The Athereloigos

The first English translation of The Odyssey was completed by Alexander Pope in 1726, which prompted Dr. Johnson’s famous comment,”it is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”  Prior to 1726, if you wanted to read Homer, you learned Greek.  But, I wondered, what would a translation have looked like in the latter-16th century (specifically between Cranmer’s BCP in 1548 and Shakespeare in 1591), written in the robust and dignified English of Spenser.  Well, here is a partial answer to that that I produced with my Liddell-Scott and OED.  I chose the prophecy of Tiresias from book XXIII because it is a personal favourite of mine.

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