about to punish his wrong-doer,