The Iliad
Homer
The Iliad
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Nine years into the siege of Troy, Agamemnon takes a prize from Achilles, and Achilles withdraws from the war. That quarrel, and what it costs the Greeks before his closest friend is killed and brings him back out, is the whole subject of the poem — a few weeks near the end of a ten-year war, in which the gods take sides and the men do the dying.
About the book
Composed around the eighth century BC and set in the tenth year of the siege of Troy, the Iliad covers a few weeks. Agamemnon, forced to give up a captive woman, takes Achilles’ prize in compensation, and Achilles withdraws from the fighting and asks his mother to have Zeus make the Greeks lose. They do. The war goes against them for thousands of lines until Patroclus borrows the armour and is killed in it, and Achilles comes back to the field in a rage that nothing human can meet. The poem ends not with the fall of the city — the horse is not in it — but with an old king crossing enemy lines at night to ask for his son’s body, and kissing the hands of the man who killed him. Everything the Iliad has to say about war is in that room.
Characters
Achilles — Protagonist
The greatest of the Greek fighters, withdrawn from the war over an insult and brought back by grief.
Hector — Trojan prince
Troy’s defender, fighting for a city he expects to lose and a family he knows will be enslaved.
Agamemnon — Greek commander
Leader of the expedition, whose seizure of Achilles’ prize is the quarrel the poem opens with.
Patroclus — Achilles’ companion
Achilles’ closest friend, who goes into battle in his armour to save the Greek ships.
Priam — King of Troy
Hector’s father, who crosses the lines alone at night to beg his son’s body from Achilles.
Andromache — Hector’s wife
Who has already lost her father and brothers to Achilles, and knows exactly what is coming.
Odysseus — Greek captain
The most resourceful of the Greek leaders, sent wherever persuasion or a night raid is needed.
Helen — In Troy
The cause of the war by everyone’s account, watching it from the walls and blaming herself.
About the author
Homer is the name given to the poet credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epics standing at the start of the European literary tradition. Nothing about his life is known, and whether one person composed either poem has been argued over since antiquity: both came out of a long oral tradition of sung verse, and both carry its repeated phrases and formulas. They were probably fixed in something like their present form in the 8th century BC. The Odyssey — a soldier taking ten years to get home from a war he had already spent ten years fighting — is the older of the two stories and the more widely read.