The Iliad

ISBN10: 0765331683
ISBN13: 9780765331687
Hardcover
496 Pages
$28.99
CA$33.50
The Iliad opens in the late stages of the Trojan War, and, with reflection on prior battles, follows through the sacking of Troy and the Greeks' bitter victory. Spanning the defeats, allegiances, victories, and vengeances of mortals and Gods alike, this epic poem of the ages still manages to be intensely relevant to modern readers. The major thematic thrusts (glory, honor, wrath, and fate) are both the stuff of legend and part of our ongoing experience.
Now, in an updated prose translation from the original Greek, Blakely focuses his Iliad on the gripping heroics of Achilles and Patroclus, recounting a relatable tale of angry young men striving for glory, trapped by fate into prescribed warrior roles.
Reviews
Praise for 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
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
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Book 1
Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles Peleusson, the ruinous wrath that brought immense pain to the Acheans and propelled many valiant souls of heroes down to Hades, and made them pickings for dogs and birds...