The Iliad

Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles… So begins the oldest work of Western literature, and with it a story that has never been surpassed as a picture of war and what it does to human beings. The Iliad is not the story of the Trojan War — it covers only a few weeks in its tenth year, and ends before Troy falls — but of one man’s anger: how a quarrel over honour made the greatest Greek warrior withdraw from battle, how that withdrawal cost the life of his dearest friend, how grief turned into savage revenge, and how, at the very end, the killer and the father of the man he killed sat together and wept.

Background

The legend

The Iliad assumes its audience knew the whole story. At the wedding of the sea-goddess Thetis and the mortal Peleus, the uninvited goddess Eris (Strife) threw a golden apple inscribed “for the fairest”. Hera, Athena and Aphrodite claimed it; Zeus had the Trojan prince Paris judge. Aphrodite bribed him with the most beautiful woman in the world — Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris, visiting Sparta as a guest, carried Helen off to Troy (with or without her consent — the tradition is ambiguous). Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gathered the Greek (Achaean) princes, bound by an oath to defend Helen’s marriage, and sailed with a thousand ships. After ten years of siege, the war is stalemated.

Thetis’s son by Peleus is Achilles, the greatest warrior alive. A prophecy gave him a choice: a short life with everlasting glory, or a long life without fame. He chose glory.

Composition

On the poem’s origins in oral tradition, its dating (eighth to seventh century BCE) and the question of Homer’s existence, see Homer.

Synopsis

The poem opens in the tenth year of the war with a plague in the Greek camp. Apollo is punishing the Greeks because Agamemnon has refused to return Chryseis, the daughter of Apollo’s priest Chryses, whom he holds as a war-prize, even when her father came to ransom her. At an assembly called by Achilles, the prophet Calchas reveals the cause. Agamemnon agrees to give up Chryseis — but, as supreme commander, he demands compensation, and takes Achilles’ own prize, the captive woman Briseis. Achilles nearly kills him on the spot; Athena, visible only to him, holds him back by the hair. Instead, Achilles swears a great oath: the Greeks will long for him when they are dying in droves at the hands of Hector. He withdraws with his Myrmidons to his tents by the ships. Weeping by the sea, he asks his mother Thetis to persuade Zeus to give victory to the Trojans until the Greeks honour him again. Zeus, reluctantly — Hera, who favours the Greeks, will be furious — nods his assent, and Olympus shakes.

Zeus sends Agamemnon a false dream promising victory. The Greek army is mustered — the long Catalogue of Ships lists every contingent — and so are the Trojans and their allies. Paris challenges Menelaus to single combat to decide the war; Helen, watching from the walls of Troy with the old king Priam, names the Greek heroes for him. Menelaus is winning when Aphrodite snatches Paris away in a mist and sets him in his bedroom, where she forces a reluctant Helen to join him. A Trojan archer, prompted by Athena, breaks the truce with an arrow, and general battle begins.

The Greek hero Diomedes, filled with Athena’s strength, rages across the field, wounding even the gods Aphrodite and Ares. In the midst of battle, he meets the Trojan ally Glaucus; asked his lineage, Glaucus answers with the most famous simile in the poem — “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men” — and the two discover their grandfathers were guest-friends; they exchange armour and agree not to fight each other.

Hector, Priam’s eldest son and Troy’s greatest defender, goes into the city to ask the women to pray to Athena. He scolds Paris back into battle. Then, at the Scaean Gate, he meets his wife Andromache and their baby son Astyanax. Andromache begs him to stay within the walls: Achilles killed her father and brothers; Hector is now father, mother, brother and husband to her. Hector replies that he would feel shame before the Trojans if he shrank from battle — and that he knows Troy will fall, and his greatest grief is to imagine her led away as a slave. He reaches for his son, but the baby shrinks back, frightened by the nodding horsehair crest of his father’s helmet; the parents laugh; Hector takes off the helmet, kisses and dandles his son, and prays that he will one day be greater than his father. It is the most tender scene in the poem, set in the middle of slaughter.

The fighting swings toward the Trojans, as Zeus promised. Hector and the huge Greek warrior Ajax fight a duel until nightfall. The Greeks build a wall and trench around their ships. On the next day Zeus forbids the gods to intervene, and the Trojans drive the Greeks back to their wall; the Trojans camp on the plain, their thousand fires burning like stars.

In despair, Agamemnon sends an embassy to Achilles — the old counsellor Phoenix, the cunning Odysseus, and Ajax — offering to return Briseis untouched, with immense gifts: tripods, gold, horses, seven women, a daughter in marriage and seven cities. Achilles receives them courteously — and refuses. His speech is one of the turning points of Western thought: he questions the whole heroic code. The coward and the brave are honoured alike; the same death comes to the man who has done nothing and the man who has done much; no wealth can buy back a man’s life once it has passed the barrier of his teeth. He will sail home tomorrow and choose the long, obscure life. Phoenix pleads with him; Ajax rebukes him bluntly; Achilles softens only to the extent of saying he will not fight until Hector reaches his own ships.

That night, Odysseus and Diomedes go on a spy-raid, capture and kill the Trojan scout Dolon, and slaughter the newly arrived Thracian king Rhesus and his men in their sleep.

The next day the Greeks are pushed back. Agamemnon, Diomedes and Odysseus are wounded. Achilles sends his beloved companion Patroclus to ask the old king Nestor who has been injured; Nestor urges Patroclus to persuade Achilles to fight — or, if not, to go into battle himself wearing Achilles’ armour, so that the Trojans will think Achilles has returned. Hector breaks through the Greek wall with a great stone; the Trojans swarm toward the ships.

The gods intervene again. Hera, to distract Zeus, borrows Aphrodite’s girdle of desire and seduces him on Mount Ida; while he sleeps, Poseidon helps the Greeks, and Hector is struck down by Ajax. Zeus wakes, is furious, and sends Apollo to revive Hector, who drives the Greeks back to the ships. Ajax fights alone on the decks with a long pike as the Trojans bring fire.

Patroclus comes to Achilles weeping, “like a little girl who runs beside her mother begging to be picked up”. Achilles lends him his armour and his Myrmidons, warning him only to drive the Trojans from the ships and not pursue them to the walls of Troy. Patroclus routs the Trojans and kills Zeus’s own son Sarpedon — Zeus weeps tears of blood but does not intervene, and has Sleep and Death carry Sarpedon’s body home to Lycia. Carried away, Patroclus forgets Achilles’ warning and charges the walls of Troy. Apollo himself strikes him from behind and knocks off his helmet; a Trojan spears him in the back; and Hector kills him. Dying, Patroclus prophesies that Achilles will kill Hector. Hector strips Achilles’ armour from the body and puts it on. A desperate fight over Patroclus’s corpse follows; Menelaus and Ajax save it.

When Antilochus brings Achilles the news, Achilles pours dust on his head, tears his hair, and lets out such a cry that Thetis hears it beneath the sea. She comes with her sea-nymphs and reminds him of the prophecy: if he kills Hector, his own death will follow soon after. He accepts: “Let me die at once, since I could not save my friend.” He does not care for glory now — only revenge. Unarmed, he appears at the trench and shouts three times; the Trojans panic, and the Greeks rescue Patroclus’s body. That night the smith-god Hephaestus, at Thetis’s request, forges Achilles new armour, and above all a great shield, described at length: the earth, sky and sea, sun, moon and constellations; a city at peace with a wedding and a lawsuit; a city at war; ploughing, reaping, a vineyard with a boy singing, cattle attacked by lions, a dancing-floor — the whole world of human life, carried into battle by the man who has chosen death.

Achilles is reconciled with Agamemnon in a public assembly; Agamemnon blames Atē (Delusion), returns Briseis and the gifts. Achilles refuses to eat until he has killed Hector; Athena secretly feeds him nectar and ambrosia. His immortal horse Xanthus, given speech by Hera, warns him that his death is near. “I know it well myself,” says Achilles, and drives into battle.

Zeus now lets the gods fight for either side. Achilles kills Trojans by the dozen, without pity. A young son of Priam, Lycaon, whom Achilles had once spared and sold into slavery, clasps his knees begging for mercy; Achilles answers: “Come, friend, you too must die. Why weep about it? Patroclus died, who was a far better man than you. Do you not see what a man I am, how tall and handsome? Yet death and strong fate wait for me too.” He kills him and throws him in the river. The river god Scamander, choked with corpses, rises up and nearly drowns Achilles until Hephaestus boils him back with fire. The gods fight among themselves, almost comically.

The Trojans flee into the city. Only Hector stays outside the Scaean Gate, though his old father and mother beg him from the walls to come in; Hecuba bares her breast to him. Hector reflects that he is ashamed to face the Trojans after leading them to disaster. As Achilles approaches, blazing like the dog-star, Hector’s courage breaks; he runs, and Achilles chases him three times around the walls of Troy, like a hawk after a dove, past the springs where Trojan women once washed clothes in peacetime. Zeus weighs their fates on golden scales; Hector’s sinks. Athena, disguised as Hector’s brother Deiphobus, tricks him into standing to fight — then vanishes. Hector realizes the gods have abandoned him: “Let me not die without a struggle and without glory.” Achilles’ spear finds the one gap in the armour Hector stripped from Patroclus — at the throat. Dying, Hector begs Achilles to return his body to his parents for burial. Achilles refuses: “Would that my rage would let me hack your flesh and eat it raw.” Hector prophesies Achilles’ death at the hands of Paris and Apollo. Achilles strips the body, pierces the ankles, ties it behind his chariot and drags it in the dust before the city, while Priam, Hecuba and Andromache watch from the walls.

That night the ghost of Patroclus comes to Achilles in a dream and asks to be buried so he can pass the gates of Hades; Achilles reaches to embrace him, and the ghost slips away like smoke. A huge funeral pyre is built; Achilles sacrifices horses, dogs and twelve Trojan captives on it. Then come the funeral games for Patroclus — chariot race, boxing, wrestling, foot race, archery — a strange interlude of comedy, generosity and rivalry, in which Achilles presides as a gracious host.

But his grief does not end. Each dawn he drags Hector’s body around Patroclus’s tomb; the gods, appalled, keep it from decay. At last Zeus sends Thetis to tell Achilles to give up the body, and sends the messenger Iris to Priam: go to Achilles with a ransom. Despite his wife’s terror, the old king loads a wagon with treasure and sets out at night with one herald. The god Hermes, disguised as a young Myrmidon, guides him through the Greek camp. Priam enters Achilles’ hut, falls at his feet, and kisses the hands that killed his sons:

Remember your own father, Achilles, godlike Achilles… I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before — I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

Achilles, moved, thinks of his own father Peleus, old and alone in Greece, who will never see him again. The two men weep together — Priam for Hector, Achilles for his father and for Patroclus. Then Achilles lifts the old man up and speaks of the two jars on Zeus’s floor, one of evils and one of blessings, from which he mixes our lots; no mortal life is without sorrow. He has Hector’s body washed and laid on the wagon, careful that Priam not see it until it is covered, lest the old man’s anger provoke his own. They eat together — Achilles reminds him that even Niobe, who lost twelve children, remembered to eat — and look at each other in wonder: Priam at Achilles’ beauty, Achilles at Priam’s nobility. Achilles grants a truce of eleven days for Hector’s funeral.

Priam brings Hector home. The poem ends with three women’s laments over his body: Andromache, who foresees her own slavery and the death of her son; Hecuba, his mother; and Helen, who says Hector alone in Troy was always kind to her. For nine days the Trojans gather wood; on the tenth they burn him and bury his bones. The last line: “So they held the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.”

Characters

The Greeks (Achaeans, Danaans, Argives)

• Achilles — son of the goddess Thetis and the mortal Peleus; leader of the Myrmidons; the greatest warrior, swift-footed, passionate, fated to die young. His wrath is the poem’s subject.
• Agamemnon — king of Mycenae, commander-in-chief; powerful, proud, often unwise.
• Menelaus — king of Sparta, Helen’s husband, Agamemnon’s brother.
• Patroclus — Achilles’ beloved companion, gentle and brave; his death turns the poem.
• Odysseus — king of Ithaca, the cleverest of the Greeks; hero of the The Odyssey.
• Ajax (son of Telamon) — huge, steady, the bulwark of the Greeks.
• Diomedes — young, bold, wounds gods.
• Nestor — the aged king of Pylos, full of long stories and sound advice.
• Briseis — the captive woman taken from Achilles, who mourns Patroclus as the only one who was kind to her.

The Trojans and their allies

• Hector — Troy’s champion, son of Priam; devoted husband and father, defender of his city, who knows it is doomed.
• Priam — the aged king of Troy, father of fifty sons.
• Hecuba — queen of Troy, Hector’s mother.
• Andromache — Hector’s wife; Astyanax — their infant son.
• Paris (Alexandros) — Priam’s son, handsome, an archer, whose abduction of Helen caused the war.
• Helen — the cause of the war, full of self-reproach: “bitch that I am”.
• Aeneas — son of Aphrodite, destined to survive Troy (and become Virgil’s hero).
• Sarpedon — Zeus’s son, leader of the Lycian allies.
• Glaucus — Sarpedon’s companion.

The gods

• Zeus — king of gods, who has promised Thetis to honour Achilles, but tries to remain above the fray.
• Hera and Athena — implacable enemies of Troy (since the Judgement of Paris).
• Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares — supporters of Troy.
• Poseidon — supports the Greeks.
• Thetis — Achilles’ mother, a sea-goddess grieving in advance for her mortal son.
• Hephaestus, Hermes, Iris — smith, guide, messenger.

Themes

Wrath

The first word of the poem is mēnin — wrath, a word used elsewhere of the gods’ anger. Achilles’ wrath moves through three stages: against Agamemnon (which costs the Greeks dearly), against Hector (after Patroclus’s death, a wrath turned murderous and inhuman), and finally its dissolution in shared grief with Priam. The poem is a study of what anger does to a person, and whether it can end.

Mortality and the heroic choice

Achilles knows exactly what he is choosing: a short life of glory. In the embassy scene he questions whether glory is worth dying for; after Patroclus’s death he goes to die anyway, for love and revenge. The poem’s deepest pathos is that its heroes know they will die and fight anyway — and that the gods, watching, do not. See Death and Fate & Necessity.

Honour and the code

The quarrel begins over a prize — a woman treated as a token of honour. The poem shows the heroic code at its most magnificent and its most brutal, and lets Achilles himself call it into question.

War’s two faces

The Iliad glories in combat — the strength of heroes, the beauty of armour, the terror and exaltation of battle. And it never forgets the cost: every death is individualized (some 240 named warriors die, many with a line about their home or parents); the similes remember peace; Andromache and Hecuba lament; the shield shows a world without war. Simone Weil called it “the poem of force” — force that turns a living man into a thing, a corpse, and makes victor and victim alike its slaves.

Pity and the enemy

The poem’s moral climax is not a victory but an act of shared humanity: Achilles and Priam, enemies, weeping together and admiring each other. It is one of the first great statements in literature that the enemy is human.

Gods and humans

The gods quarrel, deceive, and suffer nothing that matters. Their ease throws human suffering into relief — and their absence when it matters most (Athena’s trick on Hector) can be terrifying. Zeus’s grief for Sarpedon, whom he lets die, shows even a god bound by fate.

Form and style

The poem is composed in dactylic hexameter, using formulas (stock phrases), epithets (“swift-footed Achilles”, “Hector of the shining helmet”), type-scenes (arming, sacrifice, assembly) and some two hundred extended similes. Its structure is symmetrical: it begins with a father (Chryses) begging for his child and a quarrel over women, and ends with a father (Priam) begging for his son and a reconciliation — the beginning and end of the wrath. See Homer for the oral tradition behind it.

Interpretations

• Aristotle (Poetics) praised its unity — Homer chose a single action, the wrath, rather than the whole war.
• Plato objected to its gods and its heroes’ grief (Achilles lying on the ground weeping is bad for the young).
• Alexander the Great read it as a manual of heroism; Achilles was his model.
• Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (1940), written as Germany conquered France: force is the true hero, and the poem’s greatness is its bitterness and its equal compassion for all.
• Rachel Bespaloff, On the Iliad (1943), read it alongside Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
• Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam (1994), a psychiatrist, read Achilles’ berserk rage after Patroclus’s death as combat trauma — moral injury caused by a commander’s betrayal of “what’s right”.
• Feminist readings attend to the captive women — Briseis, Chryseis, Andromache’s foreknowledge of slavery — retold in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.

Legacy

The Iliad was the foundation of Greek education and the model for Virgil’s Aeneid, the West’s martial epics, and the language of heroism. Its scenes — the Judgement of Paris, Hector and Andromache, Achilles dragging Hector, Priam’s visit — fill Western painting and sculpture. Modern retellings include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Christopher Logue’s War Music, Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, and Wolfgang Petersen’s film Troy (2004). The stories of the Wooden Horse and Troy’s fall, often associated with it, come from later poems and from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book II.

Lines to carry

• “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles.” (1.1)
• “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men.” (6.146)
• “Come, friend, you too must die. Why weep about it?” (21.106)
• “I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before — I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.” (24.505–6)
• “So they held the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.” (24.804)

Keywords

Mēnis

Wrath — the first word and the subject of the poem.

Kleos aphthiton

"Undying glory" — what Achilles chooses over a long life.

The embassy

Agamemnon's offer of gifts, which Achilles refuses.

The Shield of Achilles

Hephaestus's shield, engraved with the whole world of peace and war.

Aristeia

A hero's "finest hour" of triumphant fighting — Diomedes', Patroclus's, Achilles'.

Catalogue of Ships

The list of the Greek forces in Book 2.

Ransom of Hector

Priam's visit to Achilles, the climax of the poem.

Using the Iliad in conversation

• On anger: Achilles’ wrath — justified at first, ruinous in the end.
• On leadership and honour: Agamemnon taking Briseis — how a leader’s insult can lose a war.
• On mortality: Sarpedon’s speech; the leaves and the generations.
• On enemies: Priam and Achilles weeping together.