Our Iliad and Odyssey begin as acts of translation. The background to the Iliad is that of possibly archaic orality. The transfer into writing implies translation in both the generic and the more technical sense. The world of the rhapsode and the bard, of the singer of ancient tales, many-layered, open to personal and local variations, is not that of the writer. The relation of text to audience - literally to the listener - is altogether different from that of writer to reader. Perforce, we have no knowledge of the epic of Troy, of the heroic and clan-sagas which went into its assemblage, prior to 'Homer'. What is manifest, however, is the process of linguistic adjustment and semantic stylisation. The idiom of the Iliad as we know it is a composite artifice in which vestiges of archaic forms and dialects still surface. The redactor has translated, not always with absolute confidence or understanding, from diverse lexical-grammatical materials.