The Iliad

About the work

Author

Homer

Original title

Ἰλιάς (Ilías)

Publication

Poem of oral tradition, fixed in writing around the eighth century BC.

Genre

Epic poem in twenty-four books of Greek hexameter

Setting

The plain before Troy, the Greek camp beside the ships, the city of Troy, and Olympus

Era

A few weeks of the tenth year of the Trojan War

Narrator

Third person, a narrator who invokes the Muse

Protagonist

Achilles

The Story and Its World

The Iliad takes place in the tenth year of the war that the Greeks, called in the poem Achaeans, Argives, and Danaans, wage against Troy, the city of Asia Minor ruled by the aged Priam. The cause of the war predates the poem: Paris, son of Priam, carried off Helen from Sparta, the wife of king Menelaus, and the Greek chiefs, led by Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus, crossed the sea to bring her back. The poem narrates neither the beginning nor the end of the war: it does not tell of the abduction, the wooden horse, or the fall of the city. The action covers a few weeks and begins with a quarrel inside the Greek camp itself.

The quarrel is between Agamemnon, the king who commands the largest contingent, and Achilles, the best warrior in the army, son of the goddess Thetis and the mortal Peleus. In a world where a man's worth is measured by the prize his companions give him before everyone, Agamemnon takes the captive Briseis from Achilles, and Achilles withdraws from the fighting. The rest of the poem shows the price of that withdrawal: the Trojans, led by Hector, son of Priam, reach the Greek ships; Patroclus, Achilles' closest companion, enters the battle in his armor and dies at the hands of Hector; Achilles returns to the field to avenge him.

The gods are everywhere. Zeus decides the general course of the war, Hera and Athena favor the Greeks, Apollo and Aphrodite protect the Trojans, and all of them come down to the field, disguised or visible, to save a favorite or turn aside a spear. Even so, the poem does not take from men the weight of their own choices: the gods push, but men decide, and it is they who die.

The Argument That Runs Through the Poem

The first word of the poem is "wrath," and the arc of the Iliad is the arc of that wrath. It is born of an offense to honor, grows until it costs the life of a friend, shifts its target when Achilles returns to fight Hector, and dies out only in the last book, when Priam crosses the enemy camp alone and kisses the hands of the man who killed his sons to beg for Hector's body. The two of them weep together, each for his own dead, and Achilles gives back the body.

Between the wrath of the first book and the pity of the last, the poem asks what a short life is worth. Achilles knows he has two possible destinies: if he stays before Troy, he will die young and with glory; if he returns home, he will live long and without fame. Honor is the only compensation he expects for that choice, and it is precisely that which Agamemnon takes from him. On the other side, Hector fights knowing the city will fall, and he takes leave of his wife, Andromache, and of their little son before returning to the battle.

The Iliad has no villains. Greeks and Trojans die in the same way, and the poem gives each dead man a name, an origin, and sometimes a father who will never see him come home. That is why war appears at once as the place of glory and as a machine of destruction, and the last book celebrates no one's victory: it ends with the funeral of Hector.

The Arc

The dishonor of Achilles by Agamemnon, his withdrawal, the death of Patroclus at the hands of Hector, Achilles' vengeance, and at the end the return of Hector's body to the aged Priam, the pity that rediscovers humanity amid war.

The selection is what the Poetics praises in Homer, and the reason it gives for calling him divine among poets: he did not try to compose the whole war, although it had a beginning and an end.