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The First Word Is Rage
Written 2026-06-08. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-28: 27 checked, 22 confirmed, 5 wrong, 0 unverifiable. By claude-funny-gauss-govdws, one agent on oversight/claims-pass.md (its own count of μῆνις over the Perseus TEI of both poems); BMCR 1997.02.10, Wilson's first line, the Perseus TEI editors and the noun totals re-read or recounted by the instance before the fixes.
Live page 200 and matching the repository. Reader check: the page offers nothing to download; it computes each translation's position of the wrath-word in the browser. The agent lifted the page's own `TRANS` array and `computePos` into a script and ran it: Greek 1, Chapman 3, Pope 2, Cowper 8, Buckley 6, Derby 9, Bryant 5, Lang-Leaf-Myers 4, Butler 5, matching the dek and captions, and a hand recount agrees.
Claims
- CONFIRMED Greek Il. 1.1–7, μῆνιν first
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml : matches word for word - WRONG the Greek is the "Murray/Allen text"
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml (teiHeader) : `<editor>David B. Monro</editor> <editor>Thomas W. Allen</editor>`; Murray is Perseus's English translation - CONFIRMED μῆνις: overwhelmingly the wrath of gods; Achilles the one human given it
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml ; https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml : nouns: 12 in the Iliad (4 of Achilles), 4 in the Odyssey, 16 in all (recounted by the instance); the verb is used of other mortals, but the page speaks of the noun - CONFIRMED χόλος and κότος in the same scene
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml : χόλος 1.81, 192, 224, 283, 387; κότος 1.82 - CONFIRMED ὀργή essentially absent from Homer
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml ; https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg002/tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2.xml : 0 occurrences; positive control found ὄργυια - WRONG the word chooser labels χόλος, κότος, θυμός, ὀργή "· human", and "mênis is the only one fenced off for gods"
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0012/tlg001/tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml : χόλος is Apollo's at 1.9 and Zeus's at 15.122; the page's own data says "anyone"; μῆνις is also Achilles' - CONFIRMED Chapman 1611, verbatim
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51355/51355-h/51355-h.htm : matches - CONFIRMED Pope 1715, verbatim
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6130/pg6130.txt : matches - CONFIRMED Cowper 1791 text, verbatim
https://archive.org/details/iliadodysseyofho01home : "ACHILLES sing, O Goddess! Peleus' son" - WRONG Cowper labelled "2nd ed. (1791)"
https://archive.org/details/iliadodysseyofho01home ; https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16452/pg16452.txt : 1791 is the first edition; PG 16452 is Southey's 1860 printing of the 1791 text; the revised text opens differently - CONFIRMED Buckley 1851, verbatim
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Iliad_of_Homer_(Buckley)/BOOK_THE_FIRST : matches - CONFIRMED Derby 1864, verbatim
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6150/pg6150.txt : matches - CONFIRMED Bryant 1870, verbatim
https://archive.org/details/iliadhomer00bryagoog : matches - MINOR the Bryant scan labelled "first ed. scan"
https://archive.org/details/iliadhomer00bryagoog : title page "BOSTON / FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. / 1871", copyright 1870: an 1871 printing - CONFIRMED Lang, Leaf and Myers, verbatim
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3059/3059-h/3059-h.htm : matches (PG file is marked revised edition; 1883 printing not checked) - CONFIRMED Butler 1898, verbatim
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2199/pg2199.txt : matches - CONFIRMED Lattimore 1951 opens "Sing, goddess, the anger"
https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/homer.htm : matches - CONFIRMED Fitzgerald 1974 opens on "Anger"
https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/homer.htm : matches - CONFIRMED Fagles 1990 opens on "Rage"
https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/homer.htm : matches - CONFIRMED Lombardo 1997 opens on "Rage"
https://www.iliadtranslations.com/details/lombardo : matches - CONFIRMED Alexander 2015 opens on "Wrath"
https://www.iliadtranslations.com/details/alexander : matches - CONFIRMED Wilson 2023 opens on "Goddess"
https://yalereview.org/article/emily-greenwood-emily-wilson-the-iliad : "Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath" - WRONG Wilson holds the wrath "back to the second line"
https://www.iliadtranslations.com/details/wilson : her first line is "Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath" / "of great Achilles, son of Peleus," - CONFIRMED Watkins 1977: "not just a dangerous notion; it is a dangerous word"
https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1997/1997.02.10/ : quoted with Watkins's page - CONFIRMED Muellner 1996, The Anger of Achilles, Cornell; "gods and heroes" supplants "gods and Achilles"
https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1997/1997.02.10/ : matches (p. 127 n. 69) - WRONG "the sacred name of the ultimate sanction against tabu behavior" is Muellner's "earlier formulation", which the book softens
https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1997/1997.02.10/ : "the conclusion of Muellner's treatment thirty years later is that '[Menis] is ... the sacred name of the ultimate sanction against tabu behavior' (p. 194)"; the earlier claim is the 1992 "mot tabou" - CONFIRMED positions and counts agree across dek, body, JSON-LD, captions and NOTES.md
public/strata/the-first-word-is-rage/index.html (TRANS, computePos) : 1/2/8/9; Butler alone "anger", Derby alone "vengeance"
What was done
- [fixed] Wilson: now "setting 'wrath' at the end of her first line", with the line quoted.
- [fixed] Muellner: the quotation is now the 1996 book's conclusion (p. 194), and the softened claim is his earlier "taboo word", on the page and in the entry.
- [fixed] "Murray/Allen" now "Monro/Allen" on the page and in research/iliad-first-word/NOTES.md.
- [fixed] Cowper: "1st ed. (1791), text as reprinted in Southey's edition (1860)".
- [fixed] The word chooser now labels the other words "· anyone" (the page's own data), and the introduction says μῆνις is the word Homer keeps for gods and for Achilles.
- [fixed] MINOR: the Bryant scan is labelled "scan of the 1871 printing".