The Iliad

What It Is

An epic poem of roughly 15,700 lines of Greek hexameter, composed around 750 BC at the end of centuries of oral performance, and set in a Bronze Age world already five hundred years gone. Homer is less a man we can point to than the name the Greeks gave to the moment their tradition reached its height.

It was sung, not read, to audiences who already knew the world it moves in. Everything about its construction follows from that: the repeated epithets, the formulaic lines, the scenes assembled from standard parts. Come to it expecting a novel and it will punish you for it.

It also covers far less of the Trojan legend than most people assume. Homer takes a short stretch of a long war and stays inside it. Readers who arrive with the version from films and children's books are usually surprised by where his attention goes.

Why It Matters

It is the first work of Western literature and, three thousand years on, still the coldest-eyed. Its subject is what violence does to people, and it refuses to take a side. The Trojans get exactly the interior life and grief the Greeks get, an act of imagination most war writing since has not dared to repeat.

To the Greeks it was scripture and schoolbook at once; Alexander is said to have kept a copy under his pillow on campaign. It gave the West its idea of glory and, in the same breath, its first serious doubt about glory. Simone Weil's essay of 1939, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, made it the text for thinking about what war does to a human being, and soldiers have read it that way ever since.

Read it and you understand why honour is a currency that can bankrupt a man, and why an Iron Age poem still explains a war reported this morning.

Before You Read

Twenty-four books, fifteen to twenty hours, three or four weeks at a book or two a night. That pace works. A chapter a week does not.

The sentences are clear. The difficulty is the density of names. Keep the glossary and the index of characters within reach and use them without embarrassment; Fagles and Wilson both supply good ones.

Book 2 contains a long catalogue of the assembled forces, contingent by contingent. It is a feat of memory rather than a piece of narrative, and most first-time readers move through it briskly. You are allowed to.

Which Translation to Read

• Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1990) — recommended. Free verse with enormous forward drive, written for the speaking voice, and the version that has converted more first-time readers than any other. Bernard Knox's introduction is among the finest essays written on the poem. The cost: Fagles heightens. He adds voltage where the Greek stays deliberately cold, and scholars grumble, with some justice, that he stages what Homer merely states. Knox discusses the poem in full, so save the introduction for the end. View on Amazon →
• Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1951). The closest thing in English to the shape of the Greek: line for line, formula for formula, the strange word order kept. Take it to see what Homer built rather than what an English poet made of him. The cost: stiff and slow, and it asks more of a first-time reader than most will give.
• Emily Wilson (W. W. Norton, 2023). Iambic pentameter, line for line with the Greek, plain and quick and morally exact, with an outstanding introduction, notes and maps. The cost: the restraint that makes it so clear surrenders some of the grandeur. Where Fagles roars, Wilson states.

Take Fagles to be swept along, Wilson for clarity, Lattimore for the architecture. Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 1997) is a fine fourth: blunt, colloquial, thrilling out loud.

The Folio Society has issued the Iliad and the Odyssey together as a limited edition of 500 copies, using Wilson's translations with illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. The best reading edition and the best collectible are not the same book here.

Getting the Most From This Book

Listen as well as read. Derek Jacobi's recording of the Fagles translation for Penguin Audio is a real performance, and hearing a few books aloud teaches you more about the poem than any commentary will.

Pay attention to the similes. When Homer stops the fighting to describe a shepherd, a hailstorm, or a mother brushing a fly from her sleeping child, that is not decoration. It is the peacetime world the poem measures the war against, and it is where the Iliad keeps its heart.

Read the introduction after the poem, and do not look up a summary first, however famous you have been told the story is. The poem's force depends on meeting things as they come.