Falsafa

Comma for either/or — dharma, courage. Spelling forgiving — corage finds courage.

    poetry · 8th century BCE · 4 crossings

    Iliad

    ἸλιάςIlias

    Homer, in Greek

    The wrath of Achilles, sung before Greece could write it down. The founding epic of European literature waited two thousand years for a complete Western translation.

    The chain

    c. 750 BCE Greek original

    written by Homer

    1. c. 1360–1362 Greek Latin translation attested

      translated by Leontius Pilatus for Giovanni Boccaccio in Florence

      The first complete Latin Homer of the medieval West, made line by line while Pilatus lodged in Boccaccio's house and lectured on Greek. Petrarch, who owned a Greek Homer he could not read, had begged for exactly this.

    2. 1598–1611 Greek English translation attested

      translated by George Chapman in London

      Issued in installments from 1598 and completed in 1611: the first full English Iliad. In 1816 a young apothecary's apprentice stayed up all night reading a borrowed copy and wrote a sonnet about it before breakfast.

    3. 1715–1720 Greek English translation attested

      translated by Alexander Pope in London

      Sold by subscription in six volumes, it made Pope financially independent for life: the clearest case in this atlas of a translation as a business model.

    4. 1898 Greek English translation attested

      translated by Samuel Butler in London

      Plain prose by the novelist of Erewhon. The text carried in this library is the Perseus revision by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy, which restores Greek names (Zeus for Jove, Odysseus for Ulysses).