[proxy_user]

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.

[cornelis]

Ancient Greek is a beautiful language. I like read with articulation like Erland Josephson.

[AnAmericanMother]

I think it's "anastrophe" but it's been literally decades since I read Greek seriously.

I like the alliteration in the clause that precedes the isolated "heroes" - the explosive sound of the repeated "P" seems to hurl them Hades-ward . . . Lattimore replicates this best I think. Fagles gets the alliteration in part, but loses the rhythm. My professor loved to read Homer aloud, and we all memorized and recited aloud as well. So the rhythm may be unusually important to me for that reason.

But it's all like a huge ball of string, all interconnected. Take one segment of string, cut it off from the rest, examine it in isolation, you have NO idea of the huge ball of culture and language it came out of.