Recommendations
Books Like The Iliad
Best books to read after The Iliad by Homer
Readers who love The Iliad by Homer are drawn to its combination of the founding epic of Western literature, the wrath of Achilles, the tragedy of Hector and Priam, and the pitiless clarity with which Homer shows war's cost to both sides. They want works that deal with the epic tradition, the warrior code, the costs of heroic values, and the long tradition of writers who have returned to Troy to ask Homer's questions again.
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The Odyssey
by Homer
Homer's second epic, the immediate continuation — Odysseus's ten-year journey home from the war gives us the aftermath and the cost to those who survived; the two poems together constitute Homer's complete vision of what the Trojan War meant.
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The Aeneid
by Virgil
The direct Latin heir — Virgil picks up where Homer ended, following Aeneas from the ruins of Troy to the founding of Rome; the Aeneid is the essential second chapter in the Trojan myth cycle and the work that transmitted Homer's epic conventions to European literature.
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The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
The most celebrated modern retelling of the Iliad — Miller tells the story from Patroclus's perspective and centers the love between Achilles and Patroclus, making explicit what Homer leaves implicit; the most emotionally direct engagement with the poem's central relationship in contemporary fiction.
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Circe
by Madeline Miller
Miller's companion novel retelling the myth world from Circe's perspective — while set in the Odyssey's world, Circe draws equally on the Iliad's cast of characters, and Miller's approach to reimagining the Greek epic world is consistent across both novels.
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A Thousand Ships
by Natalie Haynes
A retelling of the Trojan War from the women's perspectives — Haynes gives voice to the women Homer marginalizes: Hecuba, Andromache, Penelope, the Trojan women carried off as slaves; the most direct feminist counter-reading of the Iliad in recent fiction.
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The Silence of the Girls
by Pat Barker
Barker's retelling of the Iliad from Briseis's perspective — the enslaved woman at the centre of Achilles and Agamemnon's quarrel narrates the war she has no power over; the novel that most directly challenges the heroic frame by centering the cost to those the epic ignores.
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Omeros
by Derek Walcott
The postcolonial epic retelling Homer in the Caribbean — Walcott's verse novel rewrites the Iliad with St. Lucian fishermen as its heroes, mapping the Homer story onto the wounds of colonial history; the most ambitious literary engagement with Homer in the twentieth century.
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The Oresteia
by Aeschylus
Aeschylus's tragic trilogy dramatizing the aftermath of the Trojan War — Agamemnon's murder by Clytemnestra, Orestes's revenge, and the founding of Athenian justice; the essential dramatic sequel to the world of the Iliad and the most important work of Greek tragedy.
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