Chapmaniac
Colin Burrow: Chapman’s Homer, 27 June 2002
Chapman’s Homer: The ‘Iliad’
edited by Allardyce Nicoll.
Princeton, 613 pp., £13.95, December 1998,0 691 00236 3 Show More
edited by Allardyce Nicoll.
Princeton, 613 pp., £13.95, December 1998,
Chapman’s Homer: The ‘Odyssey’
edited by Allardyce Nicoll.
Princeton, 613 pp., £13.95, January 2001,0 691 04891 6 Show More
edited by Allardyce Nicoll.
Princeton, 613 pp., £13.95, January 2001,
“... If Homer had walked the English soil in 1597 he would have felt that he had lived in vain. At that date no English poet had a substantial knowledge of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Although the statutes of grammar schools made proud boasts that Greek was studied in the higher forms, it’s likely that by the end of the 16th century only a handful of schoolchildren could read more than a few lines of Homer in the original ... ”