Lombardo writes in short, punchy lines with frequent compression. His Book 1 opening drops the son-of-Peleus identification entirely, starting hard with "Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, / Black and murderous." The register is contemporary American: plain, sometimes blunt, occasionally colloquial. In Book 21, Achilles tells the dying Trojan "You die too, friend. Don't take it hard," which reads almost like conversation. Johnston runs longer lines and keeps more of the Greek's explicit detail, naming Thetis as "silver-footed" in Book 9 where Lombardo omits the epithet. Johnston's diction sits in a neutral modern register, not archaic and not colloquial, steady throughout. Lombardo's rhythm has real stops and starts; Johnston's is smoother, more even-paced. Lombardo cuts for speed and impact. In Book 6, he gives only "Men too. Their generations come and go," dropping the seasonal detail the Greek spends two lines on. The passage gains immediacy and loses texture. Johnston keeps "the budding wood grows more," staying closer to Homer's image of seasonal return. Johnston's approach is more thorough in tracking what the Greek actually says, which matters in passages like Book 9 where the two-fates structure ("two fates may bring about my death") is spelled out in full. Lombardo was associated with a performance-oriented approach, and that shows: his text reads aloud with urgency. Johnston reads cleanly on the page and follows the original argument more carefully.
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Sing, Goddess, sing the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus—
that murderous anger which condemned Achaeans
to countless agonies and threw many warrior souls
deep into Hades, leaving their dead bodies
carrion food for dogs and birds—
all in fulfilment of the will of Zeus.