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THE ILIAD
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oxford world’s classics
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1
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3
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Translation and glossary © Anthony Verity 2011
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CONTENTS
ix
Introduction
Note on the Text and Explanatory Materials
xxvii
Note on the Translation
xxix
Select Bibliography
xxx
xxxiii
Maps
THE ILIAD
book one
3
book two
19
book three
42
book four
54
book five
68
book six
91
book seven
105
book eight
118
book nine
133
book ten
151
book eleven
166
book twelve
188
book thirteen
200
book fourteen
222
book fifteen
236
book sixteen
255
book seventeen
277
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contents
book eighteen
297
book nineteen
313
book twenty
324
book twenty-one
337
book twenty-two
353
book twenty-three
366
book twenty-four
389
Expanatory Notes
410
Index of Personal Names
451
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INTRODUCTION
Vivid, painful, and direct, the Iliad is one of the most inluential
poems of all time. It has continuously featured in the school curriculum for two-and-a-half millennia; and, even before then, audiences
regularly heard it performed at public festivals and in private houses.
The success of the Iliad is astonishing, particularly because this poem
is neither easy nor pleasant. Already in antiquity, listeners struggled
to understand its language, and sometimes fell asleep during performances. And yet the diiculties posed by the diction and sheer length
of the poem are insigniicant when compared to the demands that
the Iliad makes on our hearts and minds. This poem confronts, with
unlinching clarity, many issues that we had rather forget altogether:
the failures of leadership, the destructive power of beauty, the brutalizing impact of war, and—above all—our ultimate fate of death. That
the Iliad has been so widely heard and read is not just a testament to its
immense power. It also speaks of the commitment of its many readers,
who have turned to it in order to understand something about their
own life, death, and humanity.
The composition of Homeric epic
It is not at all clear when or how the Iliad was composed, or what
purpose it might have served. If no literature from ancient Greece
survived, we certainly would not expect it to start with a monumental poem about the anger of Achilles. We would rather assume that it
began with shorter compositions destined for speciic occasions (for
example, wedding songs and funeral laments), and answering practical
purposes such as courtship, party entertainment, and martial exhortation. We know that those kinds of compositions did exist, and indeed
the Iliad makes reference to them. What it does not do is explain its own
existence. Scholars have ferociously debated the origins of the Iliad,
partly because the poem reveals so little about them. At a very general
level, the poem shows awareness of material circumstances not found
before the later eighth or early seventh century bce, such as temples
and cult statues, narrative art, and knowledge of the world extending
from Thrace to Phoenicia and Egypt. This gives a terminus post quem:
the poem cannot have been composed much before 700 bce.
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viii
introduction
Some historians argue that the rapidly changing social and political circumstances of the early seventh century demanded an intense
exploration of authority, and that the Iliad answers to that need. Even
a brief summary of the plot shows that the poem is indeed much concerned with how authority is established, questioned, and maintained.
It opens with a startling invocation to the Muse:
Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son,
the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countless
agonies…
Achilles’ anger inlicts countless agonies not on the enemy, the
Trojans—but on his own side, the Greeks, or rather ‘Achaeans’ as
Homer calls them.1 The reason for his anger is quickly explained.
The narrative is set sometime towards the end of the Trojan War,
and starts with the arrival of a priest of Apollo at the Achaean camp:
he has come to ransom his daughter Chryseïs, who was captured
by the Achaeans in a raid, and assigned to Agamemnon as a slave.
Agamemnon refuses to release her, claiming that he inds her more
enjoyable than his own wife, and threatens her father. Outraged by
Agamemnon’s behaviour, Apollo sends a plague that devastates the
Achaean army. Eventually, Agamemnon agrees to release Chryseïs to
appease the god, but demands recompense for his loss—in the form of
Achilles’ own slave Briseïs. Achilles is so angry at this demand that he
comes close to killing Agamemnon, though Athena restrains him, and
he decides to withdraw from the war instead. The poem shows how,
without him, the Achaeans sufer heavy losses on the battleield, and
the Trojans come close to burning their ships. In the face of imminent
defeat, Agamemnon ofers to return Briseïs and to add many more gifts
besides, but Achilles rejects an embassy detailing Agamemnon’s ofers.
It is only after the death of his closest friend Patroclus that Achilles
returns to the ighting. He is determined to avenge him by killing
Hector, best of the Trojans. His mother Thetis warns him that he will
die soon after Hector, but Achilles returns to the battleield regardless. He kills Hector, lashes his body to his chariot, and drags it to
his hut. The poem ends when Priam, Hector’s father, arrives at the
1 The Achaean army is made from contingents from the whole of Greece, but is never
called ‘Greek’ in the poem. That word has a much more speciic application in Homeric
epic: it describes people coming from Hellas, in northern Greece (see Map 1). When
describing the whole army, Homer uses three diferent collective names: Achaeans,
Danaans, or Argives.
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introduction
ix
Achaean camp and ofers ransom to Achilles in return for Hector’s
body. Achilles is reminded of his own father, another old man who will
never see his son again. He sends Priam back with Hector’s body, and
the women lead the funeral laments for him. As the last line in the
poem says,
So they conducted the funeral rites for Hector, breaker of horses.
Clearly, the Iliad is deeply concerned with leaders and their people.
The countless agonies of the Achaeans are told in painful detail: they
die when Agamemnon ofends the priest and Apollo sends the plague—
and they die again when Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon and withdraws from the ighting. The Trojans die too, even more copiously.
Hector’s death is the most afecting in the whole poem, partly because
its consequences for his wife, his baby son, and the entire Trojan community are made very clear. The death of Hector symbolizes the fall of
the city itself. Historians point out that, in the palatial culture of the late
Bronze Age, authority was difuse, and that this might have inspired
stories like the Iliad; they also argue that the rapid social and political
changes of the seventh century—when we can trace expanding communities, new settlements, increased trade and travel—provide an appropriate context for a poetic exploration of authority.2 This seems right,
but the issues explored in the Iliad remain interesting and relevant in
later times too. The common soldier Thersites is ridiculed and humiliated in the assembly; commander-in-chief Agamemnon is exposed, in
the narrative, as authoritarian and weak; Achilles, in the extremity of
his behaviour, seems inhuman even to the gods; and Hector, by his own
admission, fails his people. Depending on how we read these characters, we can attach diferent political meanings to the Iliad. The main
point is that no interpretation leads to a single original audience, or to a
speciic political agenda in support of which the poem must have been
composed. Flawed leaders like Agamemnon are always interesting; and
critics of authority, like Achilles and Thersites, are never entirely comfortable. The Iliad tells a story of universal appeal. This is something
that the ancient Greeks themselves articulated in their earliest responses
to the poem. The philosopher Xenophanes, writing in the sixth century
bce, described Homer as a universal teacher since time immemorial.3
2 For a good summary, see R. Osborne, ‘Homer’s Society’, in R. Fowler (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2004), 206–19.
3 Fr. 10 in H. Diels and W. Kranz (eds.), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols., 6th
edn. (Berlin, 1951–2).
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introduction
However uncertain the exact context in which the Iliad was composed, it is clear that it was aimed at a broad and committed audience. The Iliad is more than 15,000 lines long, and it would have taken
approximately three full days (or nights) to perform it in its entirety.4
Performances of this kind must have required some infrastructure and
organization—and we know that, from the sixth century onwards, they
received institutional support. The Athenian tyrant Pisistratus, or one
of his sons, decreed that the Homeric poems should be recited at the
most important city festival, the Great Panathenaea.5 Every four years,
at a feast in honour of their patron goddess, the Athenians listened to
the Iliad. We do not have as much information about Homeric performances in other cities, but we know they took place. Several sources
describe professional epic reciters, known as ‘rhapsodes’, travelling
from city to city and performing Homeric poetry at public festivals
and private gatherings.6 The earliest authors known to have discussed Homer come from opposite ends of the Greek-speaking world:
Xenophanes came from Colophon in Asia Minor, and Theagenes,
another early interpreter of Homer, came from Rhegium in southern Italy. The sixth-century poet Simonides of Ceos (an island in the
Aegean Sea) explicitly praised and quoted Homer in his own poetry.
The material record conirms the picture suggested by our written
evidence: it preserves late archaic images inspired by the Iliad and
originating from several diferent places.7 All this evidence provides a
terminus ante quem for the Iliad: by the late sixth century bce the poem
was well known.
Scholars continue to debate the exact date of the Iliad. Their disagreements stem, in part, from a diference in emphasis: some seek
to pinpoint the original contribution of an early poet, others focus on
the earliest documented context for Homeric recitation, which is the
Panathenaea. Beyond these diferences, all Homerists agree that sixthcentury performances and texts must have captured something considerably older. An examination of the language and style of Homeric
epic shows that it stems from a very long tradition of oral poetry.
Homeric Greek is an artiicial mixture of several diferent dialects.
4 Many scholars have tried to reconstruct how the Iliad might have been performed,
see e.g. O. Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the ‘Iliad’ (Oxford, 1995).
5 See esp. [Plato], Hipparchus 228b and Lycurgus, In Leocratem 102.
6 For a vivid, if rather hostile, portrait of a rhapsode, see Plato’s Ion.
7 The visual evidence for Iliadic scenes is collected in J. Burgess, The Tradition of the
Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001), 53–94.
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xi
It was never used by any real-life community, but rather developed,
over several centuries, for the purpose of singing the deeds of gods
and men.8 The predominant dialect is Ionic, but there is also a strong
Aeolic component. Linguists identify Euboean and Boeotian inluences too, and point to several Attic elements, though many of these
concern matters of spelling, and therefore testify to the inluence of
a written Athenian text, rather than to an early Attic contribution to
epic diction. Compared to modern linguists, ancient Homeric scholars
were even more wide-ranging in their characterization of Homeric diction: they claimed that Homer knew all the Greek dialects. This is an
exaggeration that relects, in part, the status of the Iliad as a poem that
appealed to all the Greeks. It also captures the astounding linguistic
richness and variety of Homeric epic: there are very many ways to say
‘he was’ or ‘to be’, for example. Some Homeric expressions and forms
seem relatively recent, and some are very old: there may even be remnants of Mycenaean Greek, a language that was spoken in the second
millennium bce. At times, it seems that even the poet of the Iliad is
unsure about the exact meaning of some of the inherited expressions
he uses. They sound grand and heroic but—for the sake of clarity—
he adds possible synonyms and etymologizing explanations inside the
poem. These internal explanations are, of course, lost in translation:
reading the Iliad in the original Greek gives a much better sense of
the historic depth and richness of its language. References to material
objects, in the poem, ofer a good analogy for the efect of Homeric
words: many artefacts it a late eighth- or early seventh-century context,
but some are much older. At 10.261–5, for example, Homer describes a
boar’s-tusk helmet that fell out of use after the ifteenth-century bce.
Linguistic and archaeological evidence shows that the epic tradition
developed in the course of many centuries, and went through very different linguistic environments, social contexts, and material cultures.
One of the most striking features of Homeric epic, and the tradition from which it stems, is its repetitiveness. Achilles is called ‘swiftfooted’ again and again and again—even when he sulks, motionless,
in his hut. Hector is ‘Hector of the glittering helmet’. After a meal,
Homeric characters always ‘put away the desire for eating and drinking’. At daybreak, ‘early-born Dawn with her rosy ingers appears’.
Comparative studies have established that such repeated phrases,
8 On Homeric Greek, see further G. Horrocks, ‘Homer’s Dialect’, in I. Morris and B.
Powell (eds.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden, 1997), 193–217.
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or ‘formulae’, help bards compose poetry in real time, as they perform in front of an audience. In the 1930s two American scholars—
Milman Parry and Albert Lord—travelled to what was then Yugoslavia,
and recorded the performances of illiterate Bosnian singers in local
cofee-houses.9 They showed that these singers were able to recite
poems as long as the Iliad—not by remembering a ixed script, but by
combining formulaic expressions, and by arranging them into wellestablished narrative patterns or ‘themes’. Formulae and themes were,
to a large extent, inherited: they had developed over generations, in
order to enable singers to compose, or re-compose, their poems in the
course of live performances. The singer had at his disposal a stock of
diferent formulae that described the same character, situation, thing,
or action, each of which had a speciic metrical shape. He could choose
the appropriate formula depending on how many beats he needed in
order to reach the end of the line. Parry showed that, in Homeric epic,
there is usually just one formula describing a particular character or
action in any given number of beats. This formulaic economy enables
singers to get to the end of the line, without having to take too long
thinking about diferent options for describing an action or character.
For example, depending on how many beats he needs to get to the end
of the line, the poet can say ‘Achilles’, or ‘glorious Achilles’, or ‘swiftfooted Achilles’, or ‘swift-footed glorious Achilles’. Parry and Lord
made a tremendous contribution to our understanding of Homeric
epic, but their work also posed new problems and questions.
One problem concerns the meaning and interpretation of Homeric
formulae. Parry himself reached rather discouraging conclusions on
that issue: he argued that some traditional formulae have little meaning, that audiences feel indiferent towards them, and that they are
perhaps best left untranslated. This sort of conclusion does not seem
entirely satisfactory: formulaic expressions are not equivalent to an
instrumental interlude, or a bit of humming, or some other wordless rhythmical ‘illing’ that enables singers to keep the performance
going. They are words, and afect audiences through their meaning, as
well as through their rhythmical qualities. It is true that formulae are
not always sensitive to context, but that can in itself become a poetic
resource. For example, ‘swift-footed’ Achilles refuses to leave his hut
9 See M. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman
Parry (Oxford, 1991), and A. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2nd rev. edn. (Cambridge, Mass.,
2000).
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for most of the Iliad: this tension between his traditional description
and what he actually does draws attention to his problematic behaviour. Most of the time, traditional expressions unobtrusively shape
the narrative, but sometimes the poet brings them into sharp focus. At
6.467–70, for example, baby Astyanax realizes that his father is indeed
‘Hector of the gleaming helmet’: he looks at the terrifying thing on top
of his father’s head, and screams. There is often a dynamic, expressive
tension between the traditional formulations used by the poet, and the
speciic situations he describes. Formulae fasten characters and things
to speciic qualities, but the poet tells a far less stable story. Leaders,
for example, are called ‘shepherds of the people’, but in the Iliad the
people perish, inexorably.10 It seems then that the tools of oral poetry,
far from being a convenient but stilted aid to composition, enable the
poet to tell his story powerfully and idiomatically.11
The second problem raised by the comparative study of oral poetry
is that the Iliad is not, actually, an oral poem: what we have is a written text. Scholars have long debated the possible role of writing in
the composition of Homeric epic; the German philologist Friedrich
August Wolf famously tackled the issue in his Prolegomena ad Homerum
(1795), a work that inaugurated modern classical scholarship. The earliest examples of Greek alphabetic writing date to the second half of
the eighth century bce. The most interesting piece of evidence, for
Homerists, is a modest clay cup found in Ischia, an island of the coast
of Naples. It bears an inscription which proudly announces in verse:
‘I am the cup of Nestor…’ There is no physical resemblance between
this modest vessel and the gold cup of Nestor in the Iliad, but the
inscription may well be a playful reference to some poem about the
legendary Nestor and his cup. Some have argued that the extremely
regular layout of the verse inscription may relect the inluence of epic
texts written on papyrus or leather, though such texts (if they existed)
need not have been our Iliad. It seems, then, that the Iliad harnesses
the resources of a rich and ancient tradition of oral poetry, but also
comes into existence at a time when writing was beginning to develop.
Quite what inluence this new technique had on the composition and
10 See further J. Haubold, Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation (Cambridge,
2000).
11 J. M. Foley makes this point very persuasively in Homer’s Traditional Art (University
Park, Pa., 1999); see further B. Graziosi and J. Haubold, Homer: The Resonance of Epic
(London, 2005) and A. Kelly, A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer, ‘Iliad
VIII’ (Oxford, 2007).
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preservation of the poem is something we will never know for sure. As
Albio Cassio points out, in a balanced and judicious assessment of the
evidence, our Iliad is ‘likely to be the result of extremely complicated
processes involving both orality and writing, which we can no longer
reconstruct’.12
Our own interest in writing may ultimately lead to wrong assumptions about its role and importance in early Greece. In the Iliad, writing
(or something close to it) is depicted as a nasty business: at 6.168–70
Proetus sends Bellerophon into exile, giving him a folded tablet in
which he has inscribed the order to kill the bearer of the message. This
is the only reference to writing in the whole poem: there is no hint, in
Homeric epic, that writing may be used to record great deeds, or help
singers compose their songs. This may simply be because the Homeric
poems are set in a distant, heroic past, where writing did not yet exist or
was just being invented by resourceful crooks like Proetus. The actual
context of composition of the Iliad may have been quite diferent from
the situation depicted inside the poem. What remains true beyond all
speculation, however, is that the poet of the Iliad describes his own
work in terms of singing, and expects future generations to hear about
what happened at Troy by listening.
The poet’s voice
From antiquity to the present, there has been much speculation about
the author of the Iliad. The Greeks considered him the greatest poet
that ever lived, but knew nothing certain about him: the earliest
sources that mention his name are speculative and contradictory. They
depict him as a blind beggar and a divine singer; someone who suffered many indignities in life, and composed the most beautiful poetry.
These ancient portraits of Homer tell us something important about
the early reception of epic, but say little about the actual composition
of the Iliad.13 In some ways, the situation today is rather similar: those
who attempt to give a detailed portrait of Homer often reveal more
about themselves than about Homeric epic. Albert Lord, for example,
imagined Homer as an illiterate singer dictating his poems to a scribe.
As many have noted, this Homer closely resembles a Bosnian singer
12 A. Cassio, ‘Early Editions of the Greek Epics and Homeric Textual Criticism’, in F.
Montanari (ed.), Omero tremila anni dopo (Rome, 2002), 114.
13 See B. Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge, 2002).
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performing for Lord himself. Lord wrote under dictation, and also
used audio recording. The situation in early Greece was diferent:
writing was infrequent, slow, and expensive. We therefore do not know
to what degree the circumstances of Bosnian singers and American
scholars in the 1930s ofer a itting parallel for those in which the Iliad
was actually composed and written down.
Rather than looking for the poet of the Iliad, then, it seems more
fruitful to look for the poet in the Iliad, and listen to his voice. In the
opening invocation to the Muse, the poet conidently asks the goddess
to sing about the anger of Achilles, from the time when he quarrelled
with Agamemnon. After the proem, the story begins precisely with the
quarrel: from that moment onwards, the voice of the poet and that of
the Muse blend together. It is only when the poet approaches a particularly diicult or important topic that he again puts some distance
between himself and the goddess, and asks for help. This happens, for
example, at the beginning of the Catalogue of Ships (2.484–93):
Tell me now, Muses who have your homes on Olympus—
for you are goddesses, and are present, and know everything,
while we hear only rumour, and know nothing—
who were the commanders and princes of the Danaans.
As for the soldiery, I could not describe or name them,
not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,
an indestructible voice, and a bronze heart within me,
unless the Muses of Olympus, daughters of aegis-wearing
Zeus, were to recount all those who came to besiege Ilium.
So I shall relate the ships’ captains and the number of their ships.
The Muses alone ‘are present, and know everything’. Without their
help, the poet is in the same position as his audience: ‘we hear only
rumour, and know nothing.’ This is a declaration of dependence, and a
plea for knowledge. The Muses are close to the poet, and they help him
perform his song. But they are also ‘present’ in a diferent sense: they
know everything with the reliability of an eyewitness. The poet himself
has no sure knowledge about those who fought at Troy, because—as he
repeatedly points out—they lived long before him, and were far superior to ‘men as mortals now are’. It is only with the help of the Muses
that he can give a precise account of what happened at Troy, ‘as if he
had been there himself ’.14
14 These are the words Odysseus uses when complimenting the blind singer
Demodocus on the accuracy of his song about Troy (Odyssey 8.489–91): ‘You sing the
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Many details in the narrative speak of the poet’s direct access to his
subject matter. For example, he occasionally addresses his own characters.15 These apostrophes are so startling, that ancient and modern
readers have thought they betray something about the poet—a special afection for some of his characters, for example. Not all direct
addresses seem to express afection, but they all add to the immediacy
of the story. The poet is, at times, so close to his characters that he even
talks to them. By contrast, he never addresses his real audience. He
never asks for attention, for example, or latters his listeners. Rather
than talking to or about his audience, the poet gives them a direct
insight into what happened during the Trojan War.
In general, the Iliad conveys a clear sense of the poet’s presence at
Troy, and even of the speciic vantage-point from which he observes
the action: he views the battleield from above, facing Troy and keeping his back to the sea. The curved coastline, with its beached Achaean
ships, is arranged before him ‘like a theatre’.16 When he describes what
happens ‘on the left’ or ‘on the right’ of the battleield, he is always
speaking from that speciic viewpoint. He is, however, not conined to
observing things from there: he can zoom in and describe, for example,
how Polypoetes’ spear breaks through Damasus’ forehead, and makes
pulp of the brain inside (12.181–7). He can observe at close quarters
how a pair of horses trip over a branch, breaking free of their chariot—
and then zoom out in order to show how the horses join a chaotic, general stampede towards Troy (6.38–41). Contemporary readers often
comment on the cinematic qualities of Homer’s poetry;17 but there
were no helicopters in antiquity from which to take aerial shots, and no
cameras zooming in or out. For the ancient Greeks, Homer’s powers
were truly divine: they called him theios aoidos, ‘the divine singer’, and
with good reason. Apart from the poet, only the gods could view things
from above, or observe the ighting at close quarters, objectively, and
without fear of death. The poet himself makes that point at 4.539–44,
where he claims that someone who entered the battleield under divine
fate of the Achaeans precisely, according to order; | what they did and endured and all they
sufered, | as if you had been there yourself, or heard from someone who had.’
15 See e.g. 7.104 (Menelaus), 15.582 (Melanippus), 16.787 (Patroclus), 20.2 (Achilles),
20.152 (Apollo).
16 This is the description of the ancient Homeric scholar Aristarchus, see Explanatory
Notes, note to lines 14.30–6.
17 On Homer and the cinema, see esp. M. M. Winkler (ed.), Troy: from Homer’s ‘Iliad’
to Hollywood Epic (Oxford, 2007).
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protection, and could not be touched by missiles, would agree with his
own assessment of how hard Trojans and Achaeans fought.
Divine inspiration, then, is not just a matter of conventional invocations to the Muses: it tells us something crucial about how the poet
views things. The Catalogue of Ships, for example, is a dazzling display
of the poet’s knowledge, and of his powers of visualization. He starts
in Aulis and spirals out, mentioning well over a hundred place-names,
and organizing them in a way that shows he has a clear mental picture of the whole of Greece.18 The poet’s encyclopaedic command of
his subject matter emerges from many other details. For example, he
always mentions by name those who die on the battleield, and often
adds a unique detail about them: Protesilaus leaves behind a wife ‘tearing her cheeks in grief | in a half-built house’ (2.700–1). Axylus used
to live by a main road, ‘and he would entertain everyone’ (6.13). These
details suggest that the poet knows more about his characters than he
chooses to tell. We would long to hear more about them, and perceive
our loss—precisely at the moment when they die.19
The many similes that punctuate the narrative also tell us something
important about the poet’s knowledge. Some images occur in many
variations and evoke the grandness of the epic world: lions and hunters, for example, feature prominently not just in the Iliad, but also
more generally in early Greek and Near Eastern art and poetry. Other
similes are more speciic, and suggest a keen sense of observation. At
5.902–4, for example, Ares’ blood coagulates as quickly ‘as when igjuice thickens white milk when . . . a man stirs it’. At 17.389–97 the
Trojans and the Achaeans pull Patroclus’ body in opposite directions,
like leather-tanners stretching a skin. At 23.712–13 the Achaeans grasp
each other’s hands ‘like crossing rafters that a renowned carpenter
has | itted in the roof of a high house’. At 23.760–3 Odysseus runs
behind Ajax
. . . as close as the weaving-rod of a ine-girdled
woman is to her breast as she deftly draws it tight with her hands,
pulling the spool along the warp, and holding it close to her
breast . . .
18 See Explanatory Notes, note to line 2.493, which is based on G. Danek, ‘Der
Schifskatalog der Ilias: Form und Funktion’, in H. Heftner and K. Tomaschitz (eds.),
Ad Fontes! Festschrift für Gerhard Dobesch (Vienna, 2004), 59–72.
19 On minor characters in the Iliad, see further the excellent study by J. Griin, Homer
on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980), esp. ch. 4.
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In this simile, in particular, there is a palpable sense that the woman is
being observed as she works. She is intent on her weaving, and we can
imagine someone looking at her—and noticing how close she pulls the
weaving-rod to her breast. Just so, in the poet’s vision, Odysseus pulls
close to Ajax in the foot-race.
Often the poet of the Iliad describes things from the perspective of
an implicit observer: narratologists call this technique ‘focalization’.
At times the same scene is focalized through diferent characters in
close succession. At 6.401, for example, when Hector looks at his baby
son Astyanax, the poet adopts the language of a doting parent, piling
on words of endearment for the little boy. Only a little later, however,
when it is Astyanax who looks at his father, the poet shares the bewildered, terriied perspective of the baby boy (6.468–70). Although the
poet has great powers of empathy—even for characters so young they
cannot speak—he never loses his overall control of the narrative. He
always knows, for example, what the gods are doing and, even more
importantly, what they are planning. The characters, by contrast, have
a very limited understanding of the gods, and are often deluded about
their own circumstances. We see them struggle, in their ignorance,
with their hopes and fears—while the poet tells us exactly what is in
store for them.
There is only one character in the poem who seems able to look at
the situation with the same clarity and detachment as the poet: Helen,
daughter of Zeus. This is how Homer irst introduces the beautiful
woman who caused the Trojan War. While her two husbands, Menelaus
and Paris, prepare to face each other in single combat, the goddess Iris
goes to look for her (3.125–8):
She found Helen in her hall; she was weaving a great web,
a red double cloak, and on it she was working the struggles
of the horse-breaking Trojans and the bronze-shirted Achaeans
that they were undergoing for her sake at the hands of Ares.
Like the poet, Helen weaves a picture of the Trojan War. She even sees
herself as the subject of future poetry (6.357–8):
Zeus has given us a wretched portion, so that in time hereafter
we may become a theme for the songs of generations yet to come.
And yet, not even Helen shares the poet’s full and objective knowledge of all things. At 3.234–42, for example, she scans the battleield
looking for her brothers among the Achaean troops, and wonders why
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she cannot see them. At that point the poet tells us that they died in
Lacedaemon, before the Trojan War had even started.
The poet often draws attention to the ignorance of his own characters. Most famously, he describes Andromache making arrangements
for Hector to have a bath, when he is already dead (22.440–6):
She was at her loom in the tall house’s innermost part, weaving
a red double cloak, and working a pattern of lowers into it.
She called out through the house to her lovely-haired servants
to set a great tripod over the ire, so that Hector might have
a warm bath when he returned from the ighting—poor
innocent that she was, and did not know that grey-eyed Athena
had beaten him down at Achilles’ hands, far away from baths.
Even when the poet does not ofer explicit comments of this kind,
it is clear that he and his audience share an understanding that the
characters inside the poem do not have. This understanding stems, in
part, from a shared knowledge of the epic tradition: audiences of all
times always knew that Troy was destined to fall, and that the Achaeans
would sufer greatly on their return home.
The main efect of our knowledge, and of the characters’ lack of
it, is a sense of tragic irony—a realization that mortals have no sure
understanding of the gods, or even of their own situation. For once,
when listening to the poet, we share his divine perspective—but the
spectacle is not simply entertaining, because the pain, sufering, and
uncertainty of Homer’s characters are ultimately our own.
Achilles’ anger
The very irst line of the Iliad announces a grand poem about a
very speciic issue: the anger of Achilles. The poem describes only
a handful of days towards the end of the Trojan War: it does not
include the fall of Troy, or even the death of Achilles. By leaving
those events outside the remit of his narrative, the poet invites us
to focus on his chosen theme. The irst word in the original Greek
text is mēnin, a rare term for anger which describes the vengeful
wrath typical of the gods. Soon after the proem, the same word
occurs again: at 1.75 it describes Apollo’s angry reaction to
Agamemnon’s insults, and his decision to inlict a plague on the
Achaeans. This verbal correspondence underlines a more general
truth: at the beginning of the poem Achilles behaves very much like
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a god.20 When Agamemnon insults him, he plans the extermination
of the Achaeans. His asks his mother, the goddess Thetis, to enlist the
help of Zeus, and the supreme god agrees to his plan: the Achaeans
will perish as long as Achilles refuses to ight. No ordinary mortal
could react to Agamemnon’s arrogance by sending a personal envoy
to Mount Olympus—but Achilles is the son of a goddess, and behaves
accordingly. The problem is that Achilles is mortal: the fact that he
must die complicates his relationship to Agamemnon, and ultimately
compromises his plan.
When Agamemnon realizes that without Achilles he will lose his
army, his honour, and the war, he ofers to return Briseïs, together
with countless other gifts. The women, cities, tripods, and other goods
that Agamemnon promises to Achilles in book 9 betoken a transferral
of honour on a quite unprecedented scale. And yet, Achilles refuses
Agamemnon’s ofer, pointing out that no amount of wealth can compensate for the loss of his life (9.400–9):
. . . I do not think
that anything is of equal worth to my life, not even all the wealth
they say that Ilium, that well-populated city, once possessed
in time of peace before the sons of the Achaeans came,
nor all the wealth that the stone threshold of the archer
Phoebus Apollo guards inside his temple in rocky Pytho.
Cattle and locks of sturdy sheep can be got by raiding, and
tripods and herds of chestnut horses can be made one’s own,
but raiding and getting cannot bring back a man’s life
when once it has passed beyond the barrier of his teeth.
The god Apollo may be content with guarding his riches ‘in rocky
Pytho’ (a rare reference to his sanctuary at Delphi); but the mortal
Achilles must guard something far more precious to him: his life.
As the poem unfolds, Achilles’ mortality is thrown into sharp relief,
and it becomes increasingly clear that his fate is bound to that of other
mortals. Already in book 11, soon after he has rejected Agamemnon’s
ofer, Achilles notices the wounded Achaean leaders as they return to
camp, and sends Patroclus to make enquiries. His friend returns with
terrible news, and asks Achilles to let him, at least, return to the battleield and lend his support. Achilles is worried about Patroclus’ safety
but agrees to his request, and gives him his own armour for protection.
20 On Achilles and Apollo, see esp. G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the
Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 2nd edn. (Baltimore, 1999).
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Soon after, Hector kills Patroclus and takes Achilles’ armour as spoils.
At that point Achilles enters the battleield again, not because his attitude to Agamemnon has changed (several details in the narrative suggest that it has not), but because revenge now matters to him more
than life itself. According to Apollo, Achilles’ reaction to the death of
Patroclus is excessive and inexcusable. This is what he says to the other
gods at 24.44–54:
‘. . . Achilles has killed pity, and there is no respect in him,
respect that both greatly harms and also beneits men.
Any man, I suppose, is likely to have lost someone even dearer
to him than this, a brother born of the same mother, or even a son,
but in the end he gives up his weeping and lamentation,
because the Fates have placed in men a heart that endures; but
this Achilles irst robs glorious Hector of his life and then ties him
behind his chariot and drags him round the burial-mound of his
dear companion. Yet he should know that there is nothing ine
or good about this; let him beware of our anger, great man
though he is, because in his fury he is outraging mute earth.’
In Apollo’s view, Achilles must stop deiling Hector’s body, and start to
consider his pain in relation to that of other mortals. It may be that his
sufering is not as great as that of a man who loses a brother, or a son.
Later in book 24 Achilles comes precisely to that realization—when
he sees Priam, and thinks about the imminent bereavement of his own
father.
All this suggests that Achilles may not be so special after all. His
anger is as devastating as that of the gods, but his confrontation with
death is something we all recognize. There are, in fact, many parallels for the story of Achilles—some are embedded in the poem itself,
and others belong to broader ancient traditions of poetry. For example,
Phoenix tries to persuade Achilles to accept Agamemnon’s gifts by
telling him the story of Meleager—who refused to go to war out of
anger, but who ultimately returned to the ighting in order to defend
his wife and home (9.529–99). Here too a young man initially opts out,
rejecting the social obligations placed upon him, but eventually must
recognize the bonds of afection that link him to others, and which
ultimately lead him to face death. Quite how hard Phoenix presses the
details of Meleager’s story in order to turn it into a itting example for
Achilles is something that scholars have long debated. What remains
clear is that, just like Phoenix, the poet himself invites us to see the
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story of Achilles as an example of a wider truth. In the early Greek tradition other narratives echoed that of Achilles. For example, the early
epic poem Aethiopis, now largely lost, told the story of Memnon, king
of the Ethiopians. Memnon too was the son of a goddess, Dawn, and of
a mortal man, Tithonus—and he too had to die. These echoes suggest
that the story of Achilles’ anger, though speciic in the detail, has its
roots in a wider ancient understanding of what it means to be mortal.
This emerges with special clarity when we compare the Iliad with the
Epic of Gilgamesh.
This extraordinary Babylonian poem resembles the Iliad not just
in some striking details, but in overall conception.21 Like Achilles,
Gilgamesh is of mixed human and divine ancestry, and the greatest
man that ever lived. When his closest friend Enkidu dies, he resolves to
go in search of eternal life. He undertakes a long and diicult journey
to meet Utnapishtim, the survivor of a great lood and the only man
who has been granted immortality. In the Old Babylonian version of
the poem he meets a wise ale-wife in the course of his journey, who
tells him:
‘You will not ind the eternal life you seek.
When the gods created mankind,
they appointed death for mankind,
kept eternal life in their own hands.
So, Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full,
day and night enjoy yourself in every way,
every day arrange for pleasures.
Day and night, dance and play,
wear fresh clothes.
Keep your head washed, bathe in water,
appreciate the child who holds your hand,
let your wife enjoy herself in your lap.’22
In the extremity of his pain, Gilgamesh does nothing of the sort.
Immediately after Enkidu’s death he tears out his hair, casts of his
ine clothes, and roams in the wilderness wearing an animal skin.
He continues to travel until he inds Utnapishtim—and it is only at that
21 On the parallels between Greek and Near Eastern Epic, see M. L. West, The East
Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 1997).
22 Quoted from S. Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh,
and Others, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2000), 150. For the Epic of Gilgamesh, see A. R. George,
The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 2003)
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point that he learns a fundamental lesson. In the Standard Babylonian
version, Utnapishtim tells him that he will never ind the secret of
eternal life, and then sends him home with a fresh set of clothes.
Achilles’ physical reaction to bereavement closely resembles that of
Gilgamesh. When Patroclus dies, he deiles himself. He refuses to eat,
and cannot sleep (24.1–10):
. . . the assembly broke up and the people dispersed, each
company to its swift ships, and all their thoughts were of food
and the pleasure of sweet sleep; but Achilles wept ceaselessly
as he remembered his dear companion, and sleep that subdues
all took no hold of him. He tossed and turned, thinking with
longing of Patroclus, of his manhood and his valiant strength, of
all that he had accomplished with him and the trials he had endured,
of wars of men undergone and the arduous crossing of seas.
As he called all this to mind he let fall huge tears,
lying at one time on his side and at another on his back,
and then again on his face; then he would rise to his feet . . .
Achilles’ mother suggests to him that he should sleep with Briseïs,
in an argument that, in essence, is the same as that of the ale-wife in
the Old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh. This is what Thetis says at
24.130–2:
It is indeed a good thing to lie with a woman,
since your life will not be long and I shall lose you,
and already death and your harsh destiny stand beside you.
Achilles seems inconsolable, but eventually does follow his mother’s advice and sleeps with Briseïs. When Priam enters his hut, he is
eating. Priam, by contrast, is still feeling the rawest pain at the loss
of Hector: he has just covered himself in dung—and has not eaten
or slept since the death of his son. Eventually, Achilles persuades
him to eat, drink, and sleep, telling him the story of Niobe—a
mythical mother who lost her twelve children and yet managed (according to Achilles) to have a meal after that. Again it seems that Achilles
adapts the details of Niobe’s story in order to make his point; and
yet what he is trying to say is a general truth about human life. That
truth emerges clearly after Achilles and Priam have eaten together
(24.628–32):
when they had put from themselves the desire for food and drink
then Priam of Dardanus’ line looked in amazement at Achilles,
seeing how huge and handsome he was, for he seemed like the gods;
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and Achilles too was amazed at Priam of the line of Dardanus,
seeing his noble appearance and listening to him speak.
The poet even says that Achilles and Priam took ‘pleasure from looking at each other’ (24.633). After their deilement, hunger, thirst, and
sheer exhaustion, these two men share a meal and, in the calm that follows, reach beyond their own personal sufering. Their pleasure is an
airmation of life in the face of death.
The Trojan War
The Iliad tells the story of Achilles’ anger, but also encompasses,
within its narrow focus, the whole of the Trojan War. The title promises ‘a poem about Ilium’ (i.e. Troy), and the poem lives up to that
description. The irst books recapitulate the origins and early stages
of the Trojan War. The quarrel over Briseïs mirrors the original cause
of the war, for it too is a ight between two men over one woman. The
Catalogue of Ships in book 2 acts as a reminder of the expedition; book
3 introduces Helen and her two husbands; book 4 dramatizes how a
private quarrel over a woman can become a war; in book 5 the ighting
escalates; and book 6 takes us into the city of Troy. The narrative now
looks forward to the time when the Achaeans will capture the city: it
anticipates the end of the poem, and of the war itself. The bulk of the
Iliad is devoted to the ighting on the battleield. It describes only a
few days of war, but the sheer scale of the narrative, and its relentless
succession of deaths, come to represent the whole war.23
The poet is speciic about the horrors of the battleield: wounds,
for example, are described in precise and painful detail. At 13.567–9
Meriones pursues Adamas and stabs him ‘between the genitals and
navel, in the place | where battle-death comes most painfully to
wretched mortals’. At 15.489–500 Peneleos thrusts his spear through
Ilioneus’ eye-socket, then cuts of his head and brandishes it aloft.
At 20.469–1 Tros tries to touch Achilles’ knees in supplication, but
Achilles stabs him
. . . in the liver with his sword,
and the liver slid out of his body, and the dark blood from it
illed his lap . . .
23 For a more detailed, book-by-book summary of the Iliad, see the Explanatory
Notes.
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No Hollywood version of the Iliad is as graphic as the poem itself.
Descriptions of the physical impact of war are matched by an unlinching psychological account of those who ight in it. Homer shows exactly
what it takes to step forward in the irst line of battle, towards the spear
of the enemy. He describes the adrenaline, the social conditioning, the
self-delusion required.24 And the shame of failure, which is worse than
death.25
The truth and vividness of the Iliad have struck many readers. In her
towering exploration of violence, Simone Weil, for example, calls the
Iliad ‘the most lawless of mirrors’, because it shows how war ‘makes
the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body. The Iliad
never tires of showing that tableau.’26 Weil was writing in 1939: her
L’Iliade ou le poème de la force did not just describe the Trojan War; it
anticipated the Second World War, and prophesied how it would again
turn people into things. Just like Weil, women inside the Iliad make
powerful statements against violence—and even against the courage
of their own men. Hector’s wife Andromache, for example, tells him
that his own prowess will kill him, and that he will make her a widow
(6.431–2). When confronted with his wife’s words, Hector claims he
would rather die on the battleield than witness her sufering (6.464–
5). He then tries to console her in the only way he knows: by imagining
more wars. He picks up his baby son and prays that he may be stronger
than him and, one day, bring home the spoils of the enemy, so that his
mother may rejoice (6.476–81). This is how the poet Michael Longley,
in the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, paraphrases
Hector’s prayer: he ‘kissed the babbie and dandled him in his arms
and | prayed that his son might grow up bloodier than him’.27
The Trojan War, the Second World War, the Troubles: the Iliad is
intertwined with all stories about all wars. Already in antiquity it was
part of a wider tradition of poetry, which found its inspiration in the
ruins of a Bronze Age city, well visible on the coast of Asia Minor.28
24 On these issues see, among others, M. Clarke, Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer
(Oxford, 1999), and R. Scodel, Epic Facework: Self-Presentation and Social Interaction in
Homer (Swansea, 2008).
25 See D. Cairns, Aidōs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient
Greek Literature (Oxford, 1993).
26 The best English edition is by J. P. Holoka, Simone Weil’s ‘The Iliad or The Poem of
Force’: A Critical Edition (New York, 2003).
27 M. Longley, The Ghost Orchid (London, 1995), 226.
28 On the site of Troy, see J. Latacz, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old
Mystery, tr. K. Windle and R. Ireland (Oxford, 2004).
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The Iliad often refers to that wider tradition. For example, when
Hector picks up his baby and dandles him in his arms, his gesture
recalls that of an enemy soldier who will soon pick up the little boy—
and throw him of the walls of Troy. Other early poems described the
death of Astyanax in a manner that clearly recalled his last meeting
with his father. Some stories about the fall of Troy were known to the
poet of the Iliad and his earliest audiences; others were inspired by it.
As a result, the Iliad became increasingly more allusive and complex
in the course of time.29 This is how Zachary Mason describes the situation in a recent novel inspired by Homer:
It is not widely understood that the epics attributed to Homer were in fact written by the gods before the Trojan war—these divine books are the archetypes
of that war rather than its history. In fact, there have been innumerable Trojan
wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic, each representing a
fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the
authorial intent. Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent,
an image in a warped hall of mirrors.30
Mirrors and distorted mirrors: what readers ask of the Iliad is whether
things can be diferent. Whether we must imagine wars and more
wars, like Hector when he prays for his son, or whether there can perhaps be peace—and even a poetics of peace. This is, for example, the
insistent question of the German post-war poet Peter Handke, in Der
Himmel über Berlin.31 The Iliad itself ofers no clear answer, only leeting images of peace in the form of distant memories, startling comparisons, and doomed aspirations. Hector runs past the place where
the Trojan women used to wash their clothes before the war (22.153–9).
Andromache wishes Hector had died in his own bed (24.743–5). Athena
delects an arrow like a mother brushing away a ly from her sleeping
baby (4.129–33). On the shield of Achilles—which is a representation
of the whole world—there is a city at war, but there is also a city at
peace. There is a wedding, and the vintage, and a row of boys and girls
dancing to music (18.478–608). These images are precious, because
they are so very rare.
29 See B. Graziosi and J. Haubold, Homer. ‘Iliad 6’: A Commentary (Cambridge,
2010).
30 Z. Mason, The Lost Books of the ‘Odyssey’ (London, 2010), 54.
31 The ilm, directed by Wim Wenders, scripted by Handke, and released in English as
Wings of Desire, explores the divided city of Berlin and (as its German title indicates) the
sky above it. It was released in 1987, only two years before the fall of the Berlin wall.
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NOTE ON THE TEXT AND EXPLANATORY
MATERIALS
Editing the Iliad is a diicult task because—as the Introduction
points out—there are some open questions about the composition and
transmission of the poem. Those who believe that Homer created a
master copy of the Iliad in the late eighth or early seventh century bce
privilege readings that look old, ind it easier to justify interventions
that aim at consistency, and tend to emend or expunge passages or
features that seem recent relative to other aspects of the text. Those
who believe that the Iliad may stem from a more drawn-out process
of textual ixation are prepared to allow for a less consistent and earlysounding text. The present translation is based on the critical edition
by H. van Thiel, published by Olms-Weidmann in 1996: it presents
the transmitted text with cautious editorial interventions. One of
its advantages, for the purposes of this translation, is that it includes
in square brackets passages that circulated in antiquity, but which
are not transmitted, or only weakly attested, in the medieval manuscripts. These passages are not considered authentic by the editor,
but tell us something about the early textual history of the Iliad:
they have been included in this translation—which helpfully follows
the line numeration of the original text—and left in square brackets.
This makes them available, for the irst time, to readers of the Oxford
World’s Classics.
The Explanatory Notes include succinct book summaries: they
are meant to help the reader appreciate the overall design and plot
of the poem, and locate speciic episodes in it. The notes clarify geographical and mythical references, ofer brief accounts of ancient rituals and other practices to which the poem alludes, draw attention to
echoes, allusions, and correspondences within the poem, and comment on some key passages and additional lines. They occasionally
draw from ancient explanations and commentaries. Two maps ofer
minimal information on the geography of Greece and Asia Minor, and
facilitate an appreciation of the Catalogue of Ships and the Catalogue
of the Trojans and their Allies in the second book of the Iliad. Full,
accurate, and up-to-date maps are available in the second volume
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note on the text
of J. Latacz and A. Bierl, Homers Ilias. Gesamtkommentar (Munich
and Leipzig, 2000– ); this commentary is now the standard work of
reference for any rigorous engagement with the Iliad. A short bibliography ofers suggestions for further reading in English.
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NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
The translation respects as far as possible the line numeration of
Homer’s Greek, which means that references to the original text can
easily be matched to the line numbers in the margin of this version. It
does not claim to be poetry: my aim has been to use a straightforward
English register and to keep closely to the Greek, allowing Homer to
speak for himself—for example, in the use of repeated epithets and
descriptions of recurrent scenes. I have tried to avoid importing alien
imagery, and have preserved variations in sentence length. Similarly, I
have kept clear of ‘poeticizing’ Homer at one extreme and reducing the
scale of his invention to the level of a modern adventure story at the
other. Both approaches, not unknown to recent translators, tend to get
in the way of the poem’s directness and power.
I have beneited greatly from the criticism and encouragement of
friends in preparing this version. John Taylor and Tessa Smith gave
me sound advice; Michael Clark steered me expertly through drafts of
the early books; and Barbara Graziosi’s scholarship and ear for a telling phrase lie behind most pages. As always, my editor Judith Luna has
been a constant support. Any surviving inaccuracies and infelicities are
entirely my own.
Anthony Verity
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Only works written in English and wholly or partially intelligible to readers
who do not know Latin or Greek have been included.
Commentaries
Jones, P. V., Homer’s ‘Iliad’: A Commentary on Three Translations (London,
2003).
Kirk, G. (ed.), The ‘Iliad’: A Commentary, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1985–93).
Postlethwaite, N.,Homer’s ‘Iliad’: A Commentary on the Translation of Richmond
Lattimore (Exeter, 2000).
Willcock, M., A Commentary on Homer’s ‘Iliad’ (London, 1978–84).
Companions to Homer
Cairns, D. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s ‘Iliad’ (Oxford, 2001).
Finkelberg, M. (ed.), The Homer Encyclopaedia, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2011).
Fowler, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2004).
Jong, I. J. F. de (ed.), Homer: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London, 1999).
Morris, I. and Powell, B. (eds.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden, 1997).
Stubbings, F. H. and Wace, A. J. (eds.), Companion to Homer (London, 1960).
Critical Studies
Adkins, A., Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values (Oxford, 1960).
Bakker, E., Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
Boedeker, D. (ed.), The World of Troy: Homer, Schliemann, and the Treasures of
Priam (Washington, DC, 1997).
Burgess, J., The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001).
Cassio, A. C., ‘Early Editions of the Greek Epics and Homeric Textual Criticism’, in F. Montanari (ed.), Omero tremila anni dopo (Rome, 2002), 105–36.
Clarke, M., Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer (Oxford, 1999).
Dué, C., Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis (Lanham, Md., 2002).
Edwards, M. W., Homer: Poet of the ‘Iliad’ (Baltimore, 1987).
Finley, M. I., The World of Odysseus, 2nd edn. (London, 1977).
Foley, J. M., Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park, Pa., 1999).
Ford, A., Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, NY, 1992).
Graziosi, B., Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge,
2002).
—— and Haubold, J., Homer: The Resonance of Epic (London, 2005).
—— Homer: ‘Iliad VI’ (Cambridge, 2010).
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select bibliography
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Griin, J., Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980).
—— Homer: ‘Iliad IX’ (Oxford, 1995).
Haubold, J., Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation (Cambridge,
2000).
Janko, R., Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction
(Cambridge, 1982).
Jones, P. V. (ed.), Homer: German Scholarship in Translation, trans.
G. M. Wright and P. V. Jones (Oxford, 1997).
Jong, I. J. F. de, Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the
‘Iliad’, 2nd edn. (London, 2004).
Kelly, A., A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer, ‘Iliad VIII’
(Oxford, 2007).
Latacz, J., Homer: His Art and his World, trans. J. P. Holoka (Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1996).
Latacz, J., Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery, trans.
K. Windle and R. Ireland (Oxford, 2004).
Lord, A., The Singer of Tales, 2nd edn. with foreword and CD-rom ed.
S. Mitchell and G. Nagy (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
Lynn-George, M., Epos: Word, Narrative and the ‘Iliad’ (Basingstoke, 1988).
Mackie, H., Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the ‘Iliad’ (Lanham,
Md., 1996).
Macleod, C. W. (ed.), Homer: ‘Iliad XXIV’ (Cambridge, 1982).
Martin, R., The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the ‘Iliad’
(Ithaca, NY, 1989).
Mueller, M., The Iliad, 2nd edn. (London, 2009).
Nagy, G., Homeric Questions (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
—— The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry,
2nd edn. (Baltimore, 1999).
—— Homer’s Text and Language (Champaign, Ill., 2004).
Parry, M., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry,
ed. A. Parry (Oxford, 1971).
Pulleyn, S., Homer: ‘Iliad I’ (Oxford, 2000).
Pucci, P., Odysseus Polytropos: Intertextual Readings in the ‘Odyssey’ and the
‘Iliad’ (Ithaca, NY, 1987).
Redield, J., Nature and Culture in the ‘Iliad’: The Tragedy of Hector, 2nd edn.
(Chicago, 1994).
Schein, S., The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s ‘Iliad’ (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1984).
Scodel, R., Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative, and Audience (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 2002).
—— Epic Facework: Self-Presentation and Social Interaction in Homer
(Swansea, 2008).
Scully, S., Homer and the Sacred City (Ithaca and London, 1990).
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select bibliography
Slatkin, L., The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the ‘Iliad’
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992).
Snodgrass, A., Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art
(Cambridge, 1998).
Taplin, O., Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the ‘Iliad’ (Oxford, 1992).
Wees, H. van, Status Warriors: War, Violence and Society in Homer and History
(Amsterdam, 1992).
West. M. L., The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry
and Myth (Oxford, 1997).
—— The Making of the ‘Iliad’: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary
(Oxford, 2010).
Willcock, M. M., A Companion to the ‘Iliad’, Based on the Translation by
Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1976).
Wilson, D., Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the ‘Iliad’ (Cambridge,
2002).
Winkler, M. M. (ed.), Troy: from Homer’s ‘Iliad’ to Hollywood Epic (Oxford,
2007).
Zanker, G., The Heart of Achilles: Characterization and Personal Ethics in the
‘Iliad’ (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994).
Further Reading in Oxford World Classics
Greek Lyric Poetry, trans. M. L. West.
Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West.
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Walter Shewring, introduction by G. S. Kirk.
—— The Homeric Hymns, trans. Michael Crudden.
Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, trans.
Stephanie Dalley.
Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Frederick Ahl, introduction by Elaine Fantham.
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map 1. Greece
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map 2. Asia Minor
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