The Iliad
750 BC
The Iliad
750 BC
Translated by Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Earl of Derby
The Iliad opens in the ninth year of the Trojan War, when the greatest warrior of the Greek army refuses to fight. Achilles, prince of the Myrmidons, has been insulted by Agamemnon, the king who commands all Greek forces. His prize, the captive Briseis, has been taken from him, and in his rage, Achilles withdraws. Without him, the Greeks begin to lose. Trojans surge forward under Hector, prince of Troy, pushing the invaders back to their ships. Fire and blood fill the shores. Friends die. And Achilles, though untouched, must watch his people perish while he waits for the honor he is owed. But this is not merely a story of war. It is a story of what war costs. The gods watch and scheme. Patroclus, Achilles' beloved companion, dons his armor and falls. When Achilles returns to battle, he is unstoppable, yet the peace he brings his people comes at a price even he cannot bear. Homer does not flinch from the carnage, yet he shows us the humanity beneath the bronze: Hector's love for his wife and son, Priam's grief, the simple dignity of burying the dead. This is the original war epic, the ancestor of every conflict narrative ever written. It asks what glory costs and whether any honor can justify the price. For readers who want literature that does not look away, that confronts both the heroism and the horror, The Iliad remains the benchmark after three thousand years.
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“…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible”
— Homer
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.””
— Homer
“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.””
— Homer
“Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.””
— Homer
“Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.””
— Homer
“We men are wretched things.””
— Homer
“Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.””
— Homer
“Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall””
— Homer
“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.””
— Homer
