The Iliad
750 BC
The Iliad opens with a single word - wrath - and in that syllable lies the seed of ten thousand deaths. When Agamemnon, commander of the Greek forces, refuses to release the captive daughter of a priest, Apollo unleashes a plague upon the army. Achilles, the Greeks' mightiest warrior, is then humiliated when Agamemnon claims his own captive, Briseis, as compensation. Achilles withdraws from battle and prays to his goddess mother Thetis: let the Trojans prevail until the Greeks remember who truly holds their fate in his hands. What follows is not merely a tale of war. It is an anatomy of grief, honor, and the terrible clarity that comes when men face their own mortality. Hector, the Trojan prince, knows his city will fall yet fights anyway. Achilles, maddened by the death of his companion Patroclus, kills Hector and drags his body behind his chariot - until King Priam himself comes in the night to ransom his son's corpse, and the warrior remembers what it means to be human. This is the story of the Iliad: that glory is fleeting, that the gods are indifferent, and that even in destruction, there is something inextinguishable in the human heart.
Editions
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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
