OUP (2025) h/b 414pp £170 (ISBN 9780198870777)
The Ilias Latina—‘Latin Iliad’—is something of a mystery. It skilfully condenses the 15,693 lines of Homer’s (Greek) Iliad into a mere 1070 lines of Latin hexameters and seems to have been written during the principate of Nero in the 1st century AD (see pp. 10-16). Nobody knows who composed it: an acrostic in the opening and closing lines suggests the name Italicus which could be a proper name (cf. Silius Italicus or Baebius Italicus) or else a generic title (‘Italian’)—but the anonymity makes no effective difference to our reading and enjoyment of the text.
It owed its survival not least to the fact that a Latin hexameter version of the tale of the Iliad was useful in the Greekless schoolroom: but this is the first major commentary on the text in English, and G. has done a brilliant job of bringing this forgotten gem back into the light, as one of a laudable series of books (‘Pseudepigrapha Latina’) dedicated to such neglected texts. The Latin is relatively simple and has historically made excellent reading material for courses where students are taking their first steps in hexameter poetry (and one has here the facing English translation and the abundant commentary to help with comprehension and appreciation); but do not mistake simplicity of style for lack of sophistication. The Ilias Latina was written by a poet of great skill who knew the Greek Iliad and pretty much everything written in Latin verse—and it shows.
A text like the IL seeks to reduce a sprawling multi-layered epic poem to a single thread and some corners have to be cut: Horace did something similar when he summed up the Iliad in eleven lines (Epistles 1.2.6-16) and ended up seeing the epic as a matter of ‘men…ruled by their passions’ (p.7), while Priapea 68 sees it (predictably) in terms of human genitalia. Translation is always a matter of selection, and this rendering of a long epic into a highly abbreviated version necessitates many departures from the Greek original: Iliad book 9, for instance—which Wilamowitz called ‘the jewel of the Iliad’—is summarised in a mere nine lines. The first five books of the Iliad, by contrast, take up over half the poem (IL 1–537).
The narrative stance here also owes much to Virgil’s Aeneid, both in style and in substance as this Roman Homer looks back at the Trojan war through the lens of Virgil’s epic. G. is good at telling us where this shows (e.g. 292n., 958-7n.): see esp. 899-902n where G. shows the way the IL repurposes Homer (Iliad 20.259-352) with a very contemporary Roman gratitude for the imperial era which was only made possible by the benevolence of Poseidon. See also the way G. compares and contrasts the Homeric Shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478-608) with the version here (862-91) which reshapes Homer’s text in distinctly imperial and Virgilian tones (see p.328). The poet also reduces or removes the agency of the gods in the narrative, choosing instead to foreground the human emotions at work, and G. is acutely sensitive to the ways in which this text shows the influence of Roman elegy. The poet of the Ilias Latina enjoyed a nerdish attention to numerical detail and playing ‘complex intellectual games’ (p.156), as we see when the catalogue of ships (Homer Iliad 2.494-759) is cleverly rendered into surprisingly elegant Latin (167-224): the poet even tots up Homer’s tally with an impressively Latinised version of ‘1186’ ships (‘twice times seven short of two thousand’).
Romans who could read Homer, read Homer rather than an epitome of him. The Ilias Latina had to be comprehensible to a readership unfamiliar with Homer, and this sort of version (then as now) involved making what was foreign into something familiar. This involved sailing between the Scylla of incomprehension and the Charybdis of anachronism and worse, as the poet seeks to find equivalents for things in the source text in the new medium. There is some cross-cultural shock here, such as when Menelaus seeks to bind Adrastus and take him back for a very Roman Triumph at 539-41: this makes no sense in the context of the Greek ships at Troy and omits a hugely significant interplay between the venal and relatively soft-hearted Menelaus and his ruthless brother Agamemnon (who urges them to ‘kill even the baby in his mothers’ womb’ [Iliad 6.58-9]). The anachronisms inevitably abound elsewhere too—warriors in this Trojan War, for instance, use iron (348-9n.) and Roman ladders (764-5n.)—but this is not carelessness on the part of the poet, who thus puts his own personal signature on his text, marking it as based upon (rather than enslaved to) the Greek original and more concerned about the audience for whom he was writing than about the audience about whom he composed.
G. shows us throughout how the IL makes its mark on the original and in doing so produces something new. The opening scene where Apollo sends a plague against the Greeks is both pathology and psychology, and Agamemnon’s passion for Chryseis is a ‘wild love-affair’ (ferus amor) rather than merely a tool to show an upstart Achilles who is boss: see G.’s long note on 25-6 which masterfully unpacks the layers of literary history behind this language. This more emotional take on events is partly, one suspects, because the audience for whom the IL was composed had read their Latin elegy and epic and so he would expect this sort of psychological subtlety, and possibly because the readership would welcome a more romantic read: certainly the elegists had invested Homer’s mute heroines with very human feelings as G. points out (72-3n.).
The book has an Index Locorum, an Index Verborum and a general index, and fourteen closely-typed pages of bibliography. The book is scholarly—readers of the commentary are expected to be able to read quotations from Latin and Greek without translation—but is not massively encumbered with secondary references and G.’s style is as clear and engaging as his text. The proof-reading is excellent and it is to be hoped that a less expensive paperback edition of this book will give it the wider readership it so richly deserves.
John Godwin
ILIAS LATINA: Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary
OUP (2025) h/b 414pp £170 (ISBN 9780198870777)
The Ilias Latina—‘Latin Iliad’—is something of a mystery. It skilfully condenses the 15,693 lines of Homer’s (Greek) Iliad into a mere 1070 lines of Latin hexameters and seems to have been written during the principate of Nero in the 1st century AD (see pp. 10-16). Nobody knows who composed it: an acrostic in the opening and closing lines suggests the name Italicus which could be a proper name (cf. Silius Italicus or Baebius Italicus) or else a generic title (‘Italian’)—but the anonymity makes no effective difference to our reading and enjoyment of the text.
It owed its survival not least to the fact that a Latin hexameter version of the tale of the Iliad was useful in the Greekless schoolroom: but this is the first major commentary on the text in English, and G. has done a brilliant job of bringing this forgotten gem back into the light, as one of a laudable series of books (‘Pseudepigrapha Latina’) dedicated to such neglected texts. The Latin is relatively simple and has historically made excellent reading material for courses where students are taking their first steps in hexameter poetry (and one has here the facing English translation and the abundant commentary to help with comprehension and appreciation); but do not mistake simplicity of style for lack of sophistication. The Ilias Latina was written by a poet of great skill who knew the Greek Iliad and pretty much everything written in Latin verse—and it shows.
A text like the IL seeks to reduce a sprawling multi-layered epic poem to a single thread and some corners have to be cut: Horace did something similar when he summed up the Iliad in eleven lines (Epistles 1.2.6-16) and ended up seeing the epic as a matter of ‘men…ruled by their passions’ (p.7), while Priapea 68 sees it (predictably) in terms of human genitalia. Translation is always a matter of selection, and this rendering of a long epic into a highly abbreviated version necessitates many departures from the Greek original: Iliad book 9, for instance—which Wilamowitz called ‘the jewel of the Iliad’—is summarised in a mere nine lines. The first five books of the Iliad, by contrast, take up over half the poem (IL 1–537).
The narrative stance here also owes much to Virgil’s Aeneid, both in style and in substance as this Roman Homer looks back at the Trojan war through the lens of Virgil’s epic. G. is good at telling us where this shows (e.g. 292n., 958-7n.): see esp. 899-902n where G. shows the way the IL repurposes Homer (Iliad 20.259-352) with a very contemporary Roman gratitude for the imperial era which was only made possible by the benevolence of Poseidon. See also the way G. compares and contrasts the Homeric Shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478-608) with the version here (862-91) which reshapes Homer’s text in distinctly imperial and Virgilian tones (see p.328). The poet also reduces or removes the agency of the gods in the narrative, choosing instead to foreground the human emotions at work, and G. is acutely sensitive to the ways in which this text shows the influence of Roman elegy. The poet of the Ilias Latina enjoyed a nerdish attention to numerical detail and playing ‘complex intellectual games’ (p.156), as we see when the catalogue of ships (Homer Iliad 2.494-759) is cleverly rendered into surprisingly elegant Latin (167-224): the poet even tots up Homer’s tally with an impressively Latinised version of ‘1186’ ships (‘twice times seven short of two thousand’).
Romans who could read Homer, read Homer rather than an epitome of him. The Ilias Latina had to be comprehensible to a readership unfamiliar with Homer, and this sort of version (then as now) involved making what was foreign into something familiar. This involved sailing between the Scylla of incomprehension and the Charybdis of anachronism and worse, as the poet seeks to find equivalents for things in the source text in the new medium. There is some cross-cultural shock here, such as when Menelaus seeks to bind Adrastus and take him back for a very Roman Triumph at 539-41: this makes no sense in the context of the Greek ships at Troy and omits a hugely significant interplay between the venal and relatively soft-hearted Menelaus and his ruthless brother Agamemnon (who urges them to ‘kill even the baby in his mothers’ womb’ [Iliad 6.58-9]). The anachronisms inevitably abound elsewhere too—warriors in this Trojan War, for instance, use iron (348-9n.) and Roman ladders (764-5n.)—but this is not carelessness on the part of the poet, who thus puts his own personal signature on his text, marking it as based upon (rather than enslaved to) the Greek original and more concerned about the audience for whom he was writing than about the audience about whom he composed.
G. shows us throughout how the IL makes its mark on the original and in doing so produces something new. The opening scene where Apollo sends a plague against the Greeks is both pathology and psychology, and Agamemnon’s passion for Chryseis is a ‘wild love-affair’ (ferus amor) rather than merely a tool to show an upstart Achilles who is boss: see G.’s long note on 25-6 which masterfully unpacks the layers of literary history behind this language. This more emotional take on events is partly, one suspects, because the audience for whom the IL was composed had read their Latin elegy and epic and so he would expect this sort of psychological subtlety, and possibly because the readership would welcome a more romantic read: certainly the elegists had invested Homer’s mute heroines with very human feelings as G. points out (72-3n.).
The book has an Index Locorum, an Index Verborum and a general index, and fourteen closely-typed pages of bibliography. The book is scholarly—readers of the commentary are expected to be able to read quotations from Latin and Greek without translation—but is not massively encumbered with secondary references and G.’s style is as clear and engaging as his text. The proof-reading is excellent and it is to be hoped that a less expensive paperback edition of this book will give it the wider readership it so richly deserves.
John Godwin