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There is only one character in the poem who seems able to look at the situation with the same clarity and detachment as the poet: Helen, daughter of Zeus. This is how Homer irst introduces the beautiful woman who caused the Trojan War. While her two husbands, Menelaus and Paris, prepare to face each other in single combat, the goddess Iris goes to look for her 3.

Like the poet, Helen weaves a picture of the Trojan War. She even sees herself as the subject of future poetry 6. At that point the poet tells us that they died in Lacedaemon, before the Trojan War had even started.

The poet often draws attention to the ignorance of his own charac- ters. Most famously, he describes Andromache making arrangements for Hector to have a bath, when he is already dead Even when the poet does not ofer explicit comments of this kind, it is clear that he and his audience share an understanding that the characters inside the poem do not have. This understanding stems, in part, from a shared knowledge of the epic tradition: audiences of all times always knew that Troy was destined to fall, and that the Achaeans would sufer greatly on their return home.

The poem describes only a handful of days towards the end of the Trojan War: it does not include the fall of Troy, or even the death of Achilles. By leaving those events outside the remit of his narrative, the poet invites us to focus on his chosen theme. Soon after the proem, the same word occurs again: at 1. His asks his mother, the goddess Thetis, to enlist the help of Zeus, and the supreme god agrees to his plan: the Achaeans will perish as long as Achilles refuses to ight.

The problem is that Achilles is mortal: the fact that he must die complicates his relationship to Agamemnon, and ultimately compromises his plan. The women, cities, tripods, and other goods that Agamemnon promises to Achilles in book 9 betoken a transferral of honour on a quite unprecedented scale.

I do not think that anything is of equal worth to my life, not even all the wealth they say that Ilium, that well-populated city, once possessed in time of peace before the sons of the Achaeans came, nor all the wealth that the stone threshold of the archer Phoebus Apollo guards inside his temple in rocky Pytho. His friend returns with terrible news, and asks Achilles to let him, at least, return to the battle- ield and lend his support.

Baltimore, At that point Achilles enters the battleield again, not because his atti- tude to Agamemnon has changed several details in the narrative sug- gest that it has not , but because revenge now matters to him more than life itself. This is what he says to the other gods at Achilles has killed pity, and there is no respect in him, respect that both greatly harms and also beneits men. Any man, I suppose, is likely to have lost someone even dearer to him than this, a brother born of the same mother, or even a son, but in the end he gives up his weeping and lamentation, because the Fates have placed in men a heart that endures; but this Achilles irst robs glorious Hector of his life and then ties him behind his chariot and drags him round the burial-mound of his dear companion.

Yet he should know that there is nothing ine or good about this; let him beware of our anger, great man though he is, because in his fury he is outraging mute earth. It may be that his sufering is not as great as that of a man who loses a brother, or a son. Later in book 24 Achilles comes precisely to that realization—when he sees Priam, and thinks about the imminent bereavement of his own father.

All this suggests that Achilles may not be so special after all. His anger is as devastating as that of the gods, but his confrontation with death is something we all recognize. There are, in fact, many paral- lels for the story of Achilles—some are embedded in the poem itself, and others belong to broader ancient traditions of poetry.

Here too a young man initially opts out, rejecting the social obligations placed upon him, but eventually must recognize the bonds of afection that link him to others, and which ultimately lead him to face death. In the early Greek tra- dition other narratives echoed that of Achilles. For example, the early epic poem Aethiopis, now largely lost, told the story of Memnon, king of the Ethiopians. Memnon too was the son of a goddess, Dawn, and of a mortal man, Tithonus—and he too had to die.

This emerges with special clarity when we compare the Iliad with the Epic of Gilgamesh. This extraordinary Babylonian poem resembles the Iliad not just in some striking details, but in overall conception. When his closest friend Enkidu dies, he resolves to go in search of eternal life. He undertakes a long and diicult journey to meet Utnapishtim, the survivor of a great lood and the only man who has been granted immortality. When the gods created mankind, they appointed death for mankind, kept eternal life in their own hands.

So, Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full, day and night enjoy yourself in every way, every day arrange for pleasures. Day and night, dance and play, wear fresh clothes. Keep your head washed, bathe in water, appreciate the child who holds your hand, let your wife enjoy herself in your lap.

He continues to travel until he inds Utnapishtim—and it is only at that 21 On the parallels between Greek and Near Eastern Epic, see M. Oxford, , For the Epic of Gilgamesh, see A. In the Standard Babylonian version, Utnapishtim tells him that he will never ind the secret of eternal life, and then sends him home with a fresh set of clothes. When Patroclus dies, he deiles himself. He refuses to eat, and cannot sleep He tossed and turned, thinking with longing of Patroclus, of his manhood and his valiant strength, of all that he had accomplished with him and the trials he had endured, of wars of men undergone and the arduous crossing of seas.

As he called all this to mind he let fall huge tears, lying at one time on his side and at another on his back, and then again on his face; then he would rise to his feet. This is what Thetis says at When Priam enters his hut, he is eating. Priam, by contrast, is still feeling the rawest pain at the loss of Hector: he has just covered himself in dung—and has not eaten or slept since the death of his son. Eventually, Achilles persuades him to eat, drink, and sleep, telling him the story of Niobe—a mythical mother who lost her twelve children and yet managed accord- ing to Achilles to have a meal after that.

That truth emerges clearly after Achilles and Priam have eaten together After their deilement, hunger, thirst, and sheer exhaustion, these two men share a meal and, in the calm that fol- lows, reach beyond their own personal sufering. Their pleasure is an airmation of life in the face of death.

Troy , and the poem lives up to that description. The irst books recapitulate the origins and early stages of the Trojan War. The Catalogue of Ships in book 2 acts as a reminder of the expedition; book 3 introduces Helen and her two husbands; book 4 dramatizes how a private quarrel over a woman can become a war; in book 5 the ighting escalates; and book 6 takes us into the city of Troy.

The narrative now looks forward to the time when the Achaeans will capture the city: it anticipates the end of the poem, and of the war itself. The bulk of the Iliad is devoted to the ighting on the battleield. It describes only a few days of war, but the sheer scale of the narrative, and its relentless succession of deaths, come to represent the whole war.

Descriptions of the physical impact of war are matched by an unlinch- ing psychological account of those who ight in it. Homer shows exactly what it takes to step forward in the irst line of battle, towards the spear of the enemy. He describes the adrenaline, the social conditioning, the self-delusion required.

The Iliad never tires of showing that tableau. Just like Weil, women inside the Iliad make powerful statements against violence—and even against the courage of their own men. He then tries to console her in the only way he knows: by imagining more wars.

He picks up his baby son and prays that he may be stronger than him and, one day, bring home the spoils of the enemy, so that his mother may rejoice 6. Already in antiquity it was part of a wider tradition of poetry, which found its inspiration in the ruins of a Bronze Age city, well visible on the coast of Asia Minor.

Longley, The Ghost Orchid London, , Windle and R. Ireland Oxford, For example, when Hector picks up his baby and dandles him in his arms, his gesture recalls that of an enemy soldier who will soon pick up the little boy— and throw him of the walls of Troy. Other early poems described the death of Astyanax in a manner that clearly recalled his last meeting with his father. Some stories about the fall of Troy were known to the poet of the Iliad and his earliest audiences; others were inspired by it.

As a result, the Iliad became increasingly more allusive and complex in the course of time. In fact, there have been innumerable Trojan wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic, each representing a fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the authorial intent. Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors. Whether we must imagine wars and more wars, like Hector when he prays for his son, or whether there can per- haps be peace—and even a poetics of peace.

Hector runs past the place where the Trojan women used to wash their clothes before the war Andromache wishes Hector had died in his own bed Athena delects an arrow like a mother brushing away a ly from her sleeping baby 4.

On the shield of Achilles—which is a representation of the whole world—there is a city at war, but there is also a city at peace. There is a wedding, and the vintage, and a row of boys and girls dancing to music These images are precious, because they are so very rare. Haubold, Homer.

It was released in , only two years before the fall of the Berlin wall. Those who believe that Homer created a master copy of the Iliad in the late eighth or early seventh century bce privilege readings that look old, ind it easier to justify interventions that aim at consistency, and tend to emend or expunge passages or features that seem recent relative to other aspects of the text.

Those who believe that the Iliad may stem from a more drawn-out process of textual ixation are prepared to allow for a less consistent and early- sounding text. The present translation is based on the critical edition by H. One of its advantages, for the purposes of this translation, is that it includes in square brackets passages that circulated in antiquity, but which are not transmitted, or only weakly attested, in the medieval manu- scripts.

These passages are not considered authentic by the editor, but tell us something about the early textual history of the Iliad: they have been included in this translation—which helpfully follows the line numeration of the original text—and left in square brackets. The Explanatory Notes include succinct book summaries: they are meant to help the reader appreciate the overall design and plot of the poem, and locate speciic episodes in it.

The notes clarify geo- graphical and mythical references, ofer brief accounts of ancient ritu- als and other practices to which the poem alludes, draw attention to echoes, allusions, and correspondences within the poem, and com- ment on some key passages and additional lines.

They occasionally draw from ancient explanations and commentaries. Two maps ofer minimal information on the geography of Greece and Asia Minor, and facilitate an appreciation of the Catalogue of Ships and the Catalogue of the Trojans and their Allies in the second book of the Iliad.

Latacz and A. Bierl, Homers Ilias. Gesamtkommentar Munich and Leipzig, — ; this commentary is now the standard work of reference for any rigorous engagement with the Iliad.

A short bibliog- raphy ofers suggestions for further reading in English. It does not claim to be poetry: my aim has been to use a straightforward English register and to keep closely to the Greek, allowing Homer to speak for himself—for example, in the use of repeated epithets and descriptions of recurrent scenes. I have tried to avoid importing alien imagery, and have preserved variations in sentence length.

I have beneited greatly from the criticism and encouragement of friends in preparing this version. As always, my editor Judith Luna has been a constant support. Any surviving inaccuracies and infelicities are entirely my own. Commentaries Jones, P. Kirk, G. Cambridge, — Postlethwaite, N.

Willcock, M. Companions to Homer Cairns, D. Finkelberg, M. Oxford, Fowler, R. Jong, I. London, Morris, I. Stubbings, F. Critical Studies Adkins, A. Bakker, E. Boedeker, D. Burgess, J. Cassio, A. Clarke, M. Edwards, M. Finley, M. Foley, J. Ford, A. Graziosi, B.

Haubold, J. Janko, R. Jones, P. Wright and P. Jones Oxford, Kelly, A. Latacz, J. Holoka Ann Arbor, Mich. Lord, A. Mitchell and G. Nagy Cambridge, Mass. Lynn-George, M. Mackie, H. Macleod, C. Martin, R. Mueller, M. Nagy, G. Parry, M. Parry Oxford, Pulleyn, S.

Pucci, P. Redield, J. Chicago, Schein, S. Scodel, R. Scully, S. Snodgrass, A. Taplin, O. Wees, H. Wilson, D. Winkler, M. Zanker, G. Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, trans. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. This website uses cookies to improve your experience.

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