The Iliad

A poem about one man’s anger

The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic, a long poem about heroes, set during the war at Troy. Homer’s name is attached to it, and to the Odyssey.

The first line states the subject, and the subject is the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus. The poem calls that wrath destructive and counts its cost on the Greek side. It brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, which is the poem’s usual word for the Greeks, and sent many of their own heroes down to Hades, the land of the dead.

What the poem follows, inside the war it is set in, is a quarrel in the Greek camp and what that quarrel costs the men besieging the city.

The quarrel that starts it

The quarrel begins with a refused ransom. Chryses, a priest of the god Apollo, comes to the Greek ships to buy back his daughter. He carries ransom past counting and the wreaths of Apollo on a staff of gold, and he asks the army to take it. The soldiers shout their assent.

Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek force, overrules them. He sends the old man away with a threat: the girl will not be released, and old age will come upon her in his house in Argos, far from her own country.

Apollo answers for his priest. In anger against the king he sends an evil pestilence through the army, and the people begin to die. The first harm in the poem falls on the Greeks, and their own commander’s decision brings it. The poem has already said in its opening lines that Agamemnon and Achilles parted in strife, and the plague is where that strife starts.

The Catalogue of Ships

In Book 2 the poem stops to count the army. Before it does, the poet calls on the Muses a second time, the goddesses who have their dwellings on Olympus. He gives a reason for asking them: they are goddesses, they are present and know all things, while mortals hear only a rumour and know nothing. Then he tells the captains of the ships and the ships in their order.

What follows is a register of Greek places. Pylos and the towns of the Alpheius country are led by the horseman, Nestor of Gerenia, and 90 hollow ships are ranged with him. The Cretans, drawn from Crete of the hundred cities and headed in the entry by Knossos, are led by Idomeneus, famed for his spear, and by Meriones, and 80 black ships follow them.

The Catalogue pauses once on poetry itself. Inside the Pylos entry it places at Dorium the spot where the Muses met Thamyris the Thracian and made an end of his singing.

The spear and the island

In Book 16 Patroclus, the companion of Achilles, puts on Achilles’s armour and goes out to fight in his place. He arms himself down to two spears that fit his grasp, and the one weapon he leaves behind is Achilles’s own, heavy and huge and strong. It is the Pelian ash, which the centaur Chiron, half man and half horse, gave from the peak of Pelion to Achilles’s father Peleus. Of all the Achaeans only Achilles was skilled to wield it.

Skyros reaches the poem through one woman. As the embassy leaves Achilles’s hut in Book 9, the poem names the woman lying beside Patroclus as Iphis, given to him by Achilles when he took steep Scyrus, the city of Enyeus.

Where the poem stops

The Iliad does not reach the fall of Troy. It ends at the funeral of Hector, held inside the enemy city.

Achilles has given Priam, the king of Troy and the father of Hector, his word that he will do the Trojans no hurt until the twelfth dawn. On that promise Priam tells his people to bring wood into the city and to fear no ambush. For nine days they bring in a measureless store of it. On the tenth they carry Hector out, lay him on the topmost pyre and set fire to it.

The next morning they quench the embers with wine. His brothers and companions gather the white bones, place them in a golden urn, cover it with soft purple robes and lay it in a hollow grave under close-set stones. Watchers are posted in case the Greeks come before the time. Then the city feasts in Priam’s palace. The last line of the poem records a funeral held for horse-taming Hector.

How the poem came down

Neither the author nor the date of the poem is settled. Modern scholars place it in oral tradition, in which poems were carried by word of mouth and composing a poem went together with performing it. On that reading, nothing proves that alphabetic writing was needed either to compose the Homeric poems or to perform them.

Modern scholars also argue that Homer’s name did not always belong to these two poems alone. On that view the name was narrowed to the Iliad and the Odyssey over time.

The poem is counted in 24 parts, which scholarship on the Homeric text calls rhapsodies as well as books.