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The Iliad

Name: The Iliad
Author: Homer
ISBN: 9780226470498

Homerc. 750 BCE

This is where Western literature starts.

Ancient GreeceHardEpicAncient GreekLong · 459 pages

Influence99th pct

Popularity92nd pct

Where it ranks

#58of 194Overall #10of 37Ancient Greece

Read this if you…

want context for pretty much the rest of Western Literature
like wars and battles
like books without clear Good vs Bad Guys
interested in how the Greeks spoke of gods' interactions with men (poetic? metaphorical? religious?)

Skip this if you…

want a tight modern plot
don't care about context/historical significance

Why It Matters

This is where Western literature starts. Homer set the shape every later epic would follow, and he was the first to show war the way it actually is: brutal, sad, and not all that glorious. Every major Western writer since has had to deal with this book somehow.

The Take

A classic for a reason. Unbelievable someone could write something this good so long a go. Much more narratively skilled and poetic than pretty much all other literature in the BC era. Gods as real vs being part of the spiritual motivation of the humans is interesting. Awesome fighting scenes. The rage of Achilles is a super interesting concept, hating on his own side due to dueling prides with Agamemnon. Hector with his flashing bronze helmet is quite image. Also reverence for dead bodies is super interesting

Editions

Where to Start

#1Top Pick$21.00$19.57

Robert Fagles

Penguin Classics · 1990

The most readable modern Iliad. Fagles keeps Homer's weight and momentum without sounding archaic, and the speeches still hit. When someone says they've read the Iliad, this is usually what they read.

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Alexander Pope

Penguin Classics · 1996

$18.00$16.78Buy

Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press · 1951

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Stanley Lombardo

Hackett Publishing · 1997

Buy

Caroline Alexander

Ecco · 2015

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Connections

Where to go next

The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous. The Iliad built on it. - Achilles' grief has a Bronze Age ancestor — Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu - M.L. West traces the bones of the *Iliad*'s second half back to *Gilgamesh*: the slain companion's ghost, the divine mother who pleads, the hero who must learn to die - You don't need it to read Homer, but it reframes the rage as something far older — a story that traveled, West argues, through bilingual singers out of the Near East
The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope. The Iliad shaped it. - Pope didn't just admire Homer — he translated the whole *Iliad* into English, and built a mock-epic out of the machinery while he was at it - Sarpedon's grave battle-speech to Glaucus in Book 12 returns, near line for line, as Clarissa's moralizing in Canto V — the sublime original played for comedy over a stolen lock of hair - Every Homeric device — the arming of the hero, the catalog, the divine intervention — gets shrunk to a card game and a lady's dressing table
The Aeneid by Virgil. The Iliad shaped it. - Virgil set out to compete against Homer — to write Rome's *Iliad* and surpass the reputation of the man who started it all - The second half of the *Aeneid* (books 7–12) is modeled directly on the *Iliad*'s warfare; the climactic duel mirrors Achilles and Hector in *Iliad* 22 - Down to the similes and the phrasing, Virgil works in conscious echo of Homer — the lineage is the whole ambition
Poetics by Aristotle. The Iliad shaped it. - Aristotle made the *Iliad* the central exhibit of his theory of epic - He singled out one thing — Homer organizes the whole poem around a single connected action, the anger of Achilles, instead of cramming in the entire war - That focus became the template every later epic was measured against; in the *Poetics* the *Iliad* isn't an example, it's the standard
The Republic by Plato. The Iliad shaped it. - Homer is the poet Plato can't stop arguing with — the *Republic* quotes the *Iliad* directly, only to put it on trial - Books 2–3 single out specific passages — Achilles raging, the gods at war — as lies that would corrupt the city's young guardians - Book 10 widens the indictment into a full case against Homer as the chief of the mimetic poets: the *Iliad* is the literature Plato wants to censor
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The Iliad shaped it. - Tolstoy found the *Iliad* in the summer of 1857 — and never let it go - In his 1891 list of the books that formed him, only Homer and the Bible span every stage of his life - He admired Homer's "picture of manners and customs based on historical event" — which is precisely the thing he set out to do across the vast Russian canvas of *War and Peace*
Sappho's Poems by Sappho. The Iliad shaped it. - Sappho turns Homer's epic of war inward — fragment 44 retells the *Iliad*'s wedding of Hector and Andromache in epic meter, but as a celebration of love, not a prelude to slaughter - Where Homer makes Helen the cause of a war, Sappho's fragment 16 recasts her as a figure of pure desire - The same Homeric diction, bent to a private music: martial glory traded for the things a woman actually longs for
Faust, Part Two by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Iliad shaped it. - Goethe had Homer by heart from childhood — and in *Faust, Part Two* he reaches all the way back to the war the *Iliad* is fought over - The entire Helen act picks up Homer's matter at Menelaus's palace in Sparta, casting Helen of Troy as its heroine - The face that launched the thousand ships becomes Goethe's, summoned back from the dead to marry Faust
The Histories by Herodotus. The Iliad shaped it. - The *Iliad* is the model Herodotus builds his history on — its Catalogue of Ships becomes his catalogue of Persian provinces and the muster of Xerxes' army - The fight over the body of Leonidas at Thermopylae is patterned on the fight over Patroclus - And Herodotus quotes Homer by name to argue against him — cross-examining the *Iliad* as evidence in his own case that Helen never reached Troy
Ajax by Sophocles. The Iliad shaped it. - Sophocles was called "the tragic Homer" — and *Ajax* is where you see why - Ajax is conceived fundamentally out of Homer: his ruinous pursuit of heroic honor is the mentality of the Iliadic Achilles, carried onto the tragic stage - The *Iliad*'s warrior code — what a man's honor is worth, and what it costs — becomes the thing that destroys him
Paradise Lost by John Milton. The Iliad shaped it. - Milton 'had his Homer by heart' and wrote *Paradise Lost* as a Christian epic meant to outdo him - The catalogue of fallen devils is patterned on the Catalogue of Ships, the great speeches on Homeric speeches, the similes repurposed wholesale - Satan's martial heroism is the Achillean ideal deliberately put on trial — Milton borrows Homer's grandeur precisely to overturn it
Philoctetes by Sophocles. The Iliad shaped it. - Philoctetes and Achilles are named together back in the Catalogue of Ships — two heroes alienated, absent, and in pain - Sophocles seized on that pairing: he built *Philoctetes* along the lines of *Iliad* 9's embassy, the great scene of a wronged hero refusing to rejoin the war - The wrath-and-withdrawal pattern Homer gave Achilles becomes the engine of Sophocles's marooned, embittered archer
The Symposium by Plato. The Iliad shaped it. - The *Iliad*'s Achilles, who chooses death to avenge Patroclus, becomes Plato's case study in what love can drive a hero to do - In *The Symposium*, Phaedrus cites "Homer's account" by name and crowns Achilles the supreme exemplar of love - Homer's grief-maddened warrior is reread, centuries later, as proof that love makes men brave beyond death
Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare. The Iliad shaped it. - Shakespeare reached the *Iliad* through Chapman's 1598 translation — and turned it inside out - He kept the cast — Achilles' ruinous pride, Hector's tragedy — but soured the glory into satire, hanging the foul-mouthed Thersites at the center as a chorus of disgust - *Troilus and Cressida* is what the *Iliad* looks like when a cynic retells it: the same war, none of the honor
Medea by Euripides. The Iliad shaped it. - Achilles' heroic temper outlived Homer's battlefield — Bernard Knox and later scholars trace it straight into Euripides's *Medea* - The man who cannot bear a slight, who fears mockery above all and turns his fury on friend and enemy alike: that is the Iliadic code, transplanted into a woman - Euripides even inverts it — where Achilles finally returns Hector's body, Medea refuses Jason the burial of their sons
Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The Iliad shaped it. - Hector's farewell to Andromache — "war will be the concern of men" — became a line Aristophanes couldn't resist turning inside out - In *Lysistrata*, the husbands quote that very sentiment to silence their wives; the women then seize the war anyway - The most tender, domestic moment in the *Iliad* gets recast as the punchline of an anti-war sex comedy
Apology by Plato. The Iliad shaped it. - Achilles' choice in *Iliad* 18 — death over dishonor — gave Socrates the words to defend his own life - In the *Apology*, Socrates quotes that passage by name to explain why he won't abandon his philosophic mission, even on pain of death - Homer's battlefield code becomes the template for the most famous act of intellectual courage in antiquity
Metamorphoses by Ovid. The Iliad shaped it. - Book 12 of the *Metamorphoses* is so steeped in Homer that scholars call it Ovid's "little Iliad" - Same war, same cast — Achilles, Paris, Priam, Hecuba — but Ovid swerves past Homer's great duels toward stranger transformation tales - Ovid follows the *Iliad* closely enough for verbal parallels, then reworks Achilles entirely on his own terms
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The Iliad shaped it. - Homer's most famous simile became a Stoic emperor's text for meditation - The *Iliad*'s "generations of leaves" (Book 6) — one generation falling, another springing up to replace it — is the image Marcus Aurelius returns to when he steadies himself against death - He quotes the line directly and lists Homer among the authorities he draws on
Selected Poems by John Dryden. The Iliad shaped it. - Dryden Englished Homer the way he'd Englished Virgil — measuring his own verse against the founding epic poet - He translated Hector and Andromache's parting from *Iliad* Book VI, then the entirety of Book I - The first book of the *Iliad* in heroic couplets is Dryden taking the measure of where Western poetry began
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding. The Iliad shaped it. - Fielding made the *Iliad* the engine of his comedy — the model he names alongside Aristotle in *Tom Jones* - Homer's battle-scenes and extended heroic similes get lifted wholesale into mock-epic brawls: the churchyard fight, the Mrs. Partridge episode - Apply Achilles-grade grandeur to a country squabble and you get the mock-heroic — the whole joke depends on the *Iliad* standing behind it
Walden or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau. The Iliad shaped it. - Thoreau kept the *Iliad* on his cabin table all summer and read it in the original Greek - Homer becomes the centerpiece of *Walden*'s argument that the great books reward — even require — reading in their first language - "The shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising" — Homer is Thoreau's proof that the oldest poetry stays new
The Odes of Horace by Horatius. The Iliad shaped it. - Horace opens *Odes* 1.6 by translating the *Iliad*'s first lines — and shrinking them on purpose - Achilles' towering *menis* becomes a comically small *stomachus*, a fit of pique: Horace's way of bowing to Homer while refusing to write epic himself - The Iliadic allusions thread through the rest of the *Odes* too, especially Book 4 — Homer is the giant he keeps measuring himself against
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. The Iliad shaped it. - The moment history breaks away from epic — and it happens on Homer's terms - Thucydides opens his *History* by treating the *Iliad* as evidence to be tested: mining the Catalogue of Ships for data, then scolding the poet for inflating the numbers - He builds his own factual method by arguing with Homer — the epic tradition is the foil he defines himself against
Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch. The Iliad shaped it. - Centuries on, Homer is still Plutarch's first witness — the *Iliad* gets quoted throughout the *Lives* for moral color and the texture of heroic character - Plutarch reaches for Homer to gloss everything from the Abantes' haircut to Aethra at Troy in his *Theseus* - In the *Moralia* he calls him 'the divine Homer' and mines him for how a young man should read poetry at all
The Lusiads by Luís de Camões. The Iliad shaped it. - Camões names Homer at the outset and sails the *Iliad*'s machinery into the Age of Discovery — Olympian gods leaning over a Portuguese fleet instead of a battlefield - Venus and Bacchus take up the old Homeric quarrel, divine factions for and against the mortal heroes below - Da Gama's voyage is fitted with epic gear forged here: the gods watching, choosing sides, steering the storm
Peace by Aristophanes. The Iliad shaped it. - Three centuries on, Aristophanes turns Homer into a weapon for the antiwar side - In *Peace*, Trygaeus quotes the *Iliad* by name — deploying Homer's own line against the warmongers — even as the *Iliad*'s martial verses still fire up the next generation at the wedding feast - The epic that glorified the rage of Achilles becomes the script both peace and war quote from
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. The Iliad shaped it. - Lucretius makes Homer the standard-bearer of poetry — and then bends him to Epicurus - He imitates the *Iliad*'s great shield-ecphrasis (Book 18), reading Achilles' shield as an image of the cosmos, and salutes Homer in the proem to Book 3 - The oldest epic becomes the model Lucretius writes his didactic poem against — an invitation to read Homer philosophically
Phaedrus by Plato. The Iliad shaped it. - Homer was "the educator of Hellas," and Plato's dialogues quote the *Iliad* some 91 times — it's the epic authority his Socrates keeps reckoning with - In the *Phaedrus*, Plato sets Socrates's palinode against Homer's telling of Helen and even adapts a Homeric hexameter mid-dialogue - The *Iliad* is the inherited tradition Socrates must recant before he can speak rightly about love
The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. The Iliad shaped it. - When Aristotle needs to show his readers what courage or happiness *looks like*, he reaches for the *Iliad* - He quotes Homer directly on courage in Book 3 — the lines of Hector and Diomedes — treating the poem as a shared moral vocabulary - Priam becomes his central case: "no one calls a man happy who meets misfortunes like Priam's" — the *Iliad*'s fallen king grounding Aristotle's whole account of a good life
The Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus. The Iliad shaped it. - Homer left a second war buried inside the *Iliad* — the assault on Thebes, recalled in Agamemnon's account of Tydeus at 4.372-400, with ruined Hypothebai surviving in the Catalogue of Ships - Aeschylus took that embedded Theban material and built a tragedy around it, drawing his scout's portrait of Tydeus straight from Homer's lines
The Persians by Aeschylus. The Iliad shaped it. - Aeschylus called his own plays "slices from the great banquets of Homer" — *The Persians* eats from this table - Xerxes and the ghost of Darius wear Homeric epithets, given the "godlike hero" grandeur the *Iliad* reserved for its warriors - The tragic stage borrows Homer's scale of suffering and turns it on a defeated enemy
The Frogs by Aristophanes. The Iliad shaped it. - Centuries later, Aristophanes puts the *Iliad* on trial — his Aeschylus declares his spirit "took its impress from Homer" and parodies Homeric verse directly in the underworld poetry contest - That whole contest is patterned on the legendary Contest of Homer and Hesiod, with the *Iliad* claimed as the wellspring of Aeschylus's martial poetry - The greatest war poem becomes the standard everyone in *The Frogs* is measured against
The Oresteia by Aeschylus. The Iliad shaped it. - Aeschylus called his own plays "slices from the great feasts of Homer" — and the *Oresteia* is one of the richest cuts - The trilogy borrows the *Iliad*'s technique wholesale: Iliadic similes of eagles robbed of their young, a Watchman cut from heroic cloth - The plot itself comes from the *Odyssey*'s Agamemnon myth, but the *grandeur* — the ethical weight, the heroic register — is straight from this poem

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Notable Quotes

“Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses.”
— Opening line

“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses.”
— Opening lines, Book I · trans. Robert Fagles

Deep Dive

What It's About

The Iliad drops you into the tenth and final year of the Trojan War — but this isn't a war story in any conventional sense. The poem covers roughly two weeks, and its subject isn't the fall of Troy but the rage of Achilles: the greatest Greek warrior's feud with his own commander, Agamemnon, and the catastrophic fallout of that rage for everyone around him.

After Agamemnon takes Achilles' war-prize (a captured woman, Briseis), Achilles withdraws from battle entirely. The Greeks start losing. Badly. Achilles' closest companion, Patroclus, borrows his armor to turn the tide and is killed by the Trojan hero Hector. Achilles' rage shifts — now directed at Hector and the Trojans — and he returns to the fighting with terrifying, almost inhuman fury.

The poem ends not with a victory but with two acts of grief: Achilles dragging Hector's body behind his chariot, then surrendering it to Hector's father, King Priam, in one of the most emotionally devastating scenes in all of literature. If you've never read it, be prepared — Homer is far more psychologically complex, more morally ambiguous, and more viscerally powerful than you'd expect from something written nearly three thousand years ago.

Spoiler warning

This summary gives away plot details.

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