The Iliad

Composed in archaic Greek some three thousand years ago and attributed to the poet Homer, The Iliad is one of the two foundational epics of Western literature and the first and greatest of all war poems. It takes a single theme — announced in its very first word, the wrath of Achilles — and holds to it through a few terrible weeks in the tenth and final year of the siege of Troy.

When the supreme Greek commander, Agamemnon, seizes Briseis, the war-prize of Achilles, the greatest fighter in the army withdraws from the battle in fury and prays for his own side to be beaten. They are. The Trojans, led by the noble Hector, drive the Greeks back to their ships and the sea. Only when his beloved companion Patroclus is killed by Hector does Achilles return — his pride turned to grief and his grief to terrible rage — to kill Hector before the walls of Troy and drag his body in the dust.

Beneath the battle run the themes that have kept readers returning for nearly three thousand years: wrath and honor, the glory a warrior wins and the death it costs, the weight of mortality and fate, the gods who meddle in human affairs, and the unbearable beauty of the ending, when old King Priam comes alone by night to beg the body of his son and Achilles, thinking of his own father, weeps with his enemy and gives the body back. From this single poem descend the war epic, the tragic hero, and the lament for the fallen.

This edition presents William Cullen Bryant’s clear, swift nineteenth-century blank-verse translation, complete in twenty-four books, paired with an editor’s foreword on Homer, the oral tradition, and the art of the epic, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.