ABSTRACT
In October 1713, Alexander Pope circulated his Proposals for a new verse translation of the Iliad he amazed and vastly irritated his literary adversaries. The battalion of enemies who lined up against Alexander Pope at this time all looked forward to his failure. On the grounds that he 'never was at any University,' they insisted he could not possibly know enough Greek to translate Homer. For Alexander Pope, Homer surpassed every other poet because he had 'the greatest Invention of any Writer whatever'. Alexander Pope recreated a work that had been written in about the 8th century BC, when the times and manners were wholly different from those in the England of his day and he succeeded in his aim of making the epic live for the majority of his Augustan readers. Translating the Iliad would dominate Alexander Pope's life until 1720 when the final volume was published.
