The thing that best distinguishes this from all other translations of Homer is that it alone equals the original in its ceaseless pour of verbal music. When Pope's contemporaries praised him for his ''numbers,'' they were referring not to the fairly obvious metrical system of the heroic couplet but to the euphony he achieved within its constraints. The relatively enclosed nature of the system concentrates attention on every syllable in the line, on continual shifts in the position and degree of pause marked by metrical breaks (caesuras), on sound effects used to emphasize the careful alterations in word order. Dryden, working a generation earlier on his translation of Virgil, had complained that the raspy consonants of English denied him the smooth vowel effects of the ancient languages. Pope worked miracles in highlighting the play of vowels through his lines. His most potent effect is assonance - the lazy music, for instance, of the three long e sounds (ease, heaps, grieves) in this:

Thus at full ease, in heaps of riches rolled,

What grieves the monarch?

The relatively full stop after ease sets the tone for its sound being repeated. By contrast, there is a plangent climax to the mounting long a sounds (mat-, race, -slaved) in

The matrons ravished, the whole race enslaved.

There is a lighter pause at that caesura, which is not preceded by the key sound, and a lighter stress on the words that follow. The vowel music often tells us how much or little weight to put on the metrical beats.

The echo of leap in Greek makes us read the line this way:

Leaped forth the lot of every Greek desired.

The interplay of assonance (long e sounds) with double caesuras in the second line of this couplet shows how Athena pulls Achilles up short:

The force of keen reproaches let him feel,

but sheath, / obedient, / thy revenging steel.

The sputtering rage of Achilles is marked by double caesuras and stammering short u sounds (-ious, thus, -rupt-) in this couplet's second line:

Here on the monarch's speech Achilles broke

And furious thus / and interrupting / spoke.

The sense here is underlined by consonants clashing at the word junctures (-ious-thus, -rupting-spoke). Though Pope de-emphasized English consonants when he wanted smoothness, he thickened them for obstructive effect. Ajax's shield is tough

with sev'n thick folds o'ercast

Of tough bull-hides.

When a spear hits that shield later on, it must drive through six bull hides