Reading Order
The IliadHomeric Epics Reading Order
Homer's Iliad (c. 8th century BCE) is the foundational epic of Western literature — a poem about approximately 52 days in the tenth year of the Trojan War, centered on the wrath of the Greek hero Achilles after he is dishonored by the commander Agamemnon, culminating in the death of Hector, Troy's greatest defender. The Iliad explores war's cost, the nature of heroic glory, and the impossibility of mourning across enemy lines.
Where to start
The Iliad
Complete The Iliad Book List
- 1Buy
The Iliad
Homer (tr. Caroline Alexander)·2015·Caroline Alexander's 2015 translation is widely recommended for its accuracy and its success in rendering Homer's oral-formulaic verse into English prose that preserves the epithets ('swift-footed Achilles,' 'rosy-fingered dawn') without making them feel mechanical. Robert Fagles's 1990 translation is also excellent and more dramatic in energy. - 2Buy
The Odyssey
Homer (tr. Emily Wilson)·2017·Homer's other epic — Odysseus's ten-year journey home from Troy; the natural companion to the Iliad and among the most rewarding pairings in all of literature: the Iliad is about communal fate, glory, and the cost of war; the Odyssey is about the individual journey home and the question of what survives. - 3Buy
The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller·2011·Miller's retelling of the Iliad as a love story between Achilles and Patroclus, narrated by Patroclus — one of the finest contemporary retellings of classical material, emotionally devastating and historically meticulous; begins before the Trojan War and ends with the events of the Iliad's final books. - 4Buy
The Aeneid
Virgil (tr. Robert Fagles)·2006·Virgil's Latin epic about the Trojan hero Aeneas's journey from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome — begins where the Iliad ends and is explicitly written in dialogue with Homer; the Roman counterpart to the Greek epic tradition that provides the political ideology of empire that the Homeric poems deliberately avoid. - 5Buy
A Rage in Harlem
Chester Himes·1957·Not a classical companion but recommended for readers who find the Iliad's anger (the rage of Achilles is the poem's first word) resonant with contemporary experience — Himes's crime fiction also centers on a protagonist's anger and the violence it generates in a world where he has been dishonored. - 6Buy
The Silence of the Girls
Pat Barker·2018·Barker's retelling of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis — the captive Trojan woman whose removal from Achilles's tent by Agamemnon triggers his wrath; Barker restores the women of the Iliad to their full human complexity and makes visible the violence against non-combatants that Homer narrates but does not center. - 7Buy
Achilles
Elizabeth Cook·2001·A short, lyrical novel about Achilles — his relationship with Patroclus, his awareness of his own fate (to die young and famous, rather than long and forgotten), and his presence in the classical tradition after the Iliad; written with the compression of a prose poem and among the most beautiful retellings of the myth.
The Iliad — Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Iliad cover the entire Trojan War?
No — the Iliad covers approximately 52 days near the end of the ten-year Trojan War. It begins with Achilles's quarrel with Agamemnon (in the tenth year) and ends with the funeral of Hector; the war continues after the poem ends, and the fall of Troy itself (including the Trojan Horse) is not narrated in the Iliad. The legendary story of Paris abducting Helen, the gathering of the Greek fleet, and nine years of inconclusive warfare are all before the poem begins. The Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy are narrated in Virgil's Aeneid (Book 2) and in the lost cyclic epics (the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis) that survive only in summaries.
Who is Achilles and why is his wrath important?
Achilles is the greatest Greek warrior — son of the human king Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis, who dipped him in the river Styx to make him invulnerable (leaving only his heel vulnerable, though this is not the Iliad's story — it is told in later sources). His wrath ('menis') is the poem's first word and its organizing subject: Achilles withdraws from battle after Agamemnon takes his captive Briseis, and his absence allows the Trojans to push the Greeks back to their ships. He returns to battle after his companion Patroclus is killed by Hector; he kills Hector and in his grief and rage drags Hector's body around the walls of Troy for days. The poem ends when Achilles, moved by the old king Priam's appeal to his own father's grief, returns Hector's body for burial. The wrath of Achilles is the Iliad's meditation on how anger destroys both the enemy and the one who is angry.
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