The Iliad of Homer

by Alexander Pope

Overview

This book contains Alexander Pope’s seminal interpretation of the original Homeric poem, published serially from 1715 to 1720. Hailed by Samuel Johnson as “a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal,” this is a classic text that has moulded centuries of British and American culture through its beautiful and timeless poetry. This edition provides a perfect rendering of this fine English verse which captures wonderfully the song of Homer – a must-read for absolutely everyone. Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744), was an English poet most renowned for his satirical verse and for the writing of this book. He is also the third-most quoted writer in 'The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations' after Shakespeare and Tennyson. Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473374928
Publisher:	Read Books Ltd.
Publication date:	05/20/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1001
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day. In the Western classical tradition, Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of Greek epic poets. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature. Whether and when he lived is unknown. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BC, while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BC. Most modern researchers place Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. The formative influence of the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece. Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds.