The versions of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are numerous but most readers who do not know Greek prefer the prose rendering of the Iliad by Lang, Leaf and Myers and the prose version of the Odyssey by Butcher and Lang. In language that is almost Biblical in its force and simplicity these scholars give far more of the spirit of the original Greek than any of the translators in verse. Chapman's Homer is known today only through the noble sonnet by Keats. It has fine passages but it is unreadable. Cowper's Homer in blank verse is also intolerably dull. The best blank verse translations are by Lord Derby, William Cullen Bryant and Christopher P. Cranch.
For supplementary reading on Homer these works will be found valuable: Jebb, Introduction to Homer (Glasgow, 1887); Matthew Arnold, Lectures on Translating Homer; Andrew Lang, Homer and the Epic (London, 1893); Seymour, Introduction to the Language and Verse of Homer (Boston, 1889); Professor J. P. Mahaffy's books on ancient Greece and Greek life will be found helpful.
Virgil's Æneid has been translated by many hands. Dryden produced a fair version and William Morris, Cranch, Conington and others have written excellent translations. Conington furnished a good translation in prose.
Jowett's translation is the standard English version of Plato, while good sidelights on the author of the Republic and Phædo may be gained from Emerson's essay on Plato in Representative Men and from Walter Pater's Plato and Platonism.
Professor A. J. Church's The Story of the Iliad and The Story of the Æneid while intended for the young will appeal to many mature readers.
No translation of Horace has ever been perfectly satisfactory. The quality of the poet seems to elude translation. Some of the most successful versions are Conington, Odes and Epodes (London, 1865); Lord Lytton, Odes and Epodes (London, 1869), and Sargent, Odes (Boston, 1893); supplementary matter may be found in Sellar's Horace and the Elegiac Poets (Oxford, 1892).
Short sketches and critical estimates of all the great Greek and Latin writers may be found in The New International Encyclopedia (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1904.). These are written mainly by Harry Thurston Peck, for many years Professor of Latin in Columbia University and conceded to be one of the best Latin scholars in this country. They give all the facts that the general reader cares to know with an excellent bibliography of each writer.
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
The exact title is The Book of the Thousand and One Nights. It contains two hundred and sixty-two tales, although the original edition omits one of the most famous, the story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. Antoine Galland was the first translator into a European language. His French version was issued in 1717, in twelve volumes. Sir Richard Burton, who translated an unexpurgated edition of The Arabian Nights, with many notes and an essay on the sources of the tales, ascribed the fairy tales to Persian sources. Burton's edition gives all the obscene allusions but he treated the erotic element in the tales from the scholarly standpoint, holding that this feature showed the Oriental view of such matters, which was and is radically different from the Occidental attitude.