Everything is subjective, there's no bad opinions, but this comes close. To cast so wide a brush as to paint Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Wilson, Mandelbaum, and other renowned modern translators as lukewarm and boring...
If you have some particular fondness for Victorian English, sure, read what you enjoy; but antiquated language doesn't make anything intrinsically better, and it takes the average modern reader further away from the work itself. These works weren't composed in a language that was, for their audience, hundreds of years out-of-date.
Moreover - particularly with ancient texts - older translators were typically writers first, scholars second. As pointed out elsewhere on this thread, Pope didn't even speak Greek when he "translated" the Iliad. The Butler translation here is prose. An approach to translation that takes fidelity seriously is a more modern invention.
If you have some particular fondness for Victorian English, sure, read what you enjoy; but antiquated language doesn't make anything intrinsically better, and it takes the average modern reader further away from the work itself. These works weren't composed in a language that was, for their audience, hundreds of years out-of-date.
Moreover - particularly with ancient texts - older translators were typically writers first, scholars second. As pointed out elsewhere on this thread, Pope didn't even speak Greek when he "translated" the Iliad. The Butler translation here is prose. An approach to translation that takes fidelity seriously is a more modern invention.