Pope laboured on this English translation for over six years, and published it, by subscription, in six parts between 1715 and 1720. Ultimately, it earned Pope the grand sum of £5,000 and allowed him to live on his own means as a professional author. Samuel Johnson described it as ‘the greatest version of poetry which the world has ever seen’ 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. This edition combines two volumes also published separately.