Homer’s ILIAD – World Literature – Medium Homer’s ILIAD Rage and war are the topics of Homer’s first great epic poem. The Iliad (a song about Ilium, or Troy) along with its companion epic the Odyssey form the foundation of ancient Greek culture and address the extremes of human experience through war and peace. Both epics are primary, or oral, epics that draw on an enormous wealth of cultural stories in unified structures that we attribute to the poet Homer, in eighth century B.C.E. The epics are written in an unsentimental style: the Iliad depicts the ambivalence of war in meticulously accurate details. Both the nightmare of war and its excitement find expression in the Iliad, just as the Odyssey’s pages quest for a home, or a peace that seems hard-won after the devastation of war. “The Fury of Achilles,” Charles-Antoine Coypel (1737) The subject of the Iliad is the rage of Achilles and the consequences of that rage for both the Achaeans and the Trojans. War effects not only the men who fight the battles, but also the women and children whose lives are then shaped by its outcome.

War represents the worst and, ironically, the best of humanity: ugly brutality and terrible beauty. If you doubt this, look at the place violence holds in our culture; films like The Matrix even show violence as poetic: a graceful dance of destruction that thrills the audience like little else. We both pity with Hector and sympathize with Achilles; neither side of the war holds all of our sentiments. The final outcome of the war, then, becomes truly tragic: only one culture can continue while the other is destroyed or enslaved. The Iliad’s participants are the nobility of both cultures, or the aristoi: “the best people.” They are the hereditary holders of wealth and power, and their decisions effect all of the culture. For example, Agamemnon’s decision to infuriate Achilles at the outset of the Iliad has lasting effects on the Greek warriors during the last weeks of the Trojan War. Like most epics , of which the Iliad is really the definitive example, the action begins in medias res, a few weeks before the end of a ten-year campaign, with all of the epic’s traditional accouterments.

The Iliad poses questions, as will the Odyssey, about the nature of political order and what humans must do to maintain that vision and structure. The initial contention in the Iliad is between the Greek champion Achilles and the Greek commander Agamemnon. Who has the stronger claim to right: Agamemnon who has the hereditary position, or Achilles, the one with merit? Ultimately does it matter? When swords are drawn, reason becomes irrelevant. “The Quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon,” Giovanni Battista Gaulli The Iliad is replete with the culture of men. Indeed, one may argue that all wars since the beginning of time are about men and what they want to control: state, wealth, women. What will men do to maintain their view of order and structure? What are the consequences of the resulting pride, arrogance, destruction? In book one of the Iliad, we discover that because of Agamemnon’s refusal to relinquish Chryseis, Apollo has rained a plague upon the Achaean forces.

Because he is eventually challenged by Achilles — who represents the wishes of the rest of the men — Agamemnon decides to claim Achilles’ prize (a girl named Briseis) to reassert his authority and put Achilles in his place for his challenge. Achilles shows cunning and restraint — qualities that are usually associated with Odysseus — in his argument with Agamemnon, while the latter rages and rails like a wounded child. Yet, when Agamemnon’s men take Briseis, Achilles, also child-like, begins to pout by his ships, cries to his mother, and refuses to play the war game anymore. This final decision precipitates the death of many Achaeans, including Achilles’ friend Patroclus. Achilles’ resulting rage ends with the death of Hector in book twenty-two, and Achilles’ own apocryphal death under the bow of Paris before the war’s end. The brutality of Achilles and its consequences are most evident in Book XXII of the Iliad. Achilles’ rage blinds him to anything but the death of Hector, the Trojan champion that killed Patroclus in book sixteen.

Replete with epic similes of the hunt, book twenty-two illustrates Hector’s own reluctance to do what he sees as his duty to face Achilles, yet thinks only of himself and what his people might think if he doesn’t face the Greek killing machine (cf. ll. 108-156). Hector’s resolve is soon shaken as he sees Achilles closing, bloody rage the only thing that Achilles sees. Hector flees, but is soon tricked by Athena into stopping to face Achilles, perhaps a commentary on Hector’s need for companionship and Achilles’ desire for only personal vengeance and renown. Hector is mercilessly murdered in front of Troy’s walls, like a fawn at the jaws of a lion. “Andromache Mourning Hector,” Jacques-Louis David (1793) The death of Hector, then, is given a final cultural context from Hector’s widow Andromache. She now sees the demise of Troy, but personally she sees no future for their son Astyanax. The death of the father, then, is a weighty metaphor for the Trojans: the order that they secured will soon be rendered useless by the barbarity of war; the father’s death leads to the destruction of social order.

This theme will be taken up in the Odyssey as well: what is the responsibility of the son for maintaining order in the absence or death of the father? As Andromache sees no future for Astyanax, life does continue even after the carnage of war, yet a new order is imposed on the losers — those who escape death. This theme of continuity is also addressed by Virgil in his Aeneid. Is war, then, a necessary component of human life? Just because it has been historically up until this point, are we to be like Achilles who could not hear reason through his bloody thoughts: “No truce / till one or the other falls and gluts with blood” (XXII.313-14)? When do we decide that war is better than order?

5 The Iliad and what it can still tell us about war | Books | The Guardian Books The Iliad and what it can still tell us about war As the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war holds the country in thrall, Charlotte Higgins reflects on the enduring power of a 3,000-year-old poem Echoes of Homer: Operation Achilles, a Nato offensive in Afghanistan in 2007 Photograph: Corporal Adrian Harlen/PA Images Friday 29 January 2010 19.08 EST First published on Friday 29 January 2010 19.08 EST Share on Messenger Close The Iliad is the first great book, and the first great book about the suffering and loss of war. We love to tell stories about war. Tony Blair wove his own when giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry yesterday: the latest, unpoetic attempt to make sense of an east-west clash of powers. He might note that "spin " goes back to The Iliad: the first-century writer Dio Chrysostom argued that Homer , for reasons of his own, suppressed the truth about the Trojan war – in reality, the Greeks lost.

"Men learn with difficulty . . . but they are deceived only too readily," he wrote. Why is the first book a book about war? Perhaps because war is inextricably bound up with humanity's urge to tell stories. Civilisation – with its settlements, its boundary lines, its hierarchies – breeds conflict and narrative alike. In The Iliad, two characters have the narrative urge, and something approaching a synoptic view of the scenes surging around them. Achilles sings stories of heroes' deeds in battle, and Helen embroiders scenes of fighting on an elaborate textile. Many wishing to make sense of wars in their own time have reached for The Iliad. Alexander the Great, perhaps the most flamboyantly successful soldier in history, slept beside a copy annotated by his tutor, Aristotle. "He esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge," according to Plutarch's biography.

Simone Weil's essay, "L'Iliade ou le poème de la force", published in 1940, holds that "the true hero, the true ­subject at the centre of The Iliad is force", which she defines as "that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing". Her contemporary Rachel Bespaloff, a Geneva-raised philosopher who wound up in the United States, also turned to Homer's poem as a "method of facing" the second world war. For her, it tells a profound, human story – "Suffering and loss have stripped Hector bare," her essay "On The Iliad" begins. We are still turning to The Iliad, amid our own wars: the Australian writer David Malouf's recent novel, Ransom (Chatto & Windus), is about the encounter between Priam and Achilles in The Iliad's final book, while Caroline Alexander's new study of the poem, The War that Killed Achilles (Faber), sees it as a meditation on the catastrophic effects of conflict.

While she does not indulge in crass equivalences, it is hard not to be alerted by her reading to the devastation caused by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today's students at West Point, the elite US military academy where one may minor in "terrorism studies", study The Iliad as part of their literature course. In her 2007 book Soldier's Heart, Elizabeth Samet, literature professor at the institution, recalls a visit by the late translator-poet Robert Fagles, who recited, in Greek, the first lines of the epic. The 1,000 plebes in his audience must now be in command positions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military language of the conflicts even brings with it distant echoes of Homer: Operation Achilles was a Nato offensive in 2007 aimed at clearing Helmand province of the Taliban. The Trojan war – a more or less mythical event – was a 10-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greeks, its purpose to restore Helen to her Spartan husband, Menelaus.

The Iliad charts not the famous causes of the conflict (the Trojan prince Paris's abduction of Helen) nor its ­spectacularly bloody end (the Greeks' ruse of the wooden horse and the brutal sacking of the city). Instead, the subject of the poem is menis, fury – specifically, the wrath of the Greeks' best warrior, Achilles. That wrath is provoked by his ­commander-in-chief Agamemnon's misguided decision to seize Briseis, Achilles's captive woman, as compensation for his own bit of living loot, Chriseis, whom he has been obliged to restore to her Trojan father. Achilles, his pride and honour outraged, withdraws from the fighting and persuades his mother, the goddess Thetis, to ask Zeus to turn the tide of war against the Greeks, knowing that they will suffer appalling losses. He stubbornly resists all appeals to return to battle, but ­eventually agrees to send his beloved comrade, Patroclus, into the fray. When Patroclus is killed by the Trojans' best fighter, Hector, Achilles whirls into a frenzy of redoubled, re­directed rage.

He joins the fighting, and begins a lengthy and pitiless slaughtering spree. Finally, he kills Hector in single combat and attaches the corpse to his chariot, dragging it triumphantly around the walls of the city. (In 2004, the bodies of American contractors were attached to the backs of cars and dragged through the streets of Fallujah.) At the end of the poem Hector's frail and eldery father, Priam, enters the Greeks' camp and persuades Achilles to restore to him his son's body. Not all soldiers have seen the point. TE Lawrence esteemed Homer sufficiently to translate him (rather unsatisfactorily), but he was scornful of the poet's knowledge of military affairs. Homer, he thought, must have been "very bookish" and "a house-bred man". In her book Samet records one of her students, declaring that ­"Alexander was a fool to carry this poem around with him." He had found ­nothing to emulate in either Agamemnon or Achilles – until he read through to book 11 of the poem, when he "got" it. This is the section known as Agamemnon's aristeia – his day of glory in the field.

Perhaps what appealed to the student was the scene in which the commander arms for ­battle, around 30 lines of minutely ­described military hardware down to the bronze-tipped spears that flash in the sunlight's glare: lovingly summoned-up boys' toys. Or perhaps, ­after all, it was the ­account of Agamemnon's brutal military prowess that transfixed him, the commander knocking the life out of every young Trojan he encounters, deaf to their cries for mercy: "And he pitched Pisander off the chariot on to earth and plunged a spear in his chest – the man crashed on his back as Hippolochus leapt away, but him he killed on the ground, slashing off his arms with a sword, lopping off his head and he sent him rolling through the carnage like a log." (Here, as throughout, the translation is Fagles's for Penguin Classics .) The onward rush of these almost joyful descriptions of slaughter in The Iliad might cause some modern readers to question the values of the poem, or at least to measure out the long distance between us and the society from which it sprang. Homer was no peacenik.

"Homer and Tolstoy have in common a virile love of war and a virile horror of it," Bespaloff wrote in "On The Iliad". It is futile to look to Homer for a condemnation of war: "People make war, they put up with it, they curse it, they even praise it in songs and verses, but it is not to be judged any more than destiny is." But it's easy to see why Lawrence struggled to admire The Iliad's descriptions of battle. Though they are never lacking in drama, they are frequently implausible, even to a civilian eye, not least in the way that soldiers die – ­impossibly cleanly and instantaneously. Rare are the cases in which the combatants are tended to by literature's first field surgeons, Machaon and Podalirius, or on one occasion by Patroclus himself, who turns medic to help his comrade Eurypylus. The agony of death-throes, the cries of pain from soldiers too wounded to move, are absent from the poem.

Compare this account, by John Charles Austin, from John Carey's Faber Book of Reportage, describing the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in June 1940: "A horrible stench of blood and mutilated flesh pervaded the place . . . We set our faces in the direction of the sea, quickening our pace to pass through the belt of this nauseating miasma as soon as possible. 'Water . . . Water . . .' groaned a voice from the ground just in front of us. It was a wounded infantryman. He had been hit so badly that there was no hope for him." Nor do the heroes of The Iliad suffer the long-term consequences of injury – a fact for which the disparity between ancient and modern medical practice cannot alone account. Odysseus famously has a scar in The Odyssey – it is the means by which his childhood nurse, Eurycleia, sees through his ­disguise as she bathes him on his return to Ithaca – but this he acquired in a boar hunt. Yet The Iliad still has much to say about war, even as it is fought today.

It tells us that war is both the bringer of renown to its young fighters and the destroyer of their lives. It tells us about post-conflict destruction and chaos; about war as the great reverser of fortunes. It tells us about the age-old dilemmas of fighters compelled to serve under incompetent superiors. It tells us about war as an attempt to protect and preserve a treasured way of life. It tells us, too, about the profound gulf between civilian existence and life on the front line; about atrocities and indiscriminate slaughter; about war's peculiar mercilessness to women and children; about friendships and sympathies across the battle lines. It tells us of the love between soldiers who fight together. Most of all, it tells us about the frightful losses of war: of a soldier losing his closest companion, of a ­father losing his son. At the centre of the poem's most urgent observations on the nature of war is its hero, Achilles, an extreme character in all senses – The Iliad's most bloodthirsty warrior, the quickest to anger, but at times the most tender.

He is tinged with the supernatural: his mother is a goddess; his armour is forged by the god Hephaestus; even his chariot-team consists of immortal horses, the gift of Zeus. He sees the war with an enhanced perspective; as Alexander points out, he is clear-eyed about the utter pointlessness of the conflict. During his outburst to Agamemnon in book one, Achilles says: The Trojans never did me damage, not in the least, they never stole my cattle or my horses, never in Phthia where the rich soil breeds strong men did they lay water my crops. How could they? Look at the endless miles that lie between us . . . shadowy mountain ranges, seas that surge and thunder. No, you, colossal, shameless – we all followed you, to please you, to fight for you, to win your honour back from the Trojans. "This war is stupid and pointless. It's not our country and it's not our fight," is a view typical of those recorded by Guardian photographer and film-­makerSean Smith when he was embedded among US troops in Iraq.

The Odyssey is a poem as full of twists and turns as the mind of its wily hero, Odysseus. It contains flashbacks, embedded narratives, exotic locations, fairytale characters and a chronology – sometimes stretched, sometimes compressed – that covers a decade. The Iliad, in contrast, is a linear tale, circumscribed in geography and time-frame: we are placed variously in the Greeks' camp, the plain outside Troy, the city itself, and in the gods' home on Mount Olympus. Its characters are nearly all soldiers and gods, with mere bit parts for women, children and other non-combatants. It covers about 40 days during the 10th year of the war. One of its most arresting characteristics, however, is the way it casts us forward and back, hinting at both a lost, peaceful world "back home", and the horrors of the post-conflict world to come. This is a quality that does much to lend the poem its pathos, and its constant sense of loss.

Take its regularly used epithets: these familiar phrases ("wine-dark" sea, "rosy-fingered" dawn) have often been seen as simply as the more or less meaningless metrical building blocks that would have helped a bard to improvise lines of verse on the hoof. Sometimes, though, they seem to be carefully ­chosen. The last line of the epic is "And so they buried Hector, breaker of horses." That epithet, "breaker of horses", has been used of the hero ­dozens of times, yet it never ceases to stop me in my tracks. Breaking horses is a gentle art, the occupation of peacetime (even if those horses are being readied for future war). None of that for Hector now. There's a curious resonance between that line and an account, again published in Carey's collection, by a young farmhand who fought on the other side of the Dardanelles, in Gallipoli, in 1915. The lad is on sentry duty in the trenches. "I knew the next sentry up quite well. I remembered him in Suffolk singing to his horses as he ploughed.

Now he fell back with a great scream and a look of surprise – dead." Lost peacetime is, however, most often conjured up through the poet's imagery – in which we are often invited to imagine an act of great violence with the help of similes drawn from a pastoral world far from the battlefields of Troy. In the 11th book, the Greek warrior Ajax slowly withdraws from a bout of hand-to-hand fighting: Like a stubborn ass some boys lead down a road . . . stick after stick they've cracked across his back but he's too much for them now, he rambles into a field to ravage standing crops. They keep beating his ribs, splintering sticks – their struggle child's play till with one final shove they drive him off but not before he's had his fill of feed. In book 13, an arrow bounces off Menelaus's shield like chickpeas off a shovel; the following book has a boulder thrown by Ajax that sends Hector "whirling like a whipping top".

Such humble, almost humorous images have a cumulative effect, creating a lightly sketched vision of a parallel world that sits at the back of the mind as we absorb the "foreground" action of the battle for Troy. Occasionally, such images contain their own violence, blurring into to the scenes they are helping us conjure. In the 12th book, the armies are said to fight like farmers rowing over a disputed a boundary stone – war writ small. It is the Trojans, meanwhile, who provide the most obvious focus for the fragility of civilian life, and the horrors that await the city's old, its women, and its very young. One feature of the poem is that it accords equal dignity to both sides in the war: the Trojans are not dehumanised into "ragheads" or "gooks". In book six comes the ­famous, moving scene in which Hector, returning to the city after a bout of ­battle, encounters his wife Andromache and son Astyanax. This is a passage of tenderness and tearing grief, as we witness the hero's love for his wife and hers for him; and the sweet fragility of their child.

It is this passage that helps Samet find in Hector the blueprint of the "citizen soldier", a warrior fighting to save his home and his values – a neat Americanisation. Andromache appeals to her husband to use defensive tactics, to stop leading his men from the front. She is already a victim of war: her father and seven brothers have been killed in a previous conflict by Achilles himself; her mother is dead, too. "You, Hector – you are my father now, my noble mother, / a brother too, and you are my husband, young and warm and strong! / Pity me please," she begs. Hector ­sorrowfully refuses: honour dictates he must lead his men in the field, though he has ­little doubt of the defeat that is coming. It is not so much the pain of his parents, his brothers, dying that haunts him, he says. "That is nothing, nothing beside your agony when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears. wrenching away your day of light and freedom! Then far off in the land of Argos you must live.

labouring at a loom, at another woman's beck and call, fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia, resisting all the way –" The child Astyanax recoils at the sight of his father's frightening plumed helmet. Hector picks him up, and Andromache smiles through her tears. He prays that the boy might one day be prince of the Trojans, their best fighter, better even than his father, "a joy to his mother's heart". In antiquity, those encountering the poem would probably have been familiar with two other epics, now lost, that dealt with later parts of the ­Trojan war story (these are known as The Little ­Iliad and The Sack of Troy). The ­Odyssey fills in some blanks, not least the story of the wooden horse. Later come those Athenian fifth-century tragedies that develop stories begun in The Iliad: Aeschylus's Agamemnon, and Euripides's plays Hecuba and The Trojan Women, which deal with the calamitous fall-out of the war on its female victims – its "collateral damage". From such texts we know how right, and how wrong, Hector is.

We know that Andromache will, yes, be dragged into slavery. But we also know that his aspirations for his son are empty; even the infant's name is a cruel joke ­(Astyanax means "lord of the city"). The baby will be flung over Troy's ­ramparts by the victorious Greeks – a scene that appears in The Trojan Women. It is perhaps in the relationships between the combatants that modern soldiers might most readily see their own emotions mirrored. In his book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, American psychiatrist Jonathan Shay finds parallels between the pathologies of ­Vietnam veterans whom he has treated, and Homer's Achilles. He argues that Achilles is suffering from what we would now call combat trauma, the death of Patroclus causing his character fatally to unravel. In particular, Shay compares the comradeship and passionate loyalty of American soldiers in Vietnam to that between Achilles and Patroclus – who grew up together, fought alongside each other, and whose relationship is the subject of some of Homer's most tender writing. In book 16 – shortly before he agrees to let Patroclus enter the fighting – Achilles finds him weeping: "Why in tears, Patroclus?

Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off – all tears fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms . . . That's how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears . . ." Such fierce tenderness is echoed in the conversation of today's British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former Guardian war reporter Audrey Gillan was, in 2003, embedded with the Household Cavalry in Iraq. The regiment was initially reluctant to host a female journalist, but she was later told by the driver of the personnel carrier that became her home "Don't worry, I will never, ever leave you. I will pick you up and carry you if I have to." In 2008, Gillan spoke to soldiers from the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment who had been involved in a particularly brutal firefight in Basra four years earlier. Lance Corporal Martin Hill remembered the end of a fellow soldier: "He was dead. You could see his skin changing colour and his eyes were dilated. We went through every emotion possible then.

Blokes were screaming out and crying." This is a long way from ramrod backs and stiff upper-lips. When Antilochus brings Achilles the news of Patroclus's death in book 18, "A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth, he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face and black ashes settled on to his fresh clean war-shirt, Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust, Achilles lay there, fallen . . . tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands . . ." Shay records one of his patients recalling his own fury: "I really loved fucking killing, couldn't get enough. For every one of them I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went away [sic]. Every time you lost a friend it seemed like a part of you was gone. Get one of them to compensate what they had done to me. I got very hard, cold, merciless. I lost all my mercy." Achilles also gets hard, cold, merciless. Even by the standards of The Iliad, his killing spree is grotesque.

He cannot sleep or eat; he thinks only of killing: "what I really crave / is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men". He slakes his bloodthirst by felling men, by filling the waters of the Scamander so full of bodies and gore that the river deity himself rises up from the depths in anger. It is "all day permanent red", to borrow the memorable title of one of ­Christopher Logue's ­poetic reimaginings of The Iliad. Achilles captures 12 Trojan men whom he will sacrifice on Patroclus's pyre – again, even by the standards of The Iliad, a horrific act; today, we would call it a war crime. In book 21, he downs the Trojan prince Lycaon. You captured me once before, says Lycaon, but then, merciful, you spared my life. Do the same now. Achilles responds: "Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you. And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?

The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you, death and the strong force of fate are waiting. There will come a dawn or a sunset or high noon when a man will take my life in battle too – flinging a spear perhaps or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow." After the loss of Patroclus, all life – ­Lycaon's, his own – is, for Achilles, utterly meaningless. We are all going to die; we (or at least you) may as well die now. Yet this is an aberration: life does have meaning in The Iliad, a meaning that is bound up both with a warrior's kleos, the glory he achieves in the field, and, paradoxically, with a hero's willing, onward surge towards death. How are we, then, to read the poem amid the horrors and contradictions of our own wars, conflicts that have destroyed countless Andromaches and Astyanaxes? Bleak as The Iliad is, it is made all the bleaker by its divine characters.

The poem's gods, who urge on the fighters and intervene to help their favoured heroes, are flimsy and flippant compared to their mortal counterparts, a source of troubling light relief rather than profundity. The life-and-death struggles of the human characters seem weightier and more agonisingly present when set against the meaningless existence of the gods. This is a hard world: the war isn't "for" anything, certainly not some greater good, but is merely part of the blind workings of an inexplicable fate that even Zeus, king of the gods, must bow to. When the warriors die, there are no flights of angels to sing them to their rest, only the prospect of a ghastly, ghostly, absence of meaning. As Hector's soul departs his dying body, it does so "wailing his fate / leaving his manhood far behind, / his young and supple strength".

The Iliad is a cavalcade of loss, an endless ­parade of men summoned briefly to life only to be consigned to death – such as young Gorgythion in the eighth book, subject of one of the poet's most poignant similes: "As a garden poppy, burst into red bloom, bends, dropping its head to one side, weighed down by its full seeds and a sudden spring shower, so Gorgythion's head fell limp over one shoulder, weighed down by his helmet." To post-first-world-war readers, it is hard not to add a further layer to these lines – Flanders fields a carpet of blood-red poppies. At the end of the poem comes the scene between Priam and Achilles, when the frail, grieving father finds it in himself to kiss those "terrible, man-­killing hands / that had slaughtered Priam's many sons in battle", when ­Achilles sees reflected in the face of Priam the likeness of his own beloved father. Weil underestimated the power of this passage. Achilles is not simply an unfeeling "thing", reduced by the unspeakable power of force. The truth may be harder to take.

He is at the same time a mass slaughterer and the gentlest of men. Only a few lines of verse stand between the Achilles who wipes away the tears of his beloved Patroclus and the one who piles up hecatombs of the Trojan dead. Find in this comfort, if you can. • This article was amended on 2 February 2010. In the original, Robert Fagles was said to have recited the 1,000 lines of The Iliad in Greek during a West Point visit. This has been corrected. Iliad Essay - Iliad, Homer - eNotes.com Iliad, Homer Iliad Homer Circa eighth century b.c. Greek poem. The following entry contains criticism on Homer's Iliad from 1983 to 2000. See also Homer Poetry Criticism. A seminal epic widely accepted as one of the greatest literary artifacts of Western civilization, the Iliad has been admired for centuries for its artistry as well as for the profound influence it has exerted on European literature.

Within its epic scope, set in the tenth year of a legendary war between Greeks and Trojans at Ilios (Troy), the Iliad depicts the heroic ethos of a mythic era personified in the figure of Achilles, a Greek hero of unrivaled martial excellence, who chooses undying fame won on the battlefield over the prospect of a long life. The epic's proper subject is the wrath of Achilles and its tragic consequences, but it also explores such themes as the workings of fate, honor, and the human urge toward immortality. Likewise, the Iliad delineates the heroic code—the thematic basis of all subsequent epic poetry. While theories regarding its author, the near-mythic Homer, continue to spur scholarly debate, the poem itself is renowned for its compelling narrative, vivid imagery, poetic technique, psychological scope, and stylistic clarity. Biographical Information Almost nothing is known about Homer, but scholars hypothesize that he was an Ionian Greek (probably from the coast of Asia Minor or one of the adjacent islands), that he was born sometime before 700 b.c., and that he lived in approximately the latter half of the eighth century b.c.

According to legend, he was a blind itinerant poet (the Greek word homēros means blind man); historians note that singing bards in ancient Greece were often blind and that the legend, therefore, may be based on fact, but that it is also possible that Homer may have lost his sight only late in life, or that his purported blindness was meant to mask his illiteracy. Internal evidence from the two major works attributed to Homer suggests that the Iliad preceded the Odyssey and that both were composed in the eighth century b.c. in a dialect that was a mixture of Ionic and Aeolic Greek. Biographies of Homer exist in the form of six early “lives” and assorted commentaries by ancient and Byzantine scholars, but the information they contain is considered unreliable and mostly mythical. Some commentators have even gone so far as to assert that no such individual as Homer ever lived. Due to the paucity of information regarding Homer, the manner of the composition of the Iliad has been one of determined critical speculation that has brought together the efforts of experts in such fields as archaeology, linguistics, and comparative literature.

In the 1920s the critic Milman Parry proposed that both the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed orally. Parry established that Homeric verse is formulaic by nature, relying on generic epithets (such as “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn”), repetition of stock lines and half-lines, and scenes and themes typical of traditional folk poetry. Comparing Homer's poetry with ancient oral epics from other cultures, Parry deduced that Homer was most likely a rhapsode, or itinerant professional reciter, who improvised stories to be sung at Greek festivals. As a public performer, Homer probably learned to weave together standard epic story threads and descriptions in order to sustain his narrative, relying on mnemonic devices and phrases to fill the natural metrical units of poetic lines. Parry's theory stressed the derivative, evolutionary character of Homer's poetry but affirmed his individual genius as a shaper of traditional elements whose creations far exceeded the sum of their borrowed parts. Many contemporary critics accept Parry's analysis of the authorship question, although critical speculation about the subject continues.

Textual History Scholarly consensus regarding the composition of the Iliad holds that the poem was most probably transmitted orally by local bards and first written down on papyri shortly after Homer's death. Although Homeric Greece did not yet have a system of writing appropriate for literary texts, records indicate that a Phoenician alphabet may have been adapted and used to record the poem in the eighth century b.c. Once set down in writing, the poem most likely became the exclusive property of the Homeridae, or sons of Homer, a bardic guild whose members performed and preserved the poem. Scholars conclude that in the second half of the sixth century b.c. the Athenian dictator Peisistratus, who ruled from 560 to 527 b.c., established a Commission of Editors of Homer to edit the text of the poems and remove any errors and interpolations that had accumulated in the process of transmission—thereby establishing a canon of Homer. The origin of the poem's current title, which means “the poem of Ilios” (the Homeric name for Troy), remains a matter of conjecture.

Scholars are uncertain whether Homer ever used it, for the earliest mention of the title discovered was by Herodotus in the fifth century b.c. Fragments of papyri, a third-century codex, and two other partial manuscripts exist, but the oldest full surviving manuscript of the poem, probably transcribed by a Byzantine scholar, dates from the ninth century. The first printed edition of Homer's poetry appeared in Europe in 1488 and remained in use until the seventeenth century. Many translations, both prose and verse, of the Iliad have subsequently been published. Critics agree that the most influential of these have been by George Chapman, Alexander Pope, and the translation team consisting of Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers; in the contemporary period the edition most highly regarded and frequently used is that of Richmond Lattimore. Plot and Major Characters Approximately 15,000 lines long and divided into twenty-four books (a structure that seems to date from the third century b.c. rather than from Homer's lifetime), the Iliad is composed in dactylic, or “heroic,” hexameter.

The action of the poem occurs near the Hellespont, in northwest Asia Minor, during the Trojan War, which archaeologists estimate took place in the second half of the twelfth century b.c. The plot begins in medias res, recounting an episode near the end of the war between the besieged Trojans, under King Priam, and the attacking Greeks (or Achaeans as they are generally named in the poem), led by King Agamemnon of Mycenae and his brother Menelaus of Sparta. One of Priam's sons, the self-indulgent Paris, has abducted the fabled beauty, Helen, wife of Menelaus. After a massive naval assault, fighting has dragged on for nearly ten years. During that time the Greek armies, including the mighty Myrmidons commanded by Achilles, the bravest and most headstrong of Agamemnon's supporters, have managed to capture and loot a portion of Trojan territory, but have failed to breach the massive walls of Troy. Incidents in the first book of the epic draw Achilles and Agamemnon into a disastrous quarrel.

Through his refusal to return Chryseis, a captured Trojan girl and the daughter of a priest of Apollo, Agamemnon invites a divine plague on the Greek army. In order to assuage Apollo's wrath and end the plague, Agamemnon later agrees to part with Chryseis, but demands Briseis, a Trojan concubine to Achilles, as compensation. In response to this dishonor, Achilles withdraws his troops in indignation, refusing to aid Agamemnon any further. Achilles prays that the Achaeans be defeated on the battlefield in his absence, a message his immortal mother, Thetis, conveys to Zeus, the ruler of the gods. Meanwhile, Agamemnon receives an enigmatic dream from the all-mighty Zeus, telling him he will soon defeat Troy. Armed with this knowledge, the Greek leader decides to test the resolve of his Achaean warriors. In a ruse to boost morale, Agamemnon proposes that his soldiers return to Greece, but his rhetorical trick backfires, leaving the quick-witted Ithacan king Odysseus to convince them to stay and fight.

An unsuccessful truce between the Greeks and the Trojans follows, intended to provide the opportunity for Menelaus and Paris to settle their feud by single combat. The duel proves indecisive as Paris is whisked from the battlefield by the goddess Aphrodite before he can be defeated. When fighting resumes, the Greek hero Diomedes, under the divine protection of Athena, takes to the field. He attacks and wounds two immortals, Aphrodite and the war god Ares, both of whom fight for Troy. Thereafter, Zeus decides to set his plan for a reversal of Greek fortunes into motion. The Trojans swiftly gain the upper hand in combat, despite a successful night raid by Odysseus and Diomedes on their camp. The following morning the Trojans take the offensive. Led by Hector, another of Priam's sons and the finest of the Trojan warriors, they penetrate the Greek defenses. Only temporarily slowed by the formidable Achaean hero Ajax the Greater, Hector sets fire to one of the Greek ships. At this point, Achilles relents and sends the Myrmidons, commanded by his beloved friend Patroclus, to assist Agamemnon in defense of the ships.

An outstanding warrior, Patroclus performs gloriously in battle while clad in Achilles's nearly-impenetrable armor. He slays a host of Trojans, including the hero Sarpedon, before being killed himself by Hector below the walls of Troy. In sorrow and rage, Achilles determines to rejoin the battle and obtain revenge on Hector. But first, his mother, Thetis, visits Hephaestus, blacksmith to the gods, and asks that he forge a new set of armor for Achilles. Hephaestus fulfills the request, creating an outstanding shield that symbolically depicts a city at peace and a city besieged in war. On the field of battle, Achilles's rage is unstoppable. He single-handedly repels the Trojan forces and kills Hector, dishonoring the noble warrior by mutilating his corpse by tying it to a chariot and dragging it around the city. King Priam, overtaken by grief for his son, visits Achilles in his camp and begs for the return of Hector's body so that the proper funeral rites can be performed. Moved by his passionate supplication, Achilles agrees and the work closes with a description of Hector's funeral.

Major Themes As the principal focus of the Iliad, Achilles embodies many of the major themes in the work. Among these is his choice to intensely pursue timē (roughly meaning “honor” or “prestige”), kleos (“glory”), and aretē (“martial virtue”) in order to secure his immortality as a great warrior, even if it means his early death. Thus, Achilles personifies the dual Greek conception of the brevity of life and the eternity of fame. Through Achilles, Homer delineates the heroic code fundamental to Western literature: that the chief aim of a hero's life is to win renown for his aristeia (which denotes “excellence,” “courage,” and “prowess”) using all the resources given to him through his aristocratic birth, wealth, intelligence, and military and athletic abilities. Furthermore, he fiercely guards his honor and that of his companions, strives to fulfill his aidōs (“duty” or obligation to community), and accepts his moira (“fate”) despite his constant striving for success.

That Achilles rejects his aidōs for the vast majority of the epic, instead showing himself to be vain, intemperate, and boastful while he stands aside from the battling Greeks, suggests Homer's balancing of noble, heroic behavior with human flaws and limitations. Only in the final book of the Iliad, with King Priam begging for his fallen son's corpse, does Achilles acknowledge his communal responsibilities, treating the defeated King with pity rather than wrath. To a degree, Homer also humanizes the divine figures in the epic, the pantheon of Olympian gods including Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, and Apollo. Rather than depicting the immortals as paragons of virtue or restraint, Homer characterizes these figures, for all of their knowledge and power, as variously jealous, deceitful, manipulative, capricious, wrathful, or petty. Homer conveys an additional theme of great significance to the Iliad largely through the work's renowned similes, a number of which describe scenes of ordinary, peaceful life juxtaposed against the violent and bloody warfare that drives the narrative.

Likewise, Homer highlights the stark contrast between peace and conflict in the scenes painted on Achilles's shield—a device singled out by many critics as the symbolic touchstone of the epic. Critical Reception As one of the best known literary works of the Western world, the Iliad has inspired much critical commentary and has wielded an enormous influence on later authors and readers. Over the centuries, critics have been nearly unanimous in praising Homer's handling of the narrative, imagery, structure, and themes of the Iliad. They commend his ability to intersperse lengthy descriptions of battle scenes with highly dramatic dialogue, whimsical fantasy about the gods of Olympus, and, at certain key moments, moving lyrical poetry. Homer's genius, scholars have asserted, is most evident in his masterful yet self-effacing storytelling technique. In a perfectly plain and direct manner, the narrator carries the action forward, examining the events in great detail and occasionally digressing from the main narrative, but always in such a manner that the course of the tale seems natural and entirely inevitable. In addition to praising Homer's seamless narrative technique, with its flawless manipulation of tightly woven incident, simple design, and panoramic scope, scholars have acknowledged the immediacy and crystalline clarity of the Iliad's imagery.

Special consideration has been reserved for Homer's extended similes, said to enhance the realism and enlarge the range of the poem by bringing into its military world parallel images from domestic life, agriculture, and nature. Critics have also marveled at the degree of accuracy demonstrated by Homer in his portrayal of battle scenes; his knowledge of weapons, battle strategy, and even the medical treatment of wounds has proved uncannily thorough. Although most commentators praise the narrative impact and brilliant imagery of the Iliad, there remains a great deal of debate regarding the structural and thematic unity of the poem. A number of contemporary scholars have examined the underlying complexities of work's narrative structure and thematic framework, highlighting Homer's use of misdirection, parallelism, and reversal. Some interpreters have suggested that Homer's portrayal of the Trojans is not adequately balanced with that of the Greeks, citing evidence that the poem is biased toward Achaean heroes, and finally withholds the glory due to the Trojans. Overall, however, critics have tended to cite the comprehensive and cohesive vision of life depicted in the Iliad as the poem's central unifying principle.

Although Homer presents an extremely harsh world in which human beings appear destined to suffer as the mere playthings of the gods and fate, he simultaneously conveys the value of human ideals and the joy of pursuing heroic excellence. Late twentieth-century critics have continued to focus on such specialized topics as Homer's narrative technique, use of irony and humor, and development of individual characters, considering the poet's treatment of the gods in relation to mortals, or probing such minor themes as the guilt of Helen or Paris. Exploring Homer's philosophical beliefs, scholars still grapple with his presentation of death, divine and human justice, and the role of the citizen and the state in society. The concepts of aidōs, aristeia, and other elements of the heroic code have also inspired considerable commentary. Homer's rich use of simile continues to elicit interest, with scholars considering his descriptions of heroes as wild beasts, as well as his lyric evocation of human gentleness, care, and nurturing in the brutal context of war. With the ongoing proliferation of critical attention to the Iliad, the oldest and in some ways the most formidable work of Western literature has remained fresh and intriguing for generation after generation of scholars and readers.

It impresses as much by its thematic complexity as by its stylistic simplicity, as much by its depiction of tragedy as by its celebration of life, and as much by its harsh descriptions of warfare as by its tender lyric poetry. Start Free Trial Start your free trial with eNotes to access more than 30,000 study guides. Get help with any book. The Iliad - Homer - Ancient Greece - Classical Literature Back to Top of Page �The Iliad� (Gr: �Ili�s�) is an epic poem by the ancient Greek poet Homer , which recounts some of the significant events of the final weeks of the Trojan War and the Greek siege of the city of Troy (which was also known as Ilion, Ilios or Ilium in ancient times). Written in the mid-8th Century BCE, �The Iliad� is usually considered to be the earliest work in the whole Western literary tradition, and one of the best known and loved stories of all time.

Through its portayal of the epic subject matter of the Trojan War, the stirring scenes of bloody battle, the wrath of Achilles and the constant interventions of the gods, it explores themes of glory, wrath, homecoming and fate, and has provided subjects and stories for many other later Greek, Roman and Renaissance writings. Synopsis Back to Top of Page The story covered by �The Iliad� begins nearly ten years into the seige of Troy by the Greek forces, led by Agamemnon , King of Mycenae. The Greeks are quarrelling about whether or not to return Chryseis, a Trojan captive of King Agamemnon , to her father, Chryses, a priest of Apollo. When Agamemnon refuses and threatens to ransom the girl to her father, the offended Apollo plagues them with a pestilence. The Greeks, at the behest of the warrior-hero Achilles , force Agamemnon to return Chryseis in order to appease Apollo and end the pestilence. But, when Agamemnon eventually reluctantly agrees to give her back, he takes in her stead Briseis, Achilles �s own war-prize concubine.

Feeling dishonoured, Achilles wrathfully withdraws both himself and his Myrmidon warriors from the Trojan War. Testing the resolve of the Greeks, Agamemnon feigns a homeward order, but Odysseus encourages the Greeks to pursue the fight. During a brief truce in the hostilities, Paris and Menelaus meet in single combat over Helen , while she and old King Priam of Troy watch from the city walls and, despite the goddess Aphrodite�s intervention on behalf of the over-matched Paris , Menelaus is the victor. The goddess Athena, however, who favours the Greeks, soon provokes a Trojan truce-breaking and battle begins anew. The Greek hero Diomedes, strengthened by Athena, drives the Trojans before him but, in his arrogance and blood-lust, strikes and injures Aphrodite. Despite the misgivings of his wife, Andromache , the Trojan hero, Hector , son of King Priam , challenges the Greek warrior-hero Ajax to single combat, and is almost overcome in battle.

Throughout all, in the background, the various gods and goddesses (particularly Hera, Athena, Apollo and Poseidon) continue to argue among themselves and to manipulate and intervene in the struggle, despite Zeus� specific orders to the contrary. Achilles steadfastly refuses to give in to pleas for help from Agamemnon , Odysseus , Ajax , Phoenix and Nestor, spurning the offered honours and riches and even Agamemnon �s belated offer to return Briseis to him. Diomedes and Odysseus sneak into the Trojan camp and wreak havoc. But, with Achilles and his warriors out of battle, the tide appears to begin to turn in favour of the Trojans. Agamemnon is wounded in the battle and, despite the heroics of Ajax , Hector successfully breaches the fortified Greek camp, wounding Odysseus and Diomedes in the process, and threatens to set the Greek ships on fire. Torn between his allegiances, Achilles orders his friend and lover, Patroclus, to dress in Achilles � own armour and to lead the Myrmidons in repelling the Trojans.

Intoxicated by his success, Patroclus forgets Achilles � warning, and pursues the fleeing Trojans to the walls of Troy and would have taken the city were it not for the actions of Apollo. In the heat of the battle, though, Hector finds the disguised Patroclus and, thinking him to be Achilles , fights and (again with Apollo�s help) kills him. Menelaus and the Greeks manage to recover Patroclus�s corpse before Hector can inflict more damage. Distraught at the death of his companion, Achilles then reconciles with Agamemnon and rejoins the fray, despite knowing his deadly fate, and drives all the Trojans before him in his fury. As the ten year war reaches its climax, even the gods join in the battle and the earth shakes with the clamour of the combat. Clad in new armour fashioned specially for him by Hephaestus, Achilles takes revenge for his friend Patroclus by slaying Hector in single combat, but then defiles and desecrates his corpse for several days. Now, at last, Patroclus� funeral can be celebrated in what Achilles sees as a fitting manner.

Hector �s father, King Priam , emboldened by his grief and aided by Hermes, recovers Hector �s corpse from Achilles , and �The Iliad� ends with Hector �s funeral during a twelve day truce granted by Achilles . Analysis Back to Top of Page Although attributed to Homer , "The Iliad" is clearly dependent on an older oral tradition and may well have been the collective inheritance of many singer-poets over a long period of time (the historical Fall of Troy is usually dated to around the start of the 12th Century BCE). Homer was probably one of the first generation of authors who were also literate, as the Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th Century BCE, and the language used in his epic poems is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects such as Aeolic Greek. However, it is by no means certain that Homer himself (if in fact such a man ever really existed) actually wrote down the verses.

�The Iliad� was part of a group of ancient poems known as the "Epic Cycle", most of which are now lost to us, which dealt with the history of the Trojan War and the events surrounding it. Whether or not they were written down, we do know that Homer 's poems (along with others in the �Epic Cycle�) were recited in later days at festivals and ceremonial occasions by professional singers called "rhapsodes", who beat out the measure with rhythm staffs. �The Iliad� itself does not cover the early events of the Trojan War, which had been launched ten years before the events described in the poem in order to rescue Helen , the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, after her abduction by the Trojan prince, Paris . Likewise, the death of Achilles and the eventual fall of Troy are not covered in the poem, and these matters are the subjects of other (non-Homeric) "Epic Cycle" poems, which survive only in fragments. �The Odyssey� , a separate work also by Homer , narrates Odysseus � decade-long journey home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War.

The poem consists of twenty-four scrolls, containing 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter verse. The entire poem has a formal rhythm that is consistent throughout (making it easier to memorize) and yet varied slightly from line to line (preventing it from being monotonous). Many phrases, sometimes whole passages, are repeated verbatim over and over again throughout �The Iliad�, partly to fulfill the demands of the metre and partly as part of the formulaic oral tradition. In the same way, many of the descriptive phrases that are linked with a certain character (such as "swift-footed Achilles ", "Diomedes of the great war cry", " Hector of the shining helm", and " Agamemnon the lord of men") match the number of syllables in a hero's name, and are repeated regularly to the extent that they almost seem to become part of the characters' names themselves. The immortal gods and goddesses are portrayed as characters in �The Iliad�, displaying individuality and will in their actions, but they are also stock religious figures, sometimes allegorical, sometimes psychological, and their relation to humans is extremely complex.

They are often used as a way of explaining how or why an event took place, but they are also sometimes used as comic relief from the war, mimicking, parodying and mocking mortals. Indeed, it is often the gods, not the mortals, who seem casual, petty and small-minded. The main theme of the poem is that of war and peace, and the whole poem is essentially a description of war and fighting. There is a sense of horror and futility built into Homer 's chronicle, and yet, posed against the viciousness, there is a sense of heroism and glory that adds a glamour to the fighting: Homer appears both to abhor war and to glorify it. Frequent similes tell of the peacetime efforts back home in Greece, and serve as contrasts to the war, reminding us of the human values that are destroyed by fighting, as well as what is worth fighting for. The concept of heroism, and the honour that results from it, is also one of the major currents running through the poem. Achilles in particular represents the heroic code and his struggle revolves around his belief in an honour system, as opposed to Agamemnon 's reliance on royal privilege.

But, as fighter after heroic fighter enters the fray in search of honour and is slain before our eyes, the question always remains as to whether their struggle, heroic or not, is really worth the sacrifice. �Menin� or �menis� (�anger� or �wrath�) is the word that opens �The Iliad�, and one of the major themes of the poem is Achilles coming to terms with his anger and taking responsibility for his actions and emotions. Resources English translation by Samuel Butler with popup notes and commentary (eNotes): Greek version with word-by-word translation (Perseus Project): Detailed book-by-book summary (About.com): Trojan War - Ancient History Encyclopedia Trojan War by Mark Cartwright published on 15 May 2013 The Trojan War , fought between Greeks and the defenders of the city of Troy in Anatolia sometime in the late Bronze Age, has grabbed the imagination for millennia. A conflict between Mycenaeans and Hittites may well have occurred, but its representation in epic literature such as Homer ’s Iliad is almost certainly more myth than reality. Nevertheless, it has defined and shaped the way ancient Greek culture has been viewed right up to the 21st century CE.

The story of gods and heroic warriors is perhaps one of the richest single surviving sources from antiquity and offers insights into the warfare , religion , customs, and attitudes of the ancient Greeks. Origins of the War The main source for our knowledge of the Trojan War is Homer’s Iliad (written sometime in the 8th century BCE) where he recounts 53 days during the final year of the ten year conflict. The Greeks imagined the war to have occurred some time in the 13th century BCE. However, the war was also the subject of a long oral tradition prior to Homer’s work, and this, combined with other sources such as the fragmentary Epic Cycle poems, give us a more complete picture of what exactly the Greeks thought of as the Trojan War. Remove Ads Advertisement The Trojan War, in Greek tradition, started as a way for Zeus to reduce the ever-increasing population of humanity and, more practically, as an expedition to reclaim Helen , wife of Menelaos, King of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon .

Helen was abducted by the Trojan prince Paris (also known as Alexandros) and taken as his prize for choosing Aphrodite as the most beautiful goddess in a competition with Athena and Hera at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Menelaos and the Greeks wanted her back and to avenge Trojan impudence. The Greeks The coalition of Greek forces (or Archaians as Homer often calls them) were led by King Agamemnon of Mycenae . Amongst the cities or regions represented were Boiotia, Phocia, Euboea, Athens , Argos , Corinth , Arcadia, Sparta, Kephalonia, Crete , Rhodes , Magnesia, and the Cyclades . Just how many men these totalled is unclear. Homer states an army of ‘tens of thousands’ or rather more poetically ‘as many [men] as the leaves and flowers that come in springtime’. Amongst the Greek warriors were some extra special heroes, leaders who were the greatest fighters and displayed the greatest courage on the battlefield. Also, they often had a divine mother or father whilst the other parent was a mortal, thereby creating a genealogical link between the gods and ordinary men.

Amongst the most important were Achilles , Odysseus , Ajax, Diomedes, Patroklos, Antilokus, Menestheus, and Idomenus. Remove Ads Advertisement The Greeks were aided by several of the Olympian gods of Greek religion . Athena, Poseidon , Hera, Hephaistos , Hermes , and Thetis all gave direct or indirect help to the Greeks in Homer’s account of the war. The gods had their favourites amongst the men fighting down on the plains of Troy and they often protected them by deflecting spears and even spiriting them away in the heat of battle to put them down somewhere safe, far from danger. The Trojans The Trojan army defending the great city of Troy, led by their king Priam, had assistance from a long list of allies. These included the Carians, Halizones, Kaukones, Kikones, Lycians, Maionians, Mysians, Paionians, Paphlagonians, Pelasgians, Phrygians, and Thracians.

The Trojans, too, had their semi-divine heroes and these included Hektor (son of Priam), Aeneas, Sarpedon, Glaukos, Phorkys, Poulydamas, and Rhesos. The Trojans also had help from the gods, receiving assistance during the battle from Apollo , Aphrodite, Ares , and Leto. Remove Ads Advertisement Ares, god of War, called Terror and Panic to yoke his horses, while he himself put on his gleaming armour. Iliad Key Battles Most of the Trojan War was in a fact a protracted siege, and the city was able to resist the invaders for so long principally because its fortifications were so magnificent. Indeed, in Greek mythology , the walls of Troy were said to have been built by Poseidon and Apollo who, after an act of impiety, were compelled by Zeus to serve the Trojan King Laomedon for one year. There were, though, battles outside the city where armies fought, sometimes with chariots, but mostly by men on foot using spears and swords and protected by a shield, helmet, and armour for the chest and legs.

War waged back and forth across the plains of Troy over the years, but the really exciting battles seem to have been reserved for the final year of the siege and the following are a selection of the highlights. Menelaos v Paris Tiring of indecisive battles, Menelaos offered to fight Paris in single-combat and so settle the issue of the war. Agreeing to this, the two warriors drew lots to see who would have first throw with their spear. Paris won and threw first but his spear landed harmlessly in the shield of Menelaos. The Greek king then threw his weapon with tremendous force and the spear went through the shield of Paris and carried on through to pierce his armour. If Paris had not swayed at the last moment, he would surely have been killed outright. However, Menelaos was not finished and with his sword he struck a fearful blow on the Trojan prince’s helmet. The sword shattered, though, and fell in pieces into the dust. Menelaos then grabbed Paris’ helmet with his bare hands and proceeded to drag him from the field.

Choking as his helmet strap wrapped around his neck, Paris was only saved through the intervention of Aphrodite who broke the helmet strap and, covering the prince in a thick mist, spirited her favourite back to the safety of his perfumed bedroom. Ajax v Hektor The meeting of the two great heroes echoes that of Menelaos and Paris. Each throw their spears but to no effect. Hektor then threw a large rock at the Greek, only for him to fend it off with his shield. Ajax then returned the favour with an even bigger rock, smashing Hektor’s shield. They then drew their swords and closed for mortal combat but were each stopped by their comrades who called for an end to the fighting as night was approaching. Displaying the code of honour for which the good old days were famous, the two warriors even said goodbye on friendly terms by exchanging gifts, Hektor giving a silver-hilted sword and Ajax giving a splendid purple belt. The Greek Camp Attacked Following a tremendous day of fighting, Hektor led the Trojans in an attack on the very walls of the Greeks’ camp. Breaking through the gates, the Trojans sent the Greeks fleeing in panic back to their ships.

However, as Zeus was momentarily distracted by the charms of Hera, Poseidon stepped in to encourage the Greeks who rallied and forced the Trojans to retreat. Then the tide of battle changed again and, with the support of Apollo, an inspirational Hektor, in his finest hour, once more beat the Greeks back to their ships where he sought to set them ablaze. The Death of Patroklos Invincible Achilles was quite simply the greatest warrior in Greece , or anywhere else for that matter. Much to the Greek’s frustration, though, he sat out most of the war in a big sulk. Agamemnon had stolen his female war-booty Briseis and consequently the hero refused to fight. Agamemnon at first doesn’t seem to have been too bothered about losing his temperamental talisman but as the Trojans started to gain an upper hand in the war, it began to look like Achilles would be needed if the Archaians were to actually win the protracted conflict. Accordingly, an increasingly desperate Agamemnon sent an appeal to Achilles with promises of vast treasure if he would only re-join the conflict.

These Achilles refused but with the Greek camp under attack, Patroklos appealed to his mentor and great friend Achilles to rejoin the conflict and, when he still refused, Patroklos asked for permission to wear Achilles’ armour and lead the fearful Myrmidons himself. Achilles, on seeing one of the Greek ships already ablaze, reluctantly gave his consent but warned Patroklos to only repel the Trojans from the camp and not pursue them to the walls of Troy. Patroklos then led the Greek fight-back, the Trojans were swept back and he even managed to kill the great Trojan hero Sarpedon. Flushed with success, the young hero then ignored Achilles’ advice and rashly carried the fighting on towards Troy. However, at this point, great Apollo intervened on behalf of the Trojans and struck the helmet and armour from Patroklos, shattered his spear and knocked his shield from his arm. Thus exposed and defenceless, Patroklos was stabbed by Euphorbos and then Hektor stepped in to deal the fatal blow with a pitiless stab of his spear.

Achilles’ New Armour When Achilles discovered the death of his great friend Patroklos, he was overcome with grief and rage and he swore to take terrible revenge on the Trojans and Hektor in particular. After a suitable show of mourning, Achilles finally decided to enter the battlefield once more. It was a decision which would seal the fate of Troy. Before he could enter the fighting, though, Achilles needed new armour and this was provided by his divine mother Thetis who had Hephaistos, the master craftsman of Olympus, make him the most magnificent set of armour ever seen. Using bronze, tin, silver, and gold , the god made a massive shield which depicted a myriad of earthly scenes and all the constellations. So too, he made a dazzling, gold-crested helmet for the hero. Resplendent in his shining armour, Achilles, still mad with rage, predictably routed the Trojans who fled in panic behind the safety of their city walls. Come closer now, to meet your doomed end sooner.

Achilles to Hektor, Iliad Achilles v Hektor Hektor alone remained standing outside the walls but at the sight of the awesome Achilles on the rampage, even his nerve gave way and he made a run for safety. Achilles, however, gave chase and pursued the Trojan prince three times around the city walls. Finally catching him, Achilles killed his quarry with a vicious stab of his spear in Hektor’s throat. Achilles then stripped the body of its fine armour and, tying Hektor by the ankles to his chariot , Achilles dragged the body back to the Greek camp in full view of Priam standing atop the fortifications of the city. This was a shockingly dishonourable act and against all the rules of ancient warfare. Having avenged the death of Patroklos, Achilles arranged funeral games in his fallen friend’s honour. Meanwhile, Priam entered the Greek camp in disguise and begged Achilles to return the body of his son that he might be given proper burial . Initially reluctant, the emotional pleas of the old man were finally heeded and Achilles consented to return the body. Here the Iliad ends but the war still had a few more twists of fate to turn.

The Trojan Horse & Victory The war involved several more exciting episodes including Achilles’ fight with and killing of the Ethiopian King Memnon and the Amazon Penthesilea who both came to the aid of the Trojans. Achilles was even said to have fallen in love with the beautiful Amazon just at the moment he killed her with his spear. Achilles himself met his destiny and was killed by an arrow to his only weak spot, his ankle, shot by Paris and guided by Apollo. Odysseus and Ajax squabbled over the hero’s magnificent armour and Ajax went mad with disappointment when he lost out on the prize. Slaughtering a herd of sheep he thought were Greeks, he fell on his sword in a messy and pointless suicide. Philokteles got revenge for his father, Achilles, by fatally shooting Paris with the legendary bow of Hercules . Finally, Odysseus even managed to get into the city in disguise and steal the sacred Palladion statue of Athena. The final and decisive action was, though, the idea of the wooden horse. Odysseus, inspired by Athena, thought up the ruse to get a body of men inside the walls of Troy.

First, the Greeks all sailed off into the sunset leaving a mysterious offering to the Trojans of a gigantic wooden horse which in reality concealed a group of warriors within. Just to make sure the Trojans took the horse within the city, Sinon was chosen to stay behind and tell a cock and bull story about the Greeks having given up and left a nice present. The Trojans did take the horse inside the city walls but whilst they were enjoying a drunken celebration of their victory, the Greeks climbed out of the horse, opened the city walls for the returning Greek army, and the city was sacked and the population slaughtered or enslaved. Helen was taken back to Argos and of the Trojan heroes only Aeneas escaped to eventually set up a new home in Italy . Victory had its price though. Due to their pitiless ravaging of the city and its people and even worse, outrageous sacrilegious acts such as the rape of Kassandra, the gods punished the Greeks by sending storms to wreck their ships and those who did eventually return were made to endure a protracted and difficult voyage home. Even then, some of the Greeks who did make it back to their homeland only did so to face further misfortune and disaster.

The War in Art & Literature Troy and the Trojan War became a staple myth of Classical Greek and Roman literature and were revisited many times by writers in works such as Aeschylus ’ Agamemnon, Euripedes’ Trojan Women, and Virgil’s Aenid. Also in pottery decoration and in sculpture, artists were captivated by the Trojan War. Scenes of the judgement of Paris, Achilles fighting Hektor, Achilles playing dice with Ajax, and Ajax falling on his sword were just some of the myriad scenes from the story that would appear in art again and again over the centuries. Perhaps more importantly, the Trojan War came to represent the struggle of Greeks against foreign powers and it told tales of a time when men were better, more able, and more honourable. In Archaeology There has been much scholarly debate as to whether the mythical Troy actually existed and if so, whether the archaeological site discovered in Anatolia which revealed a city which had prospered over thousands of years of habitation was actually the same city; however, it is now almost universally accepted that the archaeological excavations have revealed the city of Homer’s Iliad. Of the several cities built on top of each other, Troy VI (c.

1750-1300 BCE) is the most likely candidate for the besieged city of Homer’s Trojan War. Impressive fortification walls with several towers certainly fit the Homeric description of ‘strong-built Troy’. The lower town covers an impressive 270,000 m² protected by an encircling rock-cut ditch and suggests a grand city like the Troy of tradition. Troy VI was partially destroyed but the exact cause is not known beyond some evidence of fire. Intriguingly, bronze arrow heads, spear tips, and sling shots have been found at the site and even some embedded in the fortification walls, suggesting some sort of conflict. The dates of these (c. 1250 BCE) and the site destruction correlate with Herodotus ’ dates for the Trojan War. Conflicts over the centuries between the Mycenaean and Hittite civilizations are more than probable, colonial expansion and control of lucrative trade routes being prime motivators. However, such conflicts are unlikely to have been on the scale of Homer’s war, but collectively they may well have been the origin of the epic tale of the Trojan War which has fascinated for centuries.

Question: What war was the subject of "The Iliad"?
Answer: Trojan War