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It's RICHMOND Lattimore, not Richard.

That was the go-to "crib" when I was reading Classics, since Fagle is relatively recent.

Fagle is more entertaining, Lattimore is by far the more accurate. Ah, just read it in the original with a crib.

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
5οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

Other than Dr. Agnew at Troy, I don’t think I have ever known anyone other than my Granddaddy who could read Greek.

I assume he got his lessons at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY in the early 1900s. He also attended Stetson but I bet it was Louisville.

Dr. Agnew who was probably the smartest man I ever knew personally, could read Greek, Latin, German and probably several others.

The reason I know he could read German is that one day before class, I was early and I wrote a quote from Bismark on the chalk board in German. Since I flunked German I made a couple of mistakes.

Dr. Agnew walked in, glanced at it, then walked up and corrected the spelling and punctuation then erased it. What a perfect putdown I got.

I love the placement of 'ἡρώων' in that passage - there's probably some technical term of rhetoric for it.

The opening of the Odyssey is even better:

ἄνδρα μοιἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
5ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.
ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:

I love the way that the various nations of men have multiple cities but only one mind, and the contrast between 'ἴδεν' and 'ἔγνω' - he saw the cities, but knew the mind. It is kind of a premonition of Plato's ideas, which were baked into the Greek language anyway.

This is why you can't really read Homer, or for that matter Plato, in translation. Their thoughts are interwoven with the language they expressed them in.