Writer and musician Andrew Mackay was educated at Uppingham and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where – the third of four generations of Mackays at Trinity – he read Classics and was a prizewinner. His previous publications include reviews, articles, poetry and short stories.
This edition and translation of the Iliad, seven years in the making, owes its origin to the realisation in 2018 that, incredibly, there was no Greek text of Homer with a literal English translation on the same page to help students who are less familiar with ancient Greek than those lucky enough to be of an earlier generation. In his Preface Andrew Mackay writes:
Adding to the literature about Homer is like embarking on marriage: it ‘is not by any to be enterprized, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly’, given that an internet search on Homer Iliad offers around nine million results, three times as many as Virgil Aeneid. But Homeric scholars, who disagree about almost everything, including whether there was anyone called Homer at all, whether he ‘wrote’ the Iliad, when and how it came to be written down, and whether the Odyssey is by the same poet, are agreed on one thing: the Iliad is the greatest epic poem there is, and in many ways Western literature is built on it.
The justification for producing another text and translation of the Iliad is, therefore, straightforward: this one is intended to meet the needs of modern students who have not had the luxury, as we did, of being taught both Latin and Greek from an early age. The universities now offer courses for those who have not even done any Latin before going up, let alone any Greek, and certainly nothing that would help them to get to grips with Homer’s unique epic dialect.
I am indebted to Professor James Diggle, Stephen Anderson and Andrew Maynard for their enthusiastic support for this project, and to my colleagues Katharine Lay, Lottie Page, Edward Walker and Simon Westripp.
