HOMER'S ILIAD COMPLETE

Rhapsody 21

Literally Translated, with Explanatory Notes, by Theodore Alois Buckley

Homer Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Homer in Print

Page 13

"O father Jove, how does none of the gods undertake to save me, miserable, from the river! Hereafter, indeed, I would suffer anything.[682] But no other of the heavenly inhabitants is so culpable to me as my mother, who soothed me with falsehoods, and said that I should perish by the fleet arrows of Apollo, under the wall of the armed Trojans. Would that Hector had slain me, who here was nurtured the bravest; then a brave man would he have slain, and have despoiled a brave man. But now it is decreed that I be destroyed by an inglorious death, overwhelmed in a mighty river, like a swine-herd's boy, whom, as he is fording it, the torrent overwhelms in wintry weather."

[Footnote 682: I.e. grant that I may but escape a disgraceful death by drowning, and I care not how I perish afterwards. The Scholiast compares the prayer of Ajax in p. 647: [Greek: En de phaei kai olesson]. Cf. Aen, i. 100, sqq. Aesch. Choeph 340; Eur. Andr. 1184.]

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