Abstract: In the Renaissance, Homeric epithets were something of a difficulty for translators given their gratuitous nature and the sense of alterity that was linked to the linguistic specificity of Greek. The choices translators made – a choice between alterity, acclimatisation and effacement – reflected contemporary debates concerning Homer and Virgil, literal translation or translation “according to the meaning”, and the “propriety” of languages, mediated through the Latin tendency towards Virgilianism and, in French, the case of compound epithets.
