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This is the article about the famous epic greek poem. For other uses of Iliad, see Iliad (disambiguation).

The Iliad (Ancient Greek Ιλιάς, Ilias) tells part of the story of the siege of the city of Ilium, i.e. the Trojan War, and is, along with the Odyssey, one of the two major Greek epic poems traditionally attributed to Homer, a blind Ionian poet. Scholars dispute whether Homer existed, and whether he was one person, but it is clear that the poems spring from a long tradition of oral poetry. The Iliad and the Odyssey are traditionally dated to the 8th century BC, but many scholars now prefer a date of the 7th century BC (e.g. Martin West) or even the 6th century BC (e.g. Richard Seaford). The epics are considered by most modern scholars to be the oldest literature in the Greek language, though some classical Greeks thought that the works of the poet Hesiod were composed earlier.

The word Iliad means "pertaining to Ilion" (Latin Ilium), the name of the city proper, as opposed to Troy (Greek: Τροία, Troía; Latin: Troia) the state centered around Ilium, over which Priam reigned. The names are often used interchangeably.

File:TBanksThetis.jpg
Thetis rising from the sea to comfort Achilles (Book 18), by Thomas Banks, English, 1778 Victoria and Albert Museum

The story of the Iliad

The Iliad begins with these lines:

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Transliterated:

Mēnin aeide thea, Pēlēiadeō Akhilēos
oulomenēn, hē muri' Akhaiois alge' ethēken,

Translated:

Sing, goddess, the rage of Achilles the son of Peleus,
the destructive rage that sent countless pains on the Achaeans...

The first word of the Iliad is mēnin, "rage" or "wrath." This word announces the major theme of the Iliad: the wrath of Achilles. When Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces at Troy, dishonors Achilles by taking Briseis, a slave woman given to him as a prize of war, Achilles becomes enraged, and withdraws from the fighting. Without Achilles' prowess in battle, the Greeks are nearly defeated by the Trojans. Achilles reenters the fighting when his close friend Patroclus is killed by the Trojan Hector. Achilles slaughters many Trojans, and kills Hector. Priam, the father of Hector, ransoms his son's body, and the Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector.

Of the many themes in the Iliad, perhaps the most important is the idea of what a hero is. Achilles is forced to make a choice between living a long life or dying young on the battlefield. For the Greeks of Homer's day, the latter would have been a better choice because death in battle leads to honor and glory which were the most important values of the day — more important than even right and wrong. One of the remarkable things about the Iliad is the way that Achilles, especially in Book 9, both embraces concepts of honor and glory and also rejects them. It should be noted that, despite the fact that he is the antagonist in the story, Hector probably best displays the qualities of an ancient Mediterranean hero.

Many Greek myths exist in multiple versions, so Homer had some freedom to choose among them to suit his story. See Greek mythology for more detail.

Background to the Iliad: the Trojan War

The action of the Iliad covers only a few weeks of the tenth and final year of the Trojan War. Neither the background and early years of the war (Paris' abduction of Helen from King Menelaus), nor its end (the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy), are directly narrated in the Iliad. Many of these events were narrated in other epic poems collectively known as the Cyclic epics or the epic cycle; these poems only survive in fragments. See Trojan War for a summary of the events of the war.

The story of the Iliad

Overview

Apollo has sent a plague against the Greeks, who had captured Chryseis, the daughter of the priest Chryses, and given her as a prize to Agamemnon. Agamemnon is compelled to restore Chryseis to her father. Out of pride, Agamemnon takes Briseis, whom the Athenians had given to Achilles as a spoil of war. Achilles, the greatest warrior of the age, follows the advice of his mother, Thetis, and withdraws from battle in revenge and the allied Achaean (Greek) armies nearly lose the war.

In counterpoint to Achilles' pride and arrogance stands the Trojan prince Hector, son of King Priam, with a wife and child, who fights to defend his city and his family. The death of Patroclus, Achilles' dearest friend or lover, at the hands of Hector, brings Achilles back to the war for revenge, and he slays Hector. Later Hector's father, King Priam, comes to Achilles alone (however he was aided by Hermes) to ransom his son's body back, and Achilles is moved to pity; the funeral of Hector ends the poem.

Book summaries

After the Iliad: the end of the war and the returns home

Although certain events subsequent to the funeral of Hector are foreshadowed in the Iliad, and there is a general sense that the Trojans are doomed, a detailed account of the fall of Troy is not set out by Homer. The following account comes from later Greek and Roman poetry and drama.

Achilles fights and kills the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Aethiopean king Memnon. Very soon he is killed on the battlefield by Paris with a poisoned arrow to his vulnerable heel. (See Achilles' Heel). After his death, Ajax and Odysseus feud over who should keep his armour. They submit their disagreement to an impromptu court and Odysseus is awarded the armour. Ajax subsequently goes mad and slaughters his livestock, believing they are the Greek commanders. He then kills himself in shame.

The Amazons come to join the battle. Philoctetes, a crippled Greek who had been abandoned by the others along the journey, was recruited by the god Heracles because it was prophesied the war could not be won without his bow.

Odysseus devises a plan to take the city. He has his men build a large, hollow wooden horse, and then he and twenty others hide inside. The Greek ships withdraw out of sight of Troy, apparently admitting defeat, and leave behind the horse, purportedly as an offering to Poseidon for good winds on the return trip. The Trojans take this inside the great walls of Troy, and then feast and celebrate their victory and the war's end. At night, Odysseus and the soldiers creep out of the horse and open the gates to the other Greeks who have sailed back under cover of night. The city is sacked, and in some accounts burned for seven years.

Priam is killed. According to one tradition, Hector's wife Andromache throws their son Astyanax and herself from the ramparts to save them from slavery. According to another, Astyanax was killed by Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, to ensure that Hector's son could not seek vengeance for his father's death against Achilles' son. Andromache became Neoptolemus' concubine, later to marry Helenus, Hector's brother. A Roman tradition held that Aeneas escaped with his family and several hundred people, who after years of migration eventually founded Rome. (This tradition is best known from Virgil's Aeneid).

Odysseus' long journey home is narrated in Homer's Odyssey. Menelaus and Helen returned to Sparta to rule. Agamemnon took home as a slave the priestess Cassandra, who was gifted with prophecy but cursed never to be believed. When he returned home he was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. They in turn were killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes, and his daughter, Elektra.

Major characters

The Iliad contains a sometimes confusingly great number of characters. The latter half of the second book (often called the Catalogue of Ships) is devoted entirely to listing the various commanders. Many of the battle scenes in the Iliad feature bit characters who are quickly slain. See Trojan War for a detailed list of participating armies and warriors.

  • The Achaeans (Αχαιοί) - the word "Hellenes", which would today be translated as "Greeks", is not used by Homer
    • Achilles (Αχιλλεύς) the leader of the Myrmidons (Μυρμιδόνες) and the principal Greek champion whose anger is the over-arching theme of the story
    • Agamemnon, (Αγαμέμνων), King of Mycenae, supreme commander of the Achaean armies whose actions provoke the feud with Achilles
    • Patroclus,(Πάτροκλος) cousin, and friend or lover, to Achilles
    • Nestor, (Νέστωρ), Menelaus, (Μενέλαος), Diomedes, (Διομήδης), Idomeneus, (Ιδομενεύς), and Telamonian Aias, (Αίας ο Τελαμώνιος), kings of the principal city-states of Greece who are leaders of their own armies, under the overall command of Agamemnon
    • Odysseus,(Οδυσσεύς) another warrior-king, famed for his cunning, who is the main character of his own epic, the Odyssey
    • Calchas, (Κάλχας) a powerful Greek prophet and omen reader, who guided the Greeks through the war with his predictions.
  • The Trojans and their allies
    • Hector, (Έκτωρ) firstborn son of King Priam, leader of the Trojan and allied armies and heir apparent to the throne of Troy
    • Priam, (Πρίαμος) king of the Trojans, too old to take part in the fighting
    • Paris, (Πάρης) Trojan prince and Hector's brother, also called Alexander; his abduction of Helen is the casus belli. He was supposed to be killed as a baby because his sister Cassandra saw the destruction of Troy because of him. Raised by a shepherd.
    • Aeneas, (Αινείας) cousin of Hector, and his principal lieutenant
    • Glaucus and Sarpedon, leaders of the Lycian forces allied to the Trojan cause
  • Female characters
    • Helen, (Ελένη) former Queen of Sparta and wife of Menelaus, now espoused to Paris
    • Andromache, (Ανδρομάχη) Hector's wife and mother of their infant son, Astyanax (Αστυάναξ)
    • Hecuba, (Εκάβη) Queen of Troy, wife of Priam, mother of Hector, Cassandra, Paris etc
    • Briseis, a woman captured in the sack of Lyrnessos, a small town in the territory of Troy, and awarded to Achilles as a prize; Agamemnon takes her from Achilles in Book 1 and Achilles withdraws from battle as a result

The Olympian deities, principally Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, Athena, Hermes and Poseidon, appear in the Iliad as advisers to and manipulators of the human characters. All except Zeus become personally involved in the fighting at one point or another (See Theomachy).

Technical features

The poem is written in dactylic hexameter. The Iliad comprises roughly 16,000 lines of verse. Later Greeks divided it into twenty-four books, and this convention has lasted to the present day with little change.

The Iliad as oral tradition

The Iliad and the Odyssey were considered by Greeks of the classical age and after as the most important works in Ancient Greek literature, and were the basis of Greek pedagogy in antiquity. As the center of the rhapsode's repertoire, their recitation was a central part of Greek religious festivals. The book would be spoken or sung all night (modern readings last around 20 hours), with audiences coming and going for parts they particularly enjoyed.

Throughout much of their reception, the Iliad and Odyssey were assumed to be literary poems. However in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, scholars began to question this assumption. Milman Parry, a classical scholar, was intrigued by peculiar features of Homeric style: in particular the stock epithets and the often extensive repetition of words, phrase and even whole chunks of text. He argued that these features were artifacts of oral composition. The poet employs stock phrases because of the ease with which they could be applied to a hexameter line. Taking this theory, Parry travelled in Yugoslavia, studying the local oral poetry. In his reasearch he observed oral poets employing stock phrases and repetition to assist with the challenge of composing a poem orally and improvisationally.

The relationship of Achilles and Patroclus

Main article: Achilles and Patroclus
Achilles and Patroclus.

The precise nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus has been the subject of some dispute in both the classical period and modern times. In the Iliad, it is clear that the two heroes have a deep and extremely meaningful friendship, but the evidence of a romantic or sexual element is equivocal. Commentators from the classical period to today have tended to interpret the relationship through the lens of their own cultures. Thus, in fifth-century Athens the relationship was commonly interpreted as pederastic, since pederasty was an accepted part of Athenian society. Contemporary readers are more likely to interpret the two heroes either as non-sexual "war buddies" or as an egalitarian homosexual couple.

Translations into English

The Iliad has been translated into English for centuries. George Chapman did a translation in the 16th century which John Keats praised in his sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and Alexander Pope did another one in rhymed pentameter.

There are four widely read modern English translations. Richmond Lattimore provides a translation that attempts to reproduce, line for line, the rhythm of the original poem. Robert Fagles emphasizes contemporary English phrasing while maintaining faithfulness to the Greek. The translations of Stanley Lombardo and Robert Fitzgerald are known for their attention to Homer's imagery. Lombardo's translation is generally the one most often recommended by classics scholars because of its faithfulness to the Greek and its modern vernacular style.

The Iliad in subsequent arts and literature

Subjects from the Trojan War were a favourite among ancient Greek dramatists. Aeschylus' trilogy Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides follow the story of Agamemnon following his return from the war.

A loose film adaptation of the Iliad, Troy, was released in 2004, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles, Orlando Bloom as Paris, Eric Bana as Hector, Sean Bean as Odysseus and Brian Cox as Agamemnon. It was directed by German-born Wolfgang Petersen. Despite its popularity — largely a result of a huge marketing campaign by the studio — the film was a critical flop in the U.S., though not internationally. Several critics voted it the worst film of 2004. In addition, it only loosely resembles the Homeric version as it was presented as if it were history instead of mythology. The supernatural elements of the story were deliberately expunged, except for one scene that included Achilles' sea nymph mother, Thetis (although her supernatural nature is never specifically stated).

An epic science fiction adaptation/tribute by acclaimed author Dan Simmons titled Ilium was released in 2003. The novel received a Locus Award for best science fiction novel of 2003.

English translations

References

  • Budimir, Milan (1940). On the Iliad and Its Poet.
  • Mueller, Martin (1984). The Iliad. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0048000272.
  • Nagy, Gregory (1979). The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801823889.
  • Seaford, Richard (1994). Reciprocity and Ritual. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198150369.
  • West, Martin (1997). The East Face of Helicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198152213.
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