[5] The composition of the translation's frontispiece shows Homer in the midst of a company of laurel-crowned spirits, whose ethereal forms are expressed in stipple, with legends which together read: "Solus ſapit hic homo, Reliqui vero Umbræ mouentur;" or in English: "This man alone has wisdom, the others are mere shadows that flit around."

[6][7] The central depiction of Homer with the spirits is a reference to Circe's description of Tiresias:[8] Even in death, Persephone granted to him alone the use of his wisdom, but the others are shadows that flit around.The engraving is often ascribed to William Hole, who had previously engraved Chapman's Iliad, although Henry Watson Kent described this claim as "without any very good reason" due to it seeming "hardly probable that his awkward hand could have drawn the title.

Chapman scholar Millar MacLure notes that undergraduate English literature students can identify issues with his translation.

[18] Samuel Taylor Coleridge said Chapman's version was as original as Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (1590) but provides readers with a "small idea of Homer".

He compared its Homeric qualities favourably to Alexander Pope's translation, and derided William Cowper's as "anti-Miltonish".

Coleridge highlighted it within an English historical context, saying Chapman's version was Homer if "he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth".