Ilias per Laurentium Vallam

A couple of years ago, the school at which I was employed read the Iliad as a professional development project. Determined to not lose an opportunity for learning Latin, I scoured the internet for Latin translations of the great epic to read in lieu of the English. I found one or two, but was generally unimpressed with their clunky renditions. Somehow or another, I stumbled across an old scanned copy of Lorenzo Valla’s prose translation and set about retyping the text to make it easier to read. As a scanned PDF of an old book, the quality was poor and old typefaces, orthography, and the occasional ink blotch only confused the text further. Nevertheless, I was determined to complete it.

The whole text has been cursorily proofread and most spelling mistakes have been emended. Only the first four or five books have been meticulously proofread. Frankly, there will likely be an occasional mistake, but the effort required to proofread the whole text on my own would prevent me from ever making this publicly available. So, should any mistakes be found, please do let us know. Occasionally, it seemed, the text was so corrupt that it was illegible. In such instances, I either wagered a likely guess as to the word or left the text in its jumbled or unintelligible state to come back to later. Instances like these are rare and will likely not ruin the reader’s experience, but they do occur.

The reader will immediatley notice the immense liberty Valla has claimed in his translation: “Scripturus ego quantam exercitibus . . .”. This patent liberty is what immediatley attracted me to his work, as it offered me some confidence that Valla was more interested in rendering the sense of the passages into good Latin even if it be at the expense of the Greek idiom. 

I had read somewhere that only the first sixteen or seventeen books were actually translated by Valla himself, the remainder being carried out by a pupil of his. Ready information on this issue is sparse, but I can say that there is a notable change in style and diction towards the epic’s end. Valla clearly avoids flipping uniquely crafted Greek epithets into fictitious Latin words for the first half of the epic, yet the word pulchricoma, as an epithet for Niobe appears in the final book; arciger in 22 for Apollo; terraemotor in 20 for Neptune; along with a handful of other words like quadricristis and proculdubio that Valla seemed to deliberatley avoid lest his prose appear unauthentic. Valla himself seems cognizant of maintaining classical Latin style and vocabulary, though he does occasionally employ a word in a tense explicitly foreign to classical Latin. On at least one occasion, Valla uses inspectabant, for example, which, according to Lewis and Short, is classical only as a present participle. He also sometimes uses words like connumerare, meditabundus, inexoratus, inculpatio, invindicatus, suffulcio, hilaritudo, which are all examples of either ante or post-classical Latin. I point this out not to fault the master translator, but to simply inform the reader. Presumeably, Valla chose his words deliberatley and perhaps found these more capable of rendering the sense of the passage than any strictly “classical” word could.  

Finally, it might be worth mentioning that the PDFs that supplied the text for this project were found on Archive.org. Sometimes, one PDF would be missing a few pages, a dilemma that forced me to find my place on a different PDF. 

This is not a scholarly work, much less a critical text and should not be relied upon as such. It was copied with students of Latin and Greek in mind who are interested in deriving linguistic insight from it, and as far as I am concerned, it is a work of entertainment.

We offer the first two books for free here on the Mellarium. The remaining twenty two are available for purchase. The proceeds help support our work here at the Mellarium. Copying and proofreading is a meticulous and time consuming process, and we intend to share similar projects in the future. We may already have a couple in the pipeline . . .