Eventually I settled for henchman (as did Lattimore Fagles used aide-in-arms), recognizing it as a tough, muscular word, that conjures a right-hand man, and not a servant. The line would slow because the reader would do a double-take to accommodate it. But to drop this word–more evocative of Camelot–into the Bronze Age battle would produce the dragging sea-anchor effect. Squire is the exact and appropriate term. Lieutenant? But this introduces a modern military sensibility that is not balanced by comparable military-like terminology elsewhere in the poem. Comrade in arms is a mouthful, and also, strictly speaking, not quite correct. Because individual lines of verse can obviously take a wide variety of metrical shapes, these substitutions allow for great flexibility this variety saves the Iliad from sing-song monotony.Ībout the noble attendant of swift-footed Aeacides? In this momentous context the word is lightweight and inconsequential. In theory, that is, since the meter allows substitution of two longs (a spondee) for a dactyl, and the last unit always has a two-beat ending, usually a spondee, but on occasion a trochee (which is long-short). Hex is Greek for “six,” and the dactylic hexameter line accordingly consists of six such metrical units. A long-short-short phrase, then, is much like a phrase of whole-half-half notes in music. The quantity of a syllable, whether it is long or short, is determined by the duration it takes to sound it.

7 The Greek word dactyl means “finger,” and like a finger, the poetic dactyl has one long and two short units: in this case, syllables. RAPID: The swiftness of the Homeric line of verse is principally due to the epic's meter–its rhythm–the dactylic hexameter: an ancient meter believed to descend from Indo-European heroic poetic tradition.

Best translation of the iliad