Homer
Iliad

Ozell, Broom, Oldisworth

THE ILIAD OF HOMER, With Notes. To which are prefix’d, A large PREFACE, AND THE Life of Homer, by Madam DACIER. Done from the French by Mr. OZELL, and by him compar’d with the Greek. To which will be made some farther Notes, that shall be added at the End of the Whole, by Mr. JOHNSON, late of Eton, now of Brentford, illustrated with 26 CUTS, copyd by the best Gravers, from the Paris Plates design’s by COYPEL. London 1712.

The Iliad of Homer, translated from the Greek into blank verse, by Mr. Ozell, Mr. Broom, and Mr. Oldisworth. To which are added, A preface, The life of Homer, and notes by Madam Dacier. Illustrated with XXVI cuts, Cop’d by the best Gravers from the Paris Plates, design’d by Coypel.

London 1714-1719

This five volume work was based on a French prose translation of the Iliad by Mme. Anne Dacier, published in 1711. One curious feature of the English text is that the blank verse (advertised in the second title above) is printed as if it were prose (i.e., in right justified paragraphs). An interesting comment on this feature is as follows:

The problem with blank verse, to an Augustan ear, was precisely that the endings of the lines were blank; or, as Dr. Johnson said, quoting a contemporary critic, “Blank verse is verse only to the eye.” Blank verse, that is, might very well appear indistinguishable from prose to an eighteenth-century ear. So indistinguishable from prose might it appear that, were there to occur even the slightest departures from the iambic pentameter norm, such blank verse might well be printed as prose. And so perhaps because there were some occasional metrical irregularities in it—and perhaps because it was itself a rendition of a prose version—the translation of the Iliad done in 1711 by John Ozell (Books I-VI), William Broome (Books VII-XV), and William Oldisworth (Books XVI-XXIV) was in fact printed as prose. (Steven Shankman, Pope’s “Iliad”: Homer in the Age of Passion)

One member of this triumvirate of translators, Mr. William Broom, played a significant role in completing the Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer, which appeared shortly afterwards (and John Ozell, after quarrelling with Pope, earned a mention in the Dunciad).

[List of Published English Translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey]