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Mythographia

    The Iliad

    The Iliad is an epic poem of about 15,700 lines, attributed to Homer and composed around the eighth century BCE from a much older oral tradition. It does not tell the story of the Trojan War. It covers roughly fifty-one days in the war's tenth year, beginning with Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon and ending with Hector's funeral.

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    About the Work

    Most of what a reader assumes is in the Iliad is not. The wooden horse is not in it, Troy does not fall in it, Achilles does not die in it, and the arrow to his heel appears nowhere in its 15,700 lines. The poem opens in the tenth year of the siege and closes with the burial of Hector, and everything outside that window comes from other poems, most of them lost.

    That gap matters more here than it might elsewhere. When this site says a detail is not in Homer, it usually means it is not in these lines, and the alternative source is nearly always later, often Roman, and sometimes a thousand years later. Knowing what the earliest surviving text does and does not contain is what makes the rest of the tradition legible as a tradition rather than as one story with variants.

    The poem is also the closest thing the Greek world had to a shared scripture. Its gods argue, take sides, are wounded and are laughed at, and the account of the Olympians that later writers inherited is substantially the one this poem gave them.

    How It Is Referenced

    Twenty-four books, lettered with the Greek alphabet in antiquity and numbered 1 to 24 since. A reference is given as book and line: 15.187-193 means book 15, lines 187 to 193. Line numbers follow the Greek text, so an English translation's lines will not align exactly with the numbering, and a translator who prints line numbers in the margin is numbering the Greek rather than their own verse.

    Where to Read It

    Open translations only. A page about a source that does not lead to the source is a page about a bibliography entry.

    • A. T. Murray (1924) - The edition every Iliad citation on this site resolves against, line-addressable on Perseus.
    • Samuel Butler (1898) - Prose rather than verse, and easier to read straight through than to cite from.

    Cited By (58)

    Every page here names a passage of this work behind one of its claims. The list is read from those citations, not kept separately.

    Character

    Name

    Term

    Comparison

    Mythology

    Topic

    Does the Iliad tell the story of the Trojan War?

    No, and this is the most common thing readers get wrong about it. The poem covers about fifty-one days in the war's tenth year. It opens with Achilles withdrawing from the fighting after a quarrel with Agamemnon and it ends with the funeral of Hector. The judgement of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the wooden horse and the sack of the city are all outside it.

    Homer, Iliad 1.1-7

    Is Achilles' heel in the Iliad?

    No. Achilles is not invulnerable in the Iliad at all: he is a mortal who expects to die at Troy and says so. The dipping in the Styx and the untouched heel are later tradition, and the earliest full account of them is Roman, in Statius, over a thousand years after the poem was composed. The Iliad does not even narrate his death.

    Homer, Iliad 9.410-416

    How are Iliad line numbers cited?

    Book and line, separated by a full stop: 15.187-193 is book 15, lines 187 to 193. The numbers count lines of the Greek, not of any translation, which is why an English version's line 187 may sit a little above or below the marked number. Every Iliad citation on this site is checked against the Greek numbering on Perseus rather than against a translator's page.

    Who wrote the Iliad?

    The attribution to Homer is ancient and the identification is not. Nothing reliable is known about a poet of that name, and the poem carries the marks of a long oral tradition: formulaic epithets, repeated line-blocks, and a dialect mixture no single speaker ever spoke. Whether one composer shaped the inherited material into this poem is a genuinely open question and has been since antiquity.

    Related Terms

    Sources

    Primary sources
    • Homer, Iliad 1.1-7
    • Homer, Iliad 9.410-416
    Further reading
    • M. L. West, The Making of the Iliad (2011)
    • Gregory Nagy, Homeric Questions (1996)