The Iliad

"Blakely's translation is fluent and accurate. That it is in prose will no doubt offend purists, but it has an elegance and loftiness that proclaims something other than a prose document from a government agency or a contemporary novel. He has included the epithets and other mechanisms of oral poetry which in our time have become adornments, and they feel right. If I were a teacher, I would very much be inclined to use it as a text."—Charles Rowan Beye, distinguished professor of classics emeritus at the City University of New York

"Translators of Homer tend to be philologists or poets, but Blakely is unabashedly neither. Instead, this gentleman, a self-proclaimed amateur, [has] spent more hours with The Iliad for the love of it than most scholars of classics will in their lifetimes, and he [has] in the process developed a profound and deeply personal relationship with the poem . . . Now, with this translation, Blakely invites his readers to cultivate a like intimacy with the work, a relationship of profound rewared that will serve for years to come."—Keyne Cheshire, associate professor and chair of classics at Davidson College