In brief
The Iliad does not tell the story of the Trojan War. It covers a few weeks in the tenth year, about fifteen thousand lines of Greek in twenty-four books, and it ends before the wooden horse and before Achilles dies. A commander takes a captive woman from his best fighter, the fighter withdraws, and men die in quantity until the fighter’s closest friend is among them. Then the fighter returns, kills the enemy’s best man, abuses the corpse for days, and at last gives it back to an old father who has come by night to ask.
What makes it more than a war story is its refusal to take sides in its feeling. The Trojans are the enemy, and they get the tenderest scenes. The Greeks win, and the poem closes on a Trojan funeral. That double vision keeps readers arguing about whether it celebrates war or indicts it.
The argument
The first word in the Greek is mēnin, wrath, and Butler’s opening gets the emphasis across: “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.” The stated subject is one man’s emotion and what it costs other people. Achilles has a just complaint in Book 1, and it kills his own side. Agamemnon sends gifts in Book 9, and Achilles refuses them. From then on the anger is no longer about justice, and his friend’s death in Book 16 follows from it.
My view is that the poem’s real argument happens in Book 9, the one place where someone questions the rules. Everyone at Troy lives by a simple exchange: you risk death, and you get honour, meaning prizes and precedence. Sarpedon states it best in Book 12: if they could escape “old age and death thenceforward and forever” he would not fight either, but since they cannot, “let us go forward and either win glory for ourselves” or give it to another. Achilles, once robbed, sees that the exchange is a fraud: “He that fights fares no better than he that does not; coward and hero are held in equal honour”, and no prize buys a life back. His mother has told him “that there are two ways in which I may meet my end”, short and famous or long and forgotten. Having said it all, he has nowhere to go. Nobody in the poem can imagine another way to live, and he stays by the ships.
The answer comes only in Book 24, and it is no new code. Priam comes alone to the man who has killed his sons and says, “I have steeled myself as no man yet has ever steeled himself before me, and have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son.” They weep, “Priam, as he lay at Achilles’ feet, weeping for Hector, and Achilles now for his father and now for Patroclus”. Then Achilles talks of the two urns on the floor of Jove’s palace, and of supper: “Even lovely Niobe had to think about eating”. Nothing is repaired, and the war resumes after the last line. One man has recognised himself in his enemy, and the poem treats this as the most it can honestly offer.
The shape of the poem
Aristotle admired Homer for taking one part of the war and not the whole. The opening books pretend the war is just beginning: the ships are catalogued in Book 2, and Helen points out the Greek leaders to Priam from the wall in Book 3, as if ten years had not passed. Hector knows that “the day will surely come when mighty Ilius shall be destroyed” (Book 6), and Achilles knows that his death follows Hector’s (Book 18).
The long battle of Books 11 to 15 is where first-time readers drown, but the structure is a slow exchange of deaths: Sarpedon by Patroclus, Patroclus by Hector, Hector by Achilles, with the last understood. The ending mirrors the opening. A father comes to the enemy to ransom a child in Book 1 and is driven off with insults, which brings the plague; a father comes to ransom a child in Book 24 and is fed. The last line is plain: “Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Hector tamer of horses.”
The voice
The Iliad has little of the Odyssey’s storytelling cunning. Its own instrument is the simile, which keeps opening a window from the battlefield onto peacetime: a dying man falls like a poplar in a meadow. The shield Vulcan makes in Book 18 carries that idea furthest, with weddings, a lawsuit, ploughing, a harvest and a dance beside one city under siege. Its deaths are brief and anatomical, and often it adds a line of biography, as with Simoeisius, who “did not live to pay his parents for his rearing” (Book 4).
The free text linked here is Samuel Butler’s prose of 1898, complete in twenty-four books, with book lengths that track the Greek throughout. It is prose, so the hexameter’s pace and the weight of repeated formulas are gone, and it gives Roman names to Greek gods: Jove is Zeus, Juno is Hera, Minerva is Athena, Venus is Aphrodite, Vulcan is Hephaestus, and Ulysses is Odysseus. Quotations here use his wording.
The people
Achilles
Achilles is the only person in the poem who thinks beyond it, and he is also its most frightening killer. Adam Parry’s essay “The Language of Achilles” (1956) argued that he strains against the only vocabulary he has, since epic language has no words for the doubts he voices. His cruelty after Patroclus dies is exact and not excused. To the unarmed Lycaon, begging at his knees: “Therefore, my friend, you too shall die. Why should you whine in this way? Patroclus fell, and he was a better man than you are” (Book 21). The next sentence includes himself among the doomed. He tells Hector he would like “to cut your flesh into pieces and eat it raw” (Book 22) and burns twelve Trojan youths on the pyre (Book 23).
Hector
Hector is the man the audience can actually be, which is why many readers end up loving him more. James Redfield’s Nature and Culture in the Iliad (1975) built a reading on this. Hector fights for a city and a family, and Book 6 shows what that means: his son screams at “the horse-hair plume that nodded fiercely from his helmet”, both parents laugh, and he takes it off. He tells his wife that he knows “nothing save to fight bravely in the forefront of the Trojan host and win renown”, he refuses Polydamas’s good advice in Book 18, and he later admits, “Now that my folly has destroyed the host, I dare not look Trojan men and Trojan women in the face” (Book 22). So he stays outside the walls from shame, runs “three times round the city” in terror, and turns only when a goddess tricks him. The poem lets the city’s defender be afraid, and no scene in it moves more.
Agamemnon and Patroclus
Agamemnon is a bad king who happens to be the senior one. Patroclus is everyone’s gentle friend, and he dies by overreaching, after Apollo, Euphorbus and Hector have all struck him (Book 16).
Helen, Andromache and Briseis
Women in this poem are mostly prizes, and it knows this. Briseis’s departure gets one clause: “and the woman was loth to go” (Book 1). When she does speak, in Book 19, it emerges that Achilles killed her husband and that Patroclus was kind to her. Helen is more self-aware than any man in the poem, calling herself “abhorred and miserable” in Book 3, and she mourns Hector’s kindness at the end (Book 24). Andromache has the great scene of foreboding in Book 6 and then, in Book 22, the poem’s coldest stroke, ordering a bath for a husband already dead.
What the poem does with the gods
The gods of the Iliad are neither moral law nor primitive embarrassment. They are the audience. Jasper Griffin’s Homer on Life and Death (1980) showed how much of the poem’s seriousness depends on them watching. Because nothing can finally hurt them, the human stakes appear in full. When Diomed cuts Venus in Book 5, she runs crying to her mother and the wound is wiped away. When the gods fight each other in Book 21, Juno “laughed as she beat her” with Diana’s own bow “about the ears” in a scene of pure slapstick. Apollo declines the fight on the grounds that nobody should quarrel “about a pack of miserable mortals, who come out like leaves in summer”. Vulcan used the same words, “about a pack of mortals”, in Book 1, to calm a domestic row.
Yet Jove loves Sarpedon, his son, and cannot save him without upsetting everything, so “he shed a rain of blood upon the earth” (Book 16) and lets him die. He looks at Achilles’ immortal horses mourning Patroclus and asks why they were given to a mortal, “for of all creatures that live and move upon the earth there is none so pitiable as he is” (Book 17). Divine help is itself a cruelty: the goddess who takes Achilles by the hair in Book 1 appears to Hector as his brother in Book 22, then vanishes when he asks for a spear.
Nor do the gods excuse anyone. E. R. Dodds opened The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) with Agamemnon’s plea in Book 19 that “Jove, and Fate, and Erinys” drove him mad. A god acts and a man still pays, and the poem sees no contradiction.
Simone Weil and force
The most famous modern reading is Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”, published in Cahiers du Sud in Marseille in December 1940 and January 1941, under the name Emile Novis, with France defeated. Mary McCarthy’s English appeared in Politics in November 1945. The essay opens, “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force”, and force is defined as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing”. Whoever wields it today is its object tomorrow, and the poem’s “sense of equity” extends to both sides. From the bath in Book 22, where Butler has “poor woman, she knew not that he was now beyond the reach of baths”, she drew her great sentence: “Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths.”
She is right about what is most terrible in the poem, and the Lycaon scene could be her epigraph. She is also wrong in an instructive way. The Iliad enjoys killing: it lingers on expertise, bright armour and men at the height of their power. Her example is Patroclus, who she says “commits no cruel or brutal act”, yet in Book 16 he stands over a charioteer with a smashed skull and jokes, “Bless my heart, how active he is, and how well he dives.” Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, written in the same years and also translated by McCarthy, gives more room to beauty; New York Review Books prints the two together as War and the Iliad. The poem sees force clearly, and it also finds force beautiful.
How it was made
Nothing certain is known about Homer, and most scholars now doubt that the same poet composed both epics. The Odyssey page sets out the oral tradition behind them. For the Iliad, opinion mostly places its composition in the late eighth century BC, with a substantial minority for the seventh. The site at Hisarlik in north-west Turkey, dug by Schliemann from the 1870s, is usually taken to be Troy, but nothing there proves a war like the poem’s. Book 10, the night raid, has long been suspected of being a later addition.
Readers and critics
Plutarch has Alexander sleeping with a copy of the poem beside his dagger. Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam (1994), by a psychiatrist treating veterans, read Achilles’ betrayal and berserk grief as combat trauma.
Afterlives
Virgil built the second half of The Aeneid on the Iliad. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida mocks its heroes. W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” (1952) replaces the bright scenes of Book 18 with barbed wire. Christopher Logue’s War Music, begun in 1959, is a free account of parts of the poem. Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011) cuts the story away and keeps the minor dead and the similes. Recent fiction has gone to the people the poem overlooks, as in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018), narrated by Briseis. Wolfgang Petersen’s film Troy (2004) took the gods out.
Which translation
Butler’s is the most readable of the free versions on Project Gutenberg. Lang, Leaf and Myers (1883) keeps the Greek names in a pseudo-biblical prose. Chapman, finished by 1611, runs in long rhymed fourteeners, and it is the one Keats read. Pope (1715–20) is a major English poem in couplets, with its rawness polished away. To read the poem seriously, buy a modern verse version:
- Richmond Lattimore (1951). “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus”. Nearly line for line and still the standard for readers without Greek, though often stiff.
- Robert Fagles (1990). “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles”. Vigorous and contemporary, with an excellent introduction by Bernard Knox. The best first choice for most.
- Robert Fitzgerald (1974). “Anger be now your song, immortal one”. The most graceful as English poetry, and freer than the others.
- Stanley Lombardo (1997). “Rage: Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage”. Fast and made for performance.
- Anthony Verity (2011). Close and clean.
- Also good. Caroline Alexander (2015), the first full English version by a woman; Emily Wilson (2023), in tight iambic pentameter that matches her Odyssey; and Peter Green (2015).
How to read it
Read next
- Homer, The Odyssey (c. 700 BC). The same world after the war, in a very different temper.
- Virgil, The Aeneid (29–19 BC). A loser of this war founds Rome, and the final duel is rewritten without the mercy.
- Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (2005). The two wartime essays together.
- Alice Oswald, Memorial (2011). The poem’s dead, name by name.
- Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls (2018). Book 1 as told by the woman who was loth to go.