The Iliad

Homer

Transl. Robert
Fagles
The Iliad SuperSummary 1

Table of Contents

S UM M A RY 3

C H A P TER S UM M A RIES & A N A LYS ES 5

Books 1-4 5
Books 5-8 12
Books 9-12 20
Books 13-16 27
Books 17-20 34
Books 21-24 40

C H A RA C TER A N A LYS IS 49

Achilles 49
Hector 49
Helen 50

TH EM ES 51

Journey of the Hero 51

Fragility of Human Life and Creations 52
Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization 53

S YM B O LS & M O TIFS 55

Ilus’s Tomb 55
Zeus’s Scales 55
Cyclicality 56
Andromache’s Headdress 56

IM P O RTA N T Q UO TES 58

ES S A Y TO P IC S 72

TEA C H IN G G UID E 74

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Books 1-4 77
Books 5-8 78
Books 9-12 79
Books 13-16 79
Books 17-20 80
Books 21-24 80

IN TRO DUC TIO N 95

B EFO RE REA D IN G 97

DURIN G REA D IN G 100

Books 1-4 100

Books 5-8 101
Books 9-12 101
Books 13-16 102
Books 17-20 102
Books 21-24 103

A FTER REA D IN G 108

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Summary
The Iliad is a classic ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer, a name believed to refer to
a tradition of epic hexameter verse rather than an individual composer. When, how, and by
whom the poem was composed continues to be debated. Scholars generally believe the
poem was composed and passed on orally, possibly over hundreds of years, before it was
written down at some point during the mid-8th century BC (approximately when the Greek
alphabet was adapted) and later fixed for oral performance in Athens during the 6th century
BC.

This study guide refers to the 1990 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition translated by Robert
Fagles. The Academy of American Poets awarded Fagles the Harold Morton Landon
Translation Award for this work in 1991. Fagles explains in his translator’s note that he
sought a middle ground between the oral performance features that characterize Homer (e.g.,
repetition and formulae) and the modern English reader’s expectations for variety. His is not a
line-by-line translation but what he calls a “modern English Homer” (x). Chapter divisions exist
in the source text, but the chapter titles are Fagles’s invention.

Plot Summary

The Achaeans and Trojans have been fighting the Trojan War for 10 years. The war was
spurred when Paris of Troy fell in love with and abducted Helen, wife of King Menelaus of
Sparta, who is the younger brother of the Achaean commander Agamemnon. The poem’s
inciting event is a quarrel between Agamemnon and his best warrior Achilles. Its events
explore themes around impermanence of human life and creations, poetry as a medium of
immortalization, and the hero’s journey.

Following a raid on a nearby community, Agamemnon takes Chryseis, daughter of Chryses,

priest of Apollo, as his prize. He rudely rejects her father’s substantial ransom for her return,
despite his fellow leaders’ opposition. Apollo devastates the Achaeans with a plague,
prompting Achilles to call a council in which he questions Agamemnon’s leadership. In
retaliation, Agamemnon confiscates Achilles’s prize, Briseis, on the grounds that she will
replace Chryseis, who Agamemnon grudgingly returns to her father.

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Enraged, Achilles withdraws himself and his troops from battle and entreats to his mother,
the sea goddess Thetis who once saved Zeus during an Olympian rebellion, to appeal to Zeus
on behalf of his honor. Zeus cannot refuse her offer, though he knows it will cause strife with
his wife Hera, who supports the Achaeans. He promises Thetis that he will make the
Achaeans feel the loss of their best warrior. The tide of battle turns in favor of the Trojans,
despite the meddling of Athena, Poseidon, and Hera on behalf of the Achaeans. As the
situation grows increasingly desperate, Agamemnon sends an embassy to Achilles with the
promise of many gifts, including the return of Briseis, to entreat him to return to battle.
Achilles refuses, saying that no amount of treasure can compensate for the loss of his life. If
he returns to battle, he will die, according to a prophecy told him by Thetis. He announces that
he will only return if the Trojans directly threaten his ships.

Realizing that he has Zeus’s approval and Apollo and Ares’s assistance, Hector, Troy’s prince
and mightiest warrior, grows increasingly confident. Apollo helps him break through the
protective wall the Achaeans built around their camp. The Achaean leaders fight fiercely, but
Hector sets one of their ships on fire. Worried for the Achaeans, Achilles’s companion
Patroclus convinces Achilles to allow him to wear his armor into battle. If the Trojans think
Achilles has returned to battle, they will retreat. Still too angry to return himself, Achilles
agrees but warns Patroclus to return immediately after securing the ships and not to press on
to Troy’s gates. Caught up in the rush of battle, Patroclus forgets his advice and is killed by
Apollo and Hector.

Achilles’s grief fuses with his rage, and he returns to battle to exact revenge by killing Hector.
He succeeds, with Athena’s assistance, then drags Hector’s corpse around the city,
prompting Hector’s wife Andromache to collapse in grief, then lead Troy’s women in choral
dirges. Achilles hosts funeral games for Patroclus, magnanimously distributing prizes to the
participants, but his grief and rage are not satisfied. He continues dragging Hector’s corpse
behind his chariot, infuriating the gods, who love and respect Hector. Thetis is sent to order
Achilles to accept a ransom from Priam, Hector’s father. Priam goes to Achilles, recovers his
son’s body, and brings it back to Troy. Hector’s wife, mother, and Helen each lead a lament for
Hector. The poem ends with his funeral.

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Books 1-4

Book 1 Summary: “The Rage of Achilles”

The poet invokes the Muse to sing about the rage of Achilles, the Achaeans’ best warrior,
against Agamemnon, leader of the Achaean expedition to Troy.

Chryses, a priest of Apollo, arrives at the Achaean camp with a ransom for his daughter
Chryseis, who was captured in a raid and given as a prize to Agamemnon. He refuses to give
her up, against the other Achaean leaders’ wishes. Frightened by Agamemnon’s violent
threats, Chryses withdraws but calls on Apollo to punish the Achaeans. Apollo agrees,
sending a plague that ravages the armies.

After 10 days, Achilles calls an assembly to propose consulting a seer. Under Achilles’s
protection, Calchas reveals that Apollo sent the plague to punish the Achaeans for
disrespecting Chryses; it will continue until his daughter is returned. Agamemnon becomes
angry, claiming to prefer Chryseis to his own wife, but agrees to return her if he is
compensated with a replacement prize. Achilles counters that it would be a disgrace to
confiscate another warrior’s prize. Agamemnon accuses Achilles of trying to cheat him, and
Achilles accuses Agamemnon of hoarding the best prizes for himself while Achilles fights “to
exhaustion” on Agamemnon’s behalf (83). He threatens to return home to Phthia with his
men, the Myrmidons. Agamemnon taunts him to leave and vows to take Briseis, Achilles’s
prize, as a reminder of who is in charge and a warning for anyone who threatens his authority.

Achilles considers killing Agamemnon, but Hera sends Athena to restrain him. Achilles defers
to her but mocks Agamemnon for cowardice and warns that he will regret the day he
disrespected Achilles, “the best of the Achaeans” (85). Nester, an older leader from Pylos,
tries to make peace, urging Agamemnon to leave Briseis with Achilles and Achilles to respect
Agamemnon’s authority as expedition leader. Agamemnon concedes that Nestor’s advice is
sound but complains that Achilles has no right to critique him. Achilles vows never to yield to
Agamemnon.

Odysseus leads a contingent to return Chryseis and offer a sacrifice to Apollo, who ends the
plague. Meanwhile, Agamemnon sends his heralds to seize Briseis from Achilles. He

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reiterates his warning that the Achaeans cannot capture Troy without him. After the heralds
take Briseis, Achilles goes to the beach and prays to his mother, the sea goddess Thetis. She
comes to comfort him, and he asks her to appeal to Zeus on his behalf. Zeus owes her a favor
since she saved him when Hera, Poseidon, and Athena plotted to overthrow him. Aware this
will anger his wife Hera, who favors the Achaeans, Zeus reluctantly agrees. Hera secretly
witnesses their pact.

When Zeus arrives at the gods’ assembly, all rise in his presence, but Hera accuses him of
plotting behind her back. He warns her that she will only harm herself if she estranges him,
since no one can protect her from his wrath. Hera, along with the other immortals, is afraid.
Hephaestus attempts to smooth things over, saying that gods should not fight over mortals
and urging Hera to defer to Zeus’s greater power. Hera smiles, and the feast proceeds with
food and song, until the gods retire to their beds.

Book 2 Summary: “The Great Gathering of Armies”

Zeus sends a dream to deceive Agamemnon into believing he and the Achaeans are on the
verge of conquering Troy. Calling an assembly with Achaean leaders, Agamemnon reveals his
dream but decides, “according to time-honored custom,” to test the men (102). He announces
that Zeus has told him the Achaeans will never take Troy, and the alarmed men immediately
rush for their ships. Concerned, Hera sends Athena to halt their retreat. She enlists Odysseus,
who is also distressed by the men’s flight. He grabs Agamemnon’s scepter and runs among
the men, urging rulers not to flee since Agamemnon’s warning was merely a test and beating
“common” soldiers with the scepter (106).

One soldier, Thersites—described as bandy-legged with a club foot and known for having
insulted Achilles and Odysseus—accuses Agamemnon of greed. His taunts offend the other
Achaeans, who attempt to shout him down. Odysseus steps in, calling his behavior
outrageous and inappropriate for a man of his status. He hits Thersites with the scepter,
provoking laughter among the assembled troops, and notes with satisfaction that Thersites
has learned not to “attack the kings with insults” (108). After silencing the crowd, Odysseus
concedes that the Achaeans are weary, but it would be a disgrace to return home empty-
handed; he urges the men to stay the course until they capture Troy. The men cheer in
approval. Nestor further rouses them. Agamemnon praises Nestor and expresses regret for
fighting with Achilles, since Troy would fall if only the two great men could “think as one”
(112).

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The men return to their ships to eat and sacrifice “to one or another deathless god” (112).
Agamemnon prays to Zeus, who accepts his sacrifice but is not yet ready to grant his prayer
to sack Troy. After a feast, Nestor invites Agamemnon to review the troops before they go to
battle. The poet asks the Muse to reveal who the Achaean leaders are and where they are
from. As the armies move forward, Zeus sends Iris to warn the Trojans that the Achaeans are
approaching and to prepare his allied armies for battle. As the Trojans surge out of the city,
the poet catalogues the Trojan leaders and allies.

Book 3 Summary: “Helen Reviews the Champions”

As the Achaean and Trojan armies march toward each other, Paris brashly offers to fight the
Achaeans’ best warrior. When Menelaus, king of Sparta and Agamemnon’s younger brother,
eagerly steps forward for revenge, Paris retreats in fear. Hector chastises him, calling his
beauty a useless gift from Aphrodite since he has no courage and is a curse to his family and
city. Paris accepts the criticism, though he chides his brother not to dishonor “the gifts of the
gods” (130). Paris tells Hector that, to prevent further bloodshed, he will fight Menelaus one-
on-one for Helen and her treasure. Whatever the outcome, both armies must agree to part in
peace and friendship. Hector delivers Paris’s offer to the Achaeans, and Menelaus accepts,
asking that King Priam of Troy oversee sacrifices and oaths to Zeus, since young men’s
minds “are always flighty” but old men “see the days behind, the days ahead” (132).

Bringing Helen news of the impending duel, Iris finds her weaving images of the Trojans’ and
Argives’ “endless bloody struggles” into a robe (132). Overwhelmed by longing for her old
home and family, Helen tearfully rushes to the Scaean Gates to watch the duel. Priam and
Trojan elders who are past their fighting days but still “eloquent speakers” have already
gathered (133). When they see Helen, they marvel at her “Beauty, terrible beauty” and do not
blame men for fighting over her (133). Saying he does not blame her but the gods, Priam
kindly calls her to him and asks her to tell him who the Achaean leaders are. Lamenting that
she wishes she had died rather than followed Paris to Troy, she points out Agamemnon,
Menelaus, Odysseus “the great tactician,” Ajax, and Idomeneus (133). She wonders why her
brothers Castor and Polydeuces are not there, not realizing that they died at home before the
expedition.

Priam goes out to the plain to oversee the oaths and sacrifices. As expedition leader,
Agamemnon affirms the terms of the duel with sacrifices and prayers to Zeus, who hears but
opts not to grant them. Expecting Paris to lose, Priam returns to the city rather than watch.

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Menelaus and Paris arm themselves and take their first strikes. When Menelaus gains the
upper hand, Aphrodite wraps Paris in mist and removes him to his bedroom, then visits Helen
disguised as a beloved elderly weaver. Recognizing Aphrodite through the disguise, Helen
bitterly asks whether Aphrodite plans to send her to some other favored mortal and refuses to
go to Paris, telling Aphrodite to go herself, “until he makes you his wedded wife—that or his
slave” (142). Enraged, Aphrodite threatens to make Helen hated by both sides until she
fearfully complies.

Reunited with Paris, Helen taunts him, saying she wishes she had died before following him to
Troy and calling him a coward who would lose to Menelaus in a fair fight. Paris brushes her
off, blaming Athena for giving Menelaus the upper hand and saying he will get Menelaus next
time. While Helen and Paris make love, Menelaus stalks the battlefield searching for Paris. No
Trojan would hide him since they hate “him like death, black death” and blame him for the war
(143). Agamemnon declares Menelaus the victor by default and demands the Trojans
surrender Helen and her treasures and pay damages, to his armies’ roaring approval.

Book 4 Summary: “The Truce Erupts in War”

The gods feast as they “gaz[e] down on Troy,” until Zeus, determined to infuriate Hera,
suggests that the war ended with the aborted duel, angering both Hera and Athena (145).
Athena remains quiet, but Hera lashes out, telling Zeus the gods will never praise him for
disrupting the war that they have invested effort into fueling. Her response enrages Zeus, and
he reminds Hera not to cross him. Troy is his favorite city because its citizens always offer
ample sacrifices. Hera names Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae as her favorites and invites Zeus to
raze them if they anger him. She concedes that Zeus is stronger than her, but she reminds
him that they share the same divine linage and cajoles him to “let us yield to each other now”
(147). Zeus agrees, sending Athena to the Trojan plain “like a shooting star” and terrifying the
amassed troops (148).

Slipping into the Trojan lines, Athena convinces Pandarus to launch an arrow at Menelaus,
then deflects his shot, “quick as a mother / flicks a fly from her sleeping baby” (149). The
arrow draws blood but does not seriously wound Menelaus; nevertheless, Agamemnon is
upset to see his younger brother bleeding and vows revenge on all Trojans for the broken
oath. Menelaus attempts to calm him by showing him that the wound is not serious, but
Agamemnon has Talthybius fetch Machaon, a healer and son of Asclepius, who applies
salves that his father learned from Chiron.

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As battle resumes, Agamemnon moves among the ranks. He praises Idomeneus and his
brave Cretans, admires the efforts of Greater Ajax and Little Ajax, approves of Nestor advising
his men with his lifetime of experience. Agamemnon concedes that age has taken its toll on
Nestor’s body but not his spirit. Finding Menestheus and Odysseus idle, the “call to action”
not yet having reached them, Agamemnon criticizes them, but Odysseus takes offense and
fires back (156). His fighting spirit pleases Agamemnon, who immediately revokes his taunt,
conceding that Odysseus does not need orders. Spotting Diomedes, Agamemnon tells a story
about the young man’s father, a great warrior whose son cannot equal him. Another soldier
objects, but Diomedes rebukes him, telling him that all honor or blame will fall on
Agamemnon, depending on the war’s outcome. It is therefore inappropriate to question how
the leader rouses his troops.

The Achaean ranks move toward battle in silence, like “a heavy surf assault[ing] some roaring
coast,” while the Trojans shout out in different languages, bleating like “crying lambs” being
milked (159). As the armies clash, the poet names both the Achaeans who strike down the
Trojans and the victims themselves, who fall “like a tower” or “a lithe black poplar” (161).
Apollo encourages the Trojans, Athena the Achaeans. The poet notes that no one who walked
among the dead would scorn the men’s efforts, as Trojans and Achaeans lay alongside each
other, “face down in the dust” (163).

Books 1-4 Analysis

The Iliad presents not a self-contained story but a network of stories, a tradition of oral
storytelling, and an ancient value system. In addition to understanding the ancient contexts
alluded to in the source text, readers of the Iliad in English must also negotiate the
translator’s interpretation of that text and its world, which have been mediated by more than
2,000 years of reception. Readers of the Iliad in translation are not reading the communal
voice of “Homer”—a pastiche of different ancient Greek regional and period dialects that make
up the text passed down through history—but an individual interpretation of that voice. How
to navigate these complex issues is vigorously debated. Should the translator write in poetic
verse to create a beautiful, rhythmic poem like source text? Or is it more important to capture
the meaning as closely as possible with line-by-line translation? Fagles opts for a poetic
translation that does not follow the Greek line-by-line but that nevertheless attempts to
capture the mood, vigor, and scope of the original.

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The Iliad begins toward the end of the Trojan War, named for the city at which it is fought,
Troy, also known as Ilium after its legendary founder Ilus. The larger ancient story includes
that the seeds for the war were sown at the wedding of Achilles’s parents: Peleus, a mortal
king of Phthia in Thessaly, and Thetis, a sea goddess who was forced into the marriage.
Angry that she was left off the guest list, Eris, goddess of discord, tossed a golden apple into
the crowd bearing the message “for the most beautiful.” Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each
assumed the apple was meant for them. Zeus was asked to decide, but he deferred to Paris, a
Trojan who had previously judged a difficult contest fairly. Each goddess attempted to sway
Paris with gifts relevant to her domains and powers, and Paris chose Aphrodite’s offer of the
most beautiful woman in the world. This was Helen of Sparta, already the wife of Menelaus,
whose older brother Agamemnon was king of Mycenae.

So many suitors had sought Helen’s hand that her father feared an uprising among those who
were rejected. As a result, they were all compelled to swear an oath to abide by the final
choice and to defend that marriage if threatened. After Paris visited Sparta on a diplomatic
mission and abducted Helen, Menelaus was called to sail to Troy and reclaim Helen and her
treasure. Agamemnon had two reasons for putting the expedition together. The allied forces
were bound by the sacred oath they had sworn; they could not refuse Agamemnon’s request
without violating that oath. In addition, by stealing Helen, Paris violated a sacred law that
guests should not abuse hosts who welcomed them kindly.

This backstory reveals elements of the value system at play in the mythological world of the
Iliad, such as gods and mortals freely intermixing and producing children, god-sworn oaths
serving as the correlate to a legal system, and gods offloading their problems onto mortals.
The phenomena of a goddess, in this case Aphrodite, offering one mortal man’s wife to
another man hints that the gods may float above the systems to which mortals are bound. A
degree of antagonism and competition—such as that among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite—
exists, at times fueled by gods’ relationships with mortals. Zeus recusing himself from
judging their competition speaks to his wish to avoid involving himself in the quarrels of the
gods over whom he rules to maintain the stability of his rule. Paris’s decision to award
Aphrodite the apple may also explain why Hera and Athena harbor animosity for the Trojans.

As is indicated from the beginning of the Iliad, the gods’ laws and oaths are binding; breaking
them promises consequences possibly from the gods but more immediately from the mortals
directly involved. The responsibilities between guests and hosts are an example of these
sacred laws. There exists an implicit understanding that, to establish alliances that protect all

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involved, guests and hosts will not harm or abuse one another. Thus, Paris’s violation of
those laws sparks the Achaean expedition to wage war on Troy. Oaths, such as those
demanded by Menelaus before his duel with Paris, also set expectations and empower
mortals to seek retribution if broken. Thus, Agamemnon can call for battle when Paris
disappears from the duel, even though the agent of his disappearance is the goddess
Aphrodite.

While gods oversee the binding power of oaths, they do not themselves experience the
consequences of broken oaths. Breaking them may incur Zeus’s wrath or not, depending on
his personal whims and desires in the moment. Zeus decides how the war will progress
because he accepts Thetis’s prayer and owes her a favor. Aphrodite whisks Paris away,
causing the war to resume, with no resistance from Zeus or the other Olympians. Gods and
goddesses serve as an inverted mirror for mortals. The gods are subject to the same volatility,
fickleness, conflict, and character flaws that afflict mortals, but they bear none of the
consequences of their behavior, which sometimes renders them comic foils to mortals and
their tragic fates.

From the beginning, the poem draws parallels and contrasts between Zeus, the figurative
(and sometimes literal) father and most powerful of the Olympians, and Agamemnon, the
leader of the allied Achaean armies and elder brother to Menelaus. Agamemnon derives his
sense of authority from organizing the expedition and contributing the largest number of
ships and warriors. His status as older brother also plays an important role: It was Menelaus
who was directly offended, yet he repeatedly defers to his older brother in the poem. As the
narrative unfolds, issues of birth order and the authority granted elders become evident
among both gods and mortals. Seasoned warrior Nestor often tells long stories of his past
exploits to extract wise counsel for the moment. Poseidon complains that he and Zeus have
the same parentage, and their inheritance (the sky, sea, and underworld) was distributed
equally among himself, Zeus, and their brother Hades, yet Zeus assumes the lead position
due to being the oldest.

The conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles opens the poem with a challenge to the
established concept of leadership (status as preeminent), inviting questions about what
makes an effective leader. Agamemnon acts unilaterally when he refuses Chryses’s ransom
for his daughter and when he appropriates Briseis. In both cases, leaders directly under him
object. Outrage is piled upon outrage when Agamemnon seizes Briseis, first because one of
the leader’s roles is to distribute prizes appropriate to the recipient’s status, and second

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because these prizes serve as physical manifestations of that warrior’s honor. As the leader,
all praise or blame will ultimately fall on Agamemnon’s shoulders, as Diomedes points out.
Thus, if Achilles were to continue fighting for Agamemnon and ensure Troy falls to his forces,
Achilles would be contributing to Agamemnon’s honor. It is not in Agamemnon’s interest to
dishonor his best warrior, yet he does just that. Neither Achilles nor Agamemnon can stand to
be without a physical token of their excellence, but which kind of excellence is more
important, being socially superior (i.e., Agamemnon, the expedition leader) or heroically
superior (i.e., Achilles, the best warrior)? It is an unanswerable question within the poem,
since both are necessary to achieve success.

An important element of the war between the Trojans and Achaeans is that it is not portrayed
as a battle between good and evil. Both sides worship the same gods and goddesses and
have champions and even parents or grandparents among them. Achaeans and Trojans do
not struggle to communicate, suggesting that there is a common language between them. As
becomes increasingly evident as the poem unfolds, both sides’ warriors are worthy of
admiration according to the values of their society, and they battle courageously to defend
their lives and the lives of their loved ones. The poem holds warriors from both sides in high
esteem, humanizing and empathizing with both Achaeans and Trojans. Within the poem, the
war effort’s score is a source of awe and the warriors’ willingness to face death is admirable,
but the poem also repeatedly illustrates that it is a tragedy for all the mortals involved, on and
off the battlefield.

Books 5-8

Book 5 Summary: “Diomedes Fights the Gods”

Athena lures Ares away from the battlefield under the guise of avoiding Zeus’s wrath. The
Achaeans take the upper hand. The poet catalogues both Achaean victors and Trojan victims,
including personal details about each life lost. Scamandrius, for example, learned to hunt and
kill wild animals from Artemis herself; Phereclus’s grandfather was a blacksmith beloved by
Athena.

Athena fills Diomedes with “strength and daring” so he can “win himself great glory” (164). He
rages through the ranks like a rushing stream, “sweeping away the dikes” (167). Pandarus
boasts after wounding Diomedes, who prays to Athena to avenge him. She answers, removing
the mist from his eyes so that he can recognize gods who enter the battle. She warns him not
to fight any immortal but Aphrodite.

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Pandarus tells Aeneas that “some god” is fighting with Diomedes (170). They decide to take
him on together. Diomedes refuses to retreat, hoping to kill both and commandeer Aeneas’s
horses, a breed gifted from Zeus to Tros in payment for kidnapping his son Ganymede.
Athena guides Diomedes’s spear throw, killing Pandarus. Diomedes smashes Aeneas with a
boulder “no two men could hoist [...] weak as men are now” (174). Aphrodite spirits Aeneas
away. Diomedes chases her down and stabs her wrist. She screams and drops Aeneas, but
Apollo picks him up. She finds Ares resting nearby and asks to borrow his horses. Iris drives
her back to Olympus, where her mother, Dione, comforts her. She reminds Aphrodite that
heroes sometimes harm immortals, as when Heracles harmed Hera, but Athena taunts her, to
Zeus’s delight. He tells Aphrodite to stick with “the works of marriage” and leave Athena and
Ares to “deal with all the bloodshed” (178).

Back on the battlefield, Diomedes tries three times to attack Aeneas. On his fourth try, Apollo
warns him to back off. After bringing Aeneas to Leto and Artemis to heal, he creates a
phantom Aeneas for the Trojans and Achaeans to fight over, then encourages Ares to remove
Diomedes from the battle. Ares rouses the Trojans’ fighting spirit. The fighting rages on, with
Ares backing the Trojans and Athena the Achaeans.

Aeneas returns to battle restored and goes after Menelaus. When Antiochus rushes to
Menelaus’s side, Aeneas retreats, but Hector rushes at them with Ares at his side. Diomedes
warns his comrades to retreat since Ares is with Hector. The battle grinds on. Zeus’s son
Sarpedon and grandson Tlepolemus, Heracles’s son, exchange taunts and spear throws;
Tlepolemus dies. Odysseus considers attempting to kill Sarpedon but opts against the
attempt since his destiny is not to kill Zeus’s beloved son. The Trojans gain the upper hand,
and the poet lists the Achaeans who die at Hector and Ares’s hands. Seeing the Achaeans on
the defensive, Hera rallies Athena and secures Zeus’s permission to return to the battlefield.
While Hera rouses the troops, Athena tells Diomedes to strike at Ares. Wounded Ares shrieks
as loud as “nine, ten thousand combat soldiers,” striking terror in the hearts of both Trojans
and Achaeans (192).

Ares rushes to Olympus to complain to Zeus that he never censures Athena, even encourages
her. Zeus rebukes Ares, calling him the god he hates “most of all” and accusing him of having
his mother Hera’s “uncontrollable rage” (193). Nevertheless, Zeus calls a healer to cure him.
Athena and Hera return to Olympus having successfully ended Ares’s killing spree.

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Book 6 Summary: “Hector Returns to Troy”

With the gods away from the battlefield, the Achaeans gain ground. The poet names Achaean
leaders and their victims, detailing their form of death and providing personal details about
them. Menelaus captures Adrestus alive. Adrestus supplicates for his life, and Menelaus is
prepared to spare him, but Agamemnon rushes forward, calling his brother “soft” and asking
whether he received “such tender loving care at home from the Trojans” (197). They kill
Adrestus.

Diomedes and Glaucus come face-to-face. Diomedes asks Glaucus whether he is god or man,
then recounts the story of Zeus striking Lycurgus blind to explain why he has no desire to go
against a god. Glaucus replies that his lineage hardly matters, since men are like leaves “the
wind scatters,” then tells a long story about his grandfather Bellerophon, father of his father
Hippolochus (200). Diomedes drives his spear into “the earth that feeds us all” and warmly
informs Glaucus that they are bound by the rules of guest-friendship (202). Diomedes’s
grandfather Oeneus hosted Bellerophon, and the two exchanged “handsome gifts of
friendship” (203). Diomedes proposes that they trade armor as a sign of their friendship and
avoid each other on the battlefield. Glaucus agrees.

Concerned the Trojans will retreat, Hector’s brother Helenus instructs Aeneas to rally the
troops and sends Hector back to the city to ask the women to pray to Athena. The women
swarm Hector for news of their male relatives, friends, and loved ones. He meets Hecuba at
the palace and instructs her to pray at Athena’s shrine, promising sacrifices for the
deliverance of Troy. Hecuba complies, but Athena refuses the prayers. Hector finds Paris in
his bedroom “fondling his splendid battle-gear” while Helen oversees her women’s embroidery
work (206). Hector upbraids Paris for allowing others to die for him. Paris accepts the
criticism, explaining that Helen has urged him to return to the battlefield. Helen laments her
fate, wishing that she could have married a better man. Recognizing Hector is “hit hardest by
the fighting,” she invites him to rest, but he declines (207). He wants to visit his wife and
infant son, wondering whether it will be their last visit.

He finds Andromache and the baby—named Scamandrius but called Astyanax (“Lord of the
City”)—at the Scaean Gates. Weeping, Andromache reminds him that he is all she has left;
Achilles killed her father, Eetion, and her seven brothers when the Achaeans raided Thebe, and
her mother later died. She suggests that Hector guard the most vulnerable part of the gates

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rather than return to the plain. Hector replies that he would be ashamed to shrink from battle,
for he knows that Troy must fall. His greatest weight is her fate, being enslaved by an
Achaean ruler. He wants to be dead when that happens.

He reaches for the baby, but he cries at the sight of his father’s helmet. His parents laugh, and
Hector removes his helmet, then holds the baby, praying that he will be “a better man than his
father” and “a joy to his mother’s heart” (211). Filled with pity for his wife’s grief, he reminds
her that “no one alive has ever escaped” their fate. He then instructs her to return to her
distaff and loom and “leave the fighting to the men” (212). Returning home, Andromache
leads her women in “dirges for the dead,” though Hector is still alive (212).

Book 7 Summary: “Ajax Duels with Hector”

Hector and Paris surge out of Troy’s gates and slaughter Achaeans. Athena rushes down
from Olympus, Apollo on her heels. They agree to end the day’s fighting by having Hector
challenge the best Achaean to step forward for a duel to the death. Recognizing the
immortals’ intentions, Helenus passes the idea on to Hector, while Athena and Apollo settle
atop a sacred oak “like carrion birds, like vultures” to watch (216).

Hector says that Zeus has brought their truce to nothing and proposes a duel; the winner will
take the loser’s armor but leave his corpse for his comrades to mourn with the proper rituals.
When no Achaean volunteers, Menelaus lashes out, calling his comrades disgraceful and
putting himself forward. Agamemnon holds him back, since Hector is clearly the stronger
man whom even Achilles dreads meeting in battle. Nestor tells the Achaeans that Peleus
(Achilles’s father) would be embarrassed for them, laments that he is not young enough to
take on Hector himself, and reminisces about his past achievements, taunting the Achaeans
for cowardice. Nestor’s taunts prompt nine leaders to stand up, and Nestor draws lots for the
winner. All are relieved when Ajax wins the draw and pray for him to win.

Hector’s heart pounds with fear as Ajax bears down on him with his mighty shield, whose
qualities and maker are described in detail. The men trade insults, launch their spears at each
other, then stab at each other. Ajax deals a nonlethal blow, then wrecks Hector’s shield with a
boulder, but Apollo keeps him safe. Two of Zeus’s heralds, one from each side, tells them to
“yield to night” since both are great fighters whom Zeus loves (223). Hector and Ajax agree
and exchange gifts before parting.

Nestor proposes halting the fighting for a day to perform funeral rites for their dead and to

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build a protective wall and trench around the Achaean camp. The leaders all agree.
Meanwhile, in Troy, Antenor proposes returning Helen and her treasures to the Achaeans
since they have nothing to gain by fighting the Achaeans. Paris refuses to give up Helen but
offers to return her treasure and add his own. At dawn, Priam sends a herald to deliver the
proposal and to ask for time to mourn their dead.

The Achaeans respond to the proposal in silence, until Diomedes finally rejects it and the rest
cheer. They agree to halt the fighting so Trojans and Achaeans can collect their dead; the
men sometimes have to wash the bodies to know whether they are Achaean or Trojan. After
performing their funeral rituals, the Achaeans build their wall while the gods “seated at ease”
gaze down on them (229). Poseidon complains that they built the wall without offering the
gods a sacrifice; it might become more famous than the Scaean Gates that Apollo and
Poseidon built. Zeus tells him to stop complaining because only a weak god would fear such
a thing. He then offers to let Poseidon destroy the wall after the Achaeans sail home. As
Achaeans and Trojans feast, Zeus plots “fresh disaster for both,” sending thunder that causes
both sides to panic and pour libations (230).

Book 8 Summary: “The Tide of Battle Turns”

At dawn, Zeus gathers the immortals and sternly forbids them from interfering in the war on
pain of being “whipped by lightning” or thrown into Tartarus (231). His threats are met with
silence, until Athena assures him they would never oppose him and will only offer their
favorites tactics. Zeus smiles, saying he meant nothing “in earnest” and means her “all the
good will in the world” (232). Zeus decamps to his throne atop Mount Ida to watch the armies
clash. When the sun hits high noon, he holds up his scales, places the Trojans in one side, the
Achaeans in the other, and decrees “Achaea’s day of doom” (233). The Achaean side falls
toward the earth while the Trojan rises “toward the sky” (234). Zeus releases crashing thunder
that terrifies the men.

None of the Achaean leaders except Nestor hold their ground. Diomedes comes rushing to his
defense, and they decide to take on Hector, first striking and killing his charioteer. Zeus sends
a bolt of lightning at the feet of Diomedes’s horse. Recognizing it as sign that Zeus has
marked the Trojans for victory, Nestor instructs Diomedes to turn the chariot around. Hector
and the Trojans chase them, hurling spears and insults. Three times Diomedes is tempted to
turn back, but each time, Zeus sends thunder to warn him back. Sensing victory, Hector sets
his sights on torching the Achaean ships. He asks his horses, who Andromache has lovingly

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tended, to carry him to success. Outraged, Hera taunts Poseidon for abandoning the
Achaeans who sacrifice to him so generously. Poseidon refuses to defy Zeus, whose power
exceeds all of theirs combined.

Agamemnon uses taunts to rouse the Achaeans, then prays to Zeus in tears to allow the men
to “escape with their lives” (239). Zeus pities him and sends an omen to renew their fighting
spirit. The Achaean leaders come out in force. Greater Ajax uses his shield to protect himself
and Little Ajax, who ducks behind the shield “quick as a youngster ducking under his mother’s
skirts” (240). After they kill his charioteer, Hector hits Little Ajax with a rock. Greater Ajax
shields him as others rush him back to camp.

Zeus whips up the Trojans again, sending the Achaeans retreating in panic. Hera, “filled with
pity,” appeals to Athena, who complains that Zeus always spoils her plans without caring how
many times she saved his son Heracles (242). Instructing Hera to harness her chariot, Athena
dresses for battle, but Zeus sees them and sends Iris with a warning. Hera backs down, telling
Athena they should not defy Zeus for the sake of mortals. It is for him to decide their fates.
Zeus returns to Olympus and assembles the gods. Only Athena and Hera keep their distance,
muttering between themselves and “plotting Troy’s destruction” (246). When Zeus mocks
them, Athena holds her tongue, but Hera angrily replies that they will obey him because he is
stronger. Out of pity they offer tactics to their Achaean favorites. Zeus promises many
Achaean deaths until Achilles returns to war to avenge Patroclus’s death.

As night descends, the Achaeans are relieved to see the day’s fighting end, but Hector is
frustrated that he has not yet destroyed the Achaean ships. Hoping the tide has turned, he
looks forward to the next day’s fighting.

Books 5-8 Analysis

Book 5 begins with Athena choosing to grant Diomedes “strength and daring” so he can
distinguish himself among the Achaeans and “win himself great glory” (164). The Greek word
that Fagles translates as “glory” here and elsewhere in the poem is kleos (κλέο). In Greek the
word kleos can be translated as rumor, report, fame, or glory. More specifically, it can mean
deeds that are sung about, i.e., the act of having one’s name on people’s lips. Through being
sung about in performance of epic poetry, these deeds—great and terrible—can be eternally
reexperienced.

The poem is self-aware about this function, as expressed in the way it weaves narratives of

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past heroes into its own narrative. In this section the city of Troy’s divine ancestry is alluded
to through references to Tros, Dardanus, and Ganymede, who famously captivated and was
subsequently kidnapped by Zeus to serve as cupbearer to the gods. Heracles, arguably the
most famous Greek hero, is threaded through the poem’s narrative. His name provides insight
into the concept of kleos. Heracles’s name means Hera’s kleos, or Hera’s glory/fame/song,
yet as ancient audiences were likely aware, Hera famously obstructed Heracles at every turn.
By contriving to have Heracles’s cousin Eurystheus born before him, Hera ensured that
Heracles would always be socially inferior to him. Her schemes against Heracles result in him
performing 12 labors for Eurystheus, the labors that led to his fame. Thus while Hera caused
Heracles’s suffering, that suffering became the source of his most famous deeds, which are
reexperienced by the characters in the Iliad who sing of them in the song that is the Iliad.

The Iliad folds in other song types as well, one of which is mentioned in this section: the dirge,
a form of sung lament. In Book 6 Andromache performs the first of three songs that she sings
for Hector. The poet’s description suggests that this is a ritualized form of communal song,
with a lead (here Andromache) and a chorus (here her women). When Andromache returns to
her quarters, she finds “her women gathered there inside / and stirred them all to a high pitch
of mourning. / So in his house they raised the dirges for the dead, for Hector still alive” (212).
That the community is singing a dirge for man who is still alive is an ill omen.

Though battle scenes far outweigh domestic scenes, scenes like the one between Hector,
Andromache, and their infant son in Book 6 draw attention to war’s effect on all involved, not
only the warriors but also the women, children, and elderly whose fortunes depend on events
outside of their control. Mortals repeatedly demonstrate awareness that they are at the gods’
mercies and whims, expressed also in Book 7 when Hector offers to duel the best of the
Achaeans: “Our oaths, our sworn truce—Zeus the son of Cronus / throned in the clouds has
brought them all to nothing” (216). Zeus expresses love and pity for warriors on both sides at
various points in the poem, but he also dispenses dispassionate judgment, as when he holds
up his scales in Book 8, determining the outcome of the day’s fighting while seated well away
from the relentless grind of war.

The gods repeatedly fight over their favorites and express the inappropriateness of fighting
over their favorites. As demonstrated from the beginning, warriors on both sides of the
conflict have divine lineage, sometimes even the same divine lineage. Zeus’s son Sarpedon
(on the Trojan side) kills his grandson Tlepolemus (Heracles’s son on the Achaean side). The
gods’ conflicts can become violent, and mortals can apparently injure immortals. But because

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the consequences of their injuries are relatively benign, their injuries become almost comical.
Bloodthirsty god of war Ares screams over a relatively minor injury and rushes back to
Olympus to complain to his father that he is unfair because he gives Athena preferential
treatment. Athena outsmarts Ares, leading him away from the battlefield on the pretense that
they should not disobey Zeus. She and Apollo race each other to the battlefield to meddle
with their favorites, then ascend to the top of a tree to watch, observing with interest but free
of consequences. The poet’s simile comparing them to vultures underscores the predatory
delight they take in tragic human struggles.

Similarly to how the gods fight and recognize the inappropriateness of fighting over mortals,
Zeus’s power exceeds all the other gods’ but may also be vulnerable to them. The gods often
defer to him due to his greater power, but references to an attempted overthrow enter the
narrative early in the Iliad (in Book 1). Inconsistencies such as this may reflect the many
voices, over many centuries, that have influenced the poem. It is also possible that the poem
is self-consciously noncommittal about just how powerful any one entity is. The poem
depicts Zeus sometimes determining characters’ fates; other times, he defers either to fate as
an external agent or to his need to accommodate the feelings of other gods. He may realize
that unilateral action creates bad feelings, which can lead to unrest and overthrow. This is
certainly the case for mortal leaders, as the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon
attests.

The warriors’ reluctance to volunteer for the duel with Hector and their palpable relief when
Ajax wins the draw suggests that these warriors love their lives and do not march toward
death uncomplicatedly. This love of life is further evidenced in the Achaeans’ willingness to
leave Troy without the material benefits reaped from sacking the city and their willingness to
submit to the results of a duel. The Trojans also appear willing to give up the fight, to return
Helen and her treasures, but Paris refuses to do so, earning him the hatred of the men who
die for his decisions though not necessarily for him. Paris brought war to the gates of Troy,
and its warriors have no choice but to fight for their lives and those of their wives, parents,
and children.

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Books 9-12

Book 9 Summary: “The Embassy to Achilles”

With Achaean morale low, Agamemnon calls an assembly and tearfully says that Zeus has
tricked him: They will never conquer Troy and should return home. After a moment of silence,
Diomedes berates Agamemnon for cowardice and tells him to leave if he wants, but
Diomedes will stay and fight until Troy falls. The Achaeans cheer. Nestor tells Diomedes that
he is right but still young. It is time for the elders to take over. He provides instructions for
securing the camp for the night and tells Agamemnon to host a feast for the leaders to hear
the best advice.

At the feast Nestor reminds Agamemnon that he took Briseis against the Achaean leaders’
will. The time has come to convince Achilles to return to battle. Agamemnon agrees and
gathers gifts, including tripods, gold, stallions, and seven women along with Briseis, promising
more after the sack and plunder of Troy. Agamemnon also offers one of his daughters as a
wife for Achilles, specifying that Achilles must “bow down” to “the greater man” (256). Nestor
approves and sends an embassy with Phoenix, Ajax, and Odysseus.

The men find Achilles singing and playing the lyre. He welcomes the embassy warmly, and his
companion Patroclus prepares them food and wine. Odysseus tells Achilles that the Achaean
ships are under threat. If he fails to act, it will become too late to remedy the damage.
Odysseus asks him to set aside his anger and lists Agamemnon’s gifts, adding that if they do
not sway him, love for his comrades should. Achilles replies that all warriors end up dead, no
matter how much they toil, whether they are cowardly or brave. He berates Agamemnon for
hoarding treasures while hiding behind the lines and stealing Achilles’s honor. Agamemnon
launched the expedition because of Helen but took away the woman Achilles loves. He plans
to sail home at dawn, with the treasure he has plundered but not his “prize of honor” because
the man who gave it to him stole it away, an outrage (263). Agamemnon cheated and
dishonored him, and Achilles does not want his gifts. No wealth is worth his life, which cannot
be restored once lost. He shares a prophecy told him by his mother: He can choose either
early death at Troy and honor, or he can return to the home that he loves without honor but
with a long life. He closes by warning the Achaeans to go home; they will never take Troy.

Phoenix bursts into tears and tells a story about the family feud that forced him to seek
refuge in Phthia, where he grew to love Achilles like a son. He begs Achilles to forgive so that

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Ruin will not overcome him, then tells the story of Meleager, who refused to help his
comrades until his wife, Cleopatra, tearfully begged him to, but he waited too long to act.
Though he saved them, he received no honor for it. Achilles replies that he does not need
human honors. His honor comes from Zeus. Warning Phoenix not to side with his enemies,
Achilles says that he will decide in the morning whether to sail home.

Rising in disgust, Ajax tells the others that Achilles lacks human kindness and respect for his
comrades. Achilles acknowledges that Ajax is right, but he cannot get past his anger at being
publicly dishonored. He will not fight unless his ships are threatened.

At the Achaean camp Odysseus reports that Achilles refuses to fight and will sail home at
dawn. Diomedes grumbles that the gifts have made Achilles more prideful. He will fight when
he feels like it. The rest must carry on without him.

Book 10 Summary: “Marauding Through the Night”

Agamemnon and Menelaus are both unable to sleep for worrying. Agamemnon tells his
brother that they need good tactics now that Zeus has decided to give Hector glory. Menelaus
defers to his brother. Agamemnon sends Menelaus to gather the leaders and goes to Nestor,
who criticizes Menelaus for being asleep. Agamemnon gently corrects him, saying that while
Menelaus expects Agamemnon to act first, he is currently awake and active.

On their way to check on the sentries, Agamemnon and Nestor pick up Odysseus and
Diomedes. Finding the sentries away and watchful, Nestor praises them and suggests
sending a spy into the Trojan camp. Diomedes volunteers and asks for a companion since
two work better than one. Many volunteer, and Nestor tells him to pick the best man for the
job, even if he is not the highest rank. Diomedes picks Odysseus, and the two dress for the
mission. Meriones gives Odysseus a helmet with an impressive genealogy. Athena sends a
good omen in the form of a heron, and Odysseus prays to her to stay by his side.

In Troy, meanwhile, Hector also calls for a spy mission, promising Achilles’s horses as the
reward. Dolon accepts, but it is a doomed mission. Odysseus sees him coming, and he and
Diomedes capture him. Dolon begs them to accept a ransom for his life, and Odysseus
admonishes him to have courage. Dolon reveals everything he knows, including information
about the Thracians, late-arriving Trojan allies camped apart from the rest. Their king, Rhesus,
has the best horses. When Dolon asks to be taken to the Achaean ships, Diomedes tells him
they cannot let him live and beheads him before Dolon can complete the gesture of

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supplication. Odysseus and Diomedes strip his body of weapons and dedicate them to
Athena, asking her to guide them to raid the Thracian camp.

They slaughter a group of Thracians in their sleep, including the king, and Odysseus secures
the horses. Diomedes pauses, considering the “most brazen thing he could do,” but Athena
cautions him not to hurry lest another, hostile god notice him (293). As Diomedes and
Odysseus race for the Achaean camp with the horses, Apollo wakes up another Thracian
leader, who vomits at the carnage and wails, waking others.

Hearing the pounding of approaching hooves, Nestor worries about a Trojan charge and is
relieved to see Odysseus and Diomedes with the horses. Their comrades welcome them
warmly with hugs and handclasps. After telling their story, Diomedes and Odysseus wash,
bathe, and eat, pouring libations “to the great goddess Athena” (295).

Book 11 Summary: “Agamemnon’s Day of Glory”

Zeus flings Strife onto the Achaean ships, and her cry rouses their “fighting fury” so they no
longer think of returning “to their dear native land” (296-97). Agamemnon dresses for battle,
the poet describing the images on his breastplate and shield. As he picks up his two spears,
they flash up to the sky, and Athena and Hera release a thunder crack to honor him. Hector
advances with his armies, and the two sides clash. Strife remains among them while the rest
of the gods recline “at their royal ease,” complaining among themselves that Zeus is giving
the Trojans victory (301). He ignores them, “glorying in his power” and gazing at the clashing
armies (301).

Agamemnon rampages through the Trojan line, pushing the Achaeans forward to the gates of
Troy. Zeus ensures Hector’s safety, sending Iris to instruct Hector to hold back until
Agamemnon is wounded, then Zeus will lead him to the Achaeans ships. The poet asks the
Muse to reveal who among the Trojans fought against and was killed by Agamemnon. One of
his victims wounds him, and he is forced to withdraw from battle. Seeing his signal, Hector
fires up his armies to press forward, and the poet catalogues his victims.

Odysseus tries to rouse the Achaeans’ fighting spirit, calling out to Diomedes, who fights on
though he knows Zeus has marked Hector for glory. Together they slash through Trojans until
Hector charges at them. Diomedes’s spear hits Hector but does not pierce his armor. Paris
wounds Diomedes, and they trade insults. Diomedes taunts Paris for being a pretty boy

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incapable of hand-to-hand combat but has to withdraw, leaving Odysseus alone. Odysseus
kills a few Trojans before being wounded, not fatally due to Athena’s intervention. He too
retreats, killing the man who wounded him but being surrounded by Trojans in the process.
Hearing his distress cries, Menelaus calls Greater Ajax, and the two remove Odysseus,
scattering Trojans as they go. Hector, meanwhile, battles near Nestor and Idomeneus. Paris
wounds the healer Machaon, and Idomeneus instructs Nestor to bring him back to camp.
Hector continues his rampage, though he avoids attacking Greater Ajax directly. Zeus forces
the latter to retreat, “spirits dashed and much against his will,” under a barrage of Trojan
spears (314).

Seeing the rout from his ship and expecting the Achaeans to come crawling back to him,
Achilles sends Patroclus to question Nestor, and “from that moment on [Patroclus’s] doom
was sealed” (316). Patroclus finds Nestor with Eurymedon. Hecamede, a woman Nestor won
as a prize, is waiting on them. Nestor greets Patroclus warmly, telling him the Achaeans are in
danger. He asks how long Achilles will wait and laments that he is too old to fight as he once
did, then launches into a long story about a past exploit involving Heracles and Athena. After
he is finished, Nestor reminds Patroclus of the advice his father, Menoetius, gave him when
they left for Troy: Achilles’s immortal blood makes him more powerful and noble, but
Patroclus is older and must provide sound advice. He urges Patroclus to intervene. If Achilles
refuses to fight, he should at least send Patroclus in his armor to frighten the Trojans and
provide the exhausted Achaeans relief.

His fighting spirit ignited, Patroclus hurries back toward Achilles’s camp but stops to help a
wounded comrade, who tells him the Achaeans’ situation is hopeless.

Book 12 Summary: “The Trojans Storm the Rampart”

The fighting moves closer to the ships, endangering the Achaeans’ protective wall. The
Achaeans did not secure it with a sacrifice to the immortals; the wall survives only as long as
the war. After it ends, Apollo and Poseidon destroy it.

Hector fights his way to the wall like a boar among hunters, but his horses refuse to jump
across the trench. Polydamas says it is madness to try driving the horses across and
suggests crossing on foot. The poet catalogues the Trojan leaders who advance. One, Asius,
refuses to leave his horses behind and drives toward a gate that Polypoetes and Leonteus
successfully guard. The Trojans attack in force, and the Achaeans labor to hold back the
charge. The poet notes that it is impossible to recount the battle in full; “[t]he strain is far too

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great” (331).

Hector and his forces are determined to breach the walls, but a bird omen appears.
Polydamas urges Hector to stop attacking since the bird is a portend that the Trojans will not
succeed in burning the Achaean fleet. Accusing him of being a coward, Hector replies that the
only omen he obeys is fighting for his country. He trusts the plan of Zeus, not birds.

The Trojans continue to tear and hack at the wall. Zeus drives his son Sarpedon forward,
charging at the wall. He calls out to Glaucus, telling him that the price of receiving the highest
honors is the duty to serve on the front lines. Since they cannot escape death, they surge
ahead. Sarpedon rips off a large chunk of the wall. Little Ajax injures Glaucus and strikes at
Sarpedon, but Zeus protects his son. The fighting grows increasingly fierce and brutal, but the
Trojans cannot rout the Achaeans.

Zeus gives Hector the strength to lift a massive boulder and hurl it at the gate. It smashes it,
and Hector bursts through, urging his allies on. Some scale the wall while others surge
through the wrecked gate.

Books 9-12 Analysis

Books 9 through 12 accelerate the plot toward its climactic showdowns, with several main
characters making decisions that put them directly on the path of their own destruction,
though Zeus also engineers events from behind the scenes.

Agamemnon’s suggestion that the Achaeans run away in the night prompts Diomedes to defy
him in council, which rouses the Achaeans’ desire to fight. The embassy to Achilles fails to
bring Achilles back to the battlefield, as he continues to nurture his sense of injustice at
Agamemnon’s treatment. His refusal sets the stage for the Achaeans’ survival to become
more desperate, which then fills Hector with reckless aggression. No longer content to defend
the city, as Polydamas encourages, Hector now wants to destroy the Achaeans’ ships, their
only means to escape from Troy and return home, and he ignores an ill omen. As the situation
becomes more desperate, Nestor makes his fatal suggestion to Patroclus that he wear
Achilles’s armor into battle to frighten the Trojans into backing off. Each step marks a
misstep or outrage—Achilles’s refusal to help his friends, Hector’s insistence on aggressive
rather than defensive action—that makes the conclusion increasingly inevitable.

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Behind the scenes, Zeus contrives to set this chain in motion, intent on fulfilling his promise
to Thetis by causing the Achaeans to suffer for the dishonor Achilles endured and to remind
them that they cannot win without him. Zeus and the other immortals gather to observe the
battle, curious and personally invested but also removed from its consequences. Their most
pressing concern is annoyance with Zeus for giving victory to the Trojans and not allowing
them to play war games on behalf of their favorites.

The embassy to Achilles is arguably the most significant event in this section, for numerous
reasons. When the embassy arrives, Achilles is playing his lyre while Patroclus watches
intensely, enfolding yet another form of poetic song into the narrative. Though the poet does
not quote Achilles’s song, he sings about the deeds of men—klea anthron (κλέα ανδρών),
and his use of the lyre is suggestive of lyric poetry.

Odysseus, Phoenix, and Ajax each make an appeal to Achilles. Each moves him
infinitesimally, from his assertion to Odysseus that he will sail home in the morning, to his
claim to Phoenix that he will decide in the morning, to his concession to Ajax that he is right
to criticize Achilles, but Achilles still cannot overcome his rage and will only fight if his ships
are threatened.

Odysseus presents Agamemnon’s formal offers but also encourages Achilles to be moved by
love for his comrades. In response, Achilles reveals the two possible prophecies that could be
his fate, according to his mother: He can choose either to die at Troy and have kleos
aphthiton (κλέος άφθιτον)—which Fagles translates as “my glory never dies”—or he can
return “to the fatherland I love” to live a long but unremarkable (in the most literal sense of the
word) life (265). The Greek word aphthiton means “imperishable, incorruptible,” thus the
“glory” that “never dies” of Fagles’s translation (265). What the word glory does not quite
convey is that Achilles’s choice is to have his deeds, both great and terrible, woven into a
song/poem that is incorruptible—thus eternal, free of the ravages of time—or to live out the
normal human lifespan but then be forgotten. He will surely suffer one form of death or
another; the former is bodily death while the latter is eternal death, the erasure of his
existence and deeds.

As with other warriors at Troy, Achilles does not, at this point, seem to welcome death.
Though readers and listeners of the Iliad know, by virtue of the poem’s existence, what choice
Achilles ultimately makes, the temptation to return home alive is a serious one. If he returns
to battle, he would not live to enjoy the treasures that Agamemnon offers him, including the

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bride; thus, the compensation does not seem to fit the sacrifice. What he lacks, at this point,
is a compelling personal motive to reenter the battle, despite Odysseus and Ajax’s appeals on
the basis of friendship. Phoenix offers Achilles a similar motivation, but it hits differently.

Phoenix tells the story of a hero, Meleager, who, like Achilles, refused to fight on behalf of his
comrades due to a personal grievance. By the time he entered the battle and saved his
comrades, the situation had escalated so desperately that he did not receive any honor for
doing so. This version of the Meleager myth deviates from other popular renderings
transmitted during antiquity. Its details seem to be reshaped specifically to appeal to Achilles
by creating parallels to his situation, with Meleager serving as a parallel to Achilles, and
Cleopatra, Meleager’s wife who finally compels him to fight out of concern for her survival,
serving as a parallel to Patroclus.

Modern readers often assume that the parallel between Patroclus and Cleopatra implies a
romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. The poem is not explicit on this
account, and both men have female companions, though it seems clear that Patroclus is the
person dearest to Achilles, as Cleopatra is the person dearest to Meleager. Perhaps more
telling is the meaning of their names, which share the same two roots: kleos and patra
(meaning “father” or “ancestors”) inverted for the female and male. Patroclus and Cleopatra’s
names mean glory/fame of the ancestors. Both compel the warriors, Achilles and Meleager, to
fight and gain kleos aphthiton , imperishable or incorruptible glory through song or poetry.
Thus, because of Patroclus and Cleopatra, Achilles and Meleager perform deeds that will be
remembered eternally. Though Phoenix says that Meleager did not receive honors because he
waited too long, it should be noted that, paradoxically in this case, as long as Meleager’s story
is being retold, he has achieved the kleos accorded heroes: being remembered by having his
name woven into a song. Meleager’s name is on Phoenix’s lips: Phoenix is singing a song
about Meleager, in that Phoenix’s story is woven into the larger story of the Iliad.

The personal stake that Achilles ultimately experiences is already felt by the Achaeans at the
close of Book 12, provoking an increasing sense of urgency in the battle. When the fighting
moves to the Achaeans’ ships, their survival is in question. If they previously fought from a
sense of duty, having sworn an oath to uphold Menelaus and Helen’s marriage, they now fight
for a personal cause: saving their means of escape from Troy and their passage home.
Winners and losers, victors and victims—the poem immortalizes both.

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Note that Book 10 has been a source of debate since antiquity and is believed to have been
added to the text at a later time. As a result, not all translations include it.

Books 13-16

Book 13 Summary: “Battling for the Ships”

After driving the armies into conflict, Zeus turns his gaze away, certain that none of the gods
will dare interfere. Poseidon, however, continues following developments and, feeling pity for
the Achaeans, enters their camp, which the Trojans are swarming. In the guise of Calchas, he
encourages the two Ajaxes, filling their hearts and bodies with strength, leaving them feeling
renewed and longing for battle. When Poseidon soars away like a hawk, Little Ajax realizes he
is a god. Poseidon travels down the Achaean lines, lifting their spirits with a mix of
encouragement and berating. Hector continues to advance, certain of Zeus’s approval. He
kills Poseidon’s grandson Amphimachus, infuriating the god, who further rouses the
Achaeans.

Encountering Idomeneus, Poseidon assumes the guise of King Thoas and asks why the
Achaeans are flagging. Idomeneus blames “the pleasure of overweening Zeus” (349).
Poseidon urges him to do his best, and Idomeneus rushes toward his camp to arm. He runs
into his aid, Meriones, who has come to replace his weapons. After exchanging brags and
jibes, Idomeneus praises Meriones’s bravery, and they enter battle together. The Trojans
swarm them, and the fighting intensifies.

Zeus wills the Trojans to victory for the sake of Thetis and Achilles, though he does not want
the whole Achaean army to perish. Poseidon continues secretly acting on behalf of the
Achaeans, outraged that Zeus claims superiority because he was born first.

Idomeneus kills Orthryoneus and Asius. Deiphobus retaliates, killing Hypsenor. Idomeneus
continues his rampage, killing Anchises’s brother-in-law Alcathous and taunting Deiphobus by
reciting his genealogy, which traces back to Zeus. Deiphobus fetches Aeneas, who has set
himself apart from battle because he feels neglected by Priam. Together, they attempt to
rescue Alcathous’s body from Idomeneus. Deiphobus kills Ares’s son Ascalaphus, but the god
does not know because he is sitting under golden clouds on Olympus, obedient to Zeus’s
orders.

The fight around Ascalaphus’s body continues. Polites pulls a wounded Deiphobus away from

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the fighting. Achaean and Trojan leaders continue to wound and kill each other, the victims
reaching out for their comrades at the moment of death. Poseidon ensures Antilochus’s
safety. The poet catalogues deaths on both sides. Menelaus wounds Helenus and kills
Pisander, then complains to his corpse of the outrages he has suffered at Trojan hands. The
battle rages on, unbeknownst to Hector, who is fighting further along the line.

Hector is determined to reach the Achaean ships but meets stiff resistance. The two Ajaxes
fight side by side, and the Achaeans maintain the upper hand. Concerned that Achilles will
rejoin the fighting, Polydamas convinces Hector to withdraw and strategize. Seeking his
leaders for council, Hector discovers most have been wounded or killed, except for Paris,
whom Hector berates. Paris objects that they have fought tirelessly all day against a strong
Achaean defense. Hector is satisfied, and they head into the fiercest fighting. Ajax taunts
Hector that it is Zeus, not the Trojans, who fights the Achaeans, and Troy will fall before the
Achaean ships come to harm. An eagle swoops past, sealing Ajax’s words. The Achaeans
cheer, but Hector taunts back and surges forward.

Book 14 Summary: “Hera Outflanks Zeus”

Tending Machaon in his tent, Nestor hears the battle cries growing closer and hurries out to
check on the situation; he is stunned to see the protective wall smashed. He rushes to
Agamemnon and finds him dispirited, fearing Hector will succeed and all Achaea will hate
him. Nestor agrees the situation is dire, and they need to strategize with the Achaean leaders.
Believing that Zeus wants to kill the Achaeans at Troy, Agamemnon suggests that they drag
their ships out to sea and flee in the night. Odysseus furiously calls him “a disaster,” pointing
out that if the Achaean fighters see them putting the ships to sea, they will falter and be
overwhelmed by the Trojans, and everyone will die (372). Agamemnon backs down and asks
for a better plan. Diomedes steps forward. Realizing the others will not be inclined to listen to
him because he is the youngest, he shares his noble genealogy, then suggests the leaders
return to battle to encourage the others but stay out of direct combat since they are wounded.

Poseidon sends Agamemnon a heartening message and releases a thunderous shriek, as

loud “as nine, ten thousand combat soldiers,” that instills fighting power and spirit into the
Achaeans (374). Hera is pleased, but when she notices Zeus “at rest” on Mount Ida, “her heart
is filled with loathing” (374-75). To distract him from the battle, she decides to seduce him,
then put him into a deep sleep. She bathes, applies performed oils, does her hair,
accessorizes, and puts on her sandals and headdress, then visits Aphrodite. Hera asks to
borrow Love and Longing, claiming that she wants to use them to heal the feud between

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Ocean and Tethys. Aphrodite happily hands over the garment that contains them—a
breastband “with every kind of enchantment woven through it” (376). Finally, Hera visits
Sleep, Death’s twin brother, and asks him to put Zeus to sleep after they make love, promising
that Hephaestus will make him a throne in return. Sleep refuses, reminding Hera of the last
time he helped her, when she plotted against Heracles. Zeus would have destroyed Sleep if
Night had not hidden him. Hera promises Sleep one of the Graces for a wife. After making
Hera swear an oath, Sleep agrees.

The two proceed to Mount Ida, and Sleep hides in a tall pine tree. Zeus sees Hera and is
overcome with lust. Listing his lovers and the children they bore him, Zeus declares he has
never been so attracted to anyone before. He wraps them in a dense golden cloud, and they
make love. After putting Zeus to sleep, Sleep visits Poseidon to tell him that he can now help
the Achaeans without interference. Poseidon rouses the Achaean leaders, who distribute
armor to ensure the best fighters are paired with the best weapons.

The war cries grow louder than crashing waves or gale-force winds. Hector throws his spear
at Ajax, who responds by hurling a rock at Hector, knocking him off his feet. Trojan leaders
remove him from the field to the Xanthus river. The Achaeans take advantage of Hector’s
absence to press harder. The poet catalogues attacks and counter attacks and the grief
warriors feel for their fallen comrades, culminating in Peneleos beheading Ilioneus and
brandishing his head at the Trojans, which terrifies them. The poet invokes the Muses to tell
him which Achaeans gained “bloody spoils” when Poseidon turned the tide toward them and
follows with a brief list of Trojan deaths (386).

Book 15 Summary: “The Achaean Armies at Bay”

As the Trojans retreat in panic, Zeus awakens, sees Poseidon leading the Achaean rout and
Hector incapacitated, and immediately blames Hera. He reminds her of his violent response
to her treachery against Heracles and the other gods’ impotence to help her. She swears that
it is all Poseidon’s doing; he pities the Achaeans. Accepting her explanation, Zeus orders her
back to Olympus to fetch Iris and Apollo. He will send Iris to order Poseidon to stop interfering
and Apollo to revive Hector and panic the Achaeans. This will send Patroclus into battle,
which will lead to his death, which will lead Achilles to rejoin the fight to avenge him. After all
this takes place, Zeus will give the Achaeans victory. He will permit no interference until his
vow to Achilles is fulfilled.

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Hera obeys but gripes to the other Olympians that Zeus claims to have greater power and is
insensitive to their cares. When she reveals that Ares’s son Ascalaphus was killed, Ares is
determined to avenge him and dresses for battle. Concerned that Zeus will punish them all,
Athena restrains Ares, telling him the gods cannot rescue all humanity. Meanwhile, Apollo and
Iris carry out Zeus’s orders. Poseidon fumes that he and Zeus share the same parentage and
received equal shares of their inheritance; Iris reminds him that the Furies “stand by older
brothers” (394). He agrees to yield, though it is unfair, and asserts that their rift will be
permanent if Zeus attempts to save Troy from falling. The Achaeans feel Poseidon’s
departure from the field.

A revived Hector returns to battle, and Achaean Thoas assumes Zeus is once again behind
the Trojan leader. He suggests sending the “rank and file” back to the ships while the best
fighters stay to face Hector (397). Apollo fills the Achaeans with fear and gives Hector and the
Trojans “instant glory” (398). The poet catalogues the Trojan leaders’ victims. The Achaeans
retreat, and Hectors orders his armies to “storm the ships” (399). Apollo leads the way, tearing
down the Achaeans’ protective wall with the ease of a boy knocking down a sandcastle. The
Achaeans pray to the immortals as they retreat. Nestor begs Zeus, if their sacrifices have
meant anything, not to let this be the end of the Achaeans. Zeus releases a thunder clap that
thrills the Trojans storming over the wall.

Hearing the din, Patroclus hopes to spur Achilles back into battle. Both sides fight fiercely at
the ships. Hector and the Ajaxes face off, but Zeus guards Hector. Little Ajax realizes that a
god is foiling him. Hector shouts encouragement to the Trojans, assuring them that Zeus is
on their side and urging them to die fighting for their homeland. Ajax berates the Achaeans.
The poet catalogues Trojan and Achaean deaths at the hands of leaders from both sides.

Zeus builds the Trojans’ fury and blunts the Achaeans’ fighting spirit, determined to bring
Thetis’s “disastrous prayer” to fulfillment (407). After the Trojans set fire to an Achaean ship,
he will drive the Trojans back and give the Achaeans victory. Zeus prizes Hector above the
others because his life will soon end through Athena’s schemes. Zeus and Hector rout the
Achaeans. Nestor begs them to be brave. Athena sends a bright light bursting forth to light
the Achaeans’ vision. Greater Ajax leaps from ship to ship, urging the Achaeans to defend
their only means of transport home. The Trojans press harder, and Ajax struggles to hold
them back with his long pike. He begs the Achaeans to fight.

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Book 16 Summary: “Patroclus Fights and Dies”

In tears, Patroclus rebukes Achilles for his stubborn rage and implores him to send in the
Myrmidons with Patroclus wearing Achilles’s armor to deceive the Trojans into retreating.
Though he continues to wallow in his anger, Achilles grants Patroclus’s request, instructing
him to return to camp as soon as the ships are safe. He must not press on to Troy since he
may attract an antagonistic god’s attention or, by breaching Troy’s walls, diminish Achilles’s
glory.

Overwhelmed by the Trojans’ relentless onslaught, Greater Ajax begins to flag. The poet
invokes the Muses to sing of the first ship to catch fire. Hector wrecks Ajax’s pike.
Recognizing Zeus’s hand, Ajax retreats. A ship goes up in flames, and Achilles urges
Patroclus to hurry before the Achaeans’ ships, their only means of escape, are destroyed.
Patroclus wears Achilles’s armor but carries his own spear, since only Achilles can wield his
weapons. Automedon yokes Achilles’s immortal horses and a purebred.

The Myrmidons are eager for battle. The poet catalogues their battalions, including
genealogies and divine parentage. Achilles commands them to fight, then prays to Zeus for
Patroclus’s success and safe return to camp. Zeus grants the first but not the second prayer.
The Myrmidons surge out “like wasps from a roadside nest” that has been disturbed (421).
Thinking Achilles has returned, the Trojans fearfully back away from the ships. Patroclus
begins slaughtering Trojans. The Achaeans extinguish the fire. The fighting grows fierce, with
Achaeans mauling Trojans like “ravenous wolves” (424).

The Trojans launch a mass retreat. Hector’s horses carry him away, leaving his men behind.
Patroclus chases him, slaughtering Trojans along the way. Zeus’s son Sarpedon rebukes his
Lycians for lacking pride and rushes Patroclus. They clash like “a pair of crook-clawed, hook-
beaked vultures” (426). Zeus wants to save his son from his fate, but Hera warns him the
other immortals will want to do the same for their mortal children. She recommends Zeus not
interfere but instead arrange for Sleep and Death to return Sarpedon’s body to Lycia for
funeral rites and honors. Zeus agrees, crying “tears of blood” that rain down on earth in praise
of his son (427).

Patroclus cuts down Sarpedon, who begs Glaucus to save his armor from being stripped.
Glaucus prays to Apollo for strength. Achaeans and Trojans fight over Sarpedon’s body, with
Zeus intensifying the struggle. As the fight rages on, Zeus considers how to bring about

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Patroclus’s death. He provokes Hector, who recognizes the god’s hand, to retreat. The Trojans
surge back toward the city. Patroclus captures Sarpedon’s armor, then Zeus has Apollo
remove Sarpedon’s body to Lycia.

Patroclus drives toward Troy, forgetting Achilles’s orders; Zeus’s will “always overpower[s]
the will of men” (435). The poet catalogues the Trojans Patroclus slaughters. Apollo defends
Troy’s walls, ordering Patroclus to back off; it is not his fate to capture Troy. When Patroclus
charges forward, Apollo smacks him on his back with the flat of his hand, stunning him. He
knocks off Patroclus’s helmet, shatters his spear, and drops his shield and breastplate into
the dust. Euphorbus spears him between his shoulders. Patroclus tries to retreat into the
Achaean line, but Hector rushes forward and buries his spear into Patroclus’s stomach. The
Achaeans are horrified. Hector taunts the dying man, who replies that Zeus and Apollo
defeated him. He warns Hector that he will soon die at Achilles’s hands.

Books 13-16 Analysis

As the fight for the Achaean ships intensifies, the poem heightens the contrast between gods,
who have no lasting stakes in human conflicts, and mortals, who have everything to lose.

Agamemnon, caught up in the desperation of the moment, suggests fleeing, the third time in
the poem that he does so. The strong wills and wise counsel of Diomedes and Odysseus
contrast with Agamemnon’s weakness. Though he is the leader, it is his supposed social
inferiors—Odysseus, who commands a relatively small force, and Diomedes, who is young and
inexperienced—who prop him up. High status does not guarantee the best decision-making,
as Agamemnon suggests fleeing multiple times.

Among the gods, meanwhile, Zeus sets events in motion then turns away from the scene,
overly secure in his authority. His inattention gives Poseidon an opportunity to interfere,
unimpeded, further benefited by Hera’s seduction of Zeus. Evidently, both mortal and
immortal leaders are subject to error. But while Poseidon and Hera’s schemes forestall the
Achaeans and Trojans’ fates, they do not fundamentally alter them. Immortals’ “mistakes”
can have high stakes for mortals while having no long-term consequences among the gods.
Conversely, mortal leaders’ mistakes can be costly. Had the Achaeans followed
Agamemnon’s advice and fled, they would likely all have died ignominiously, according to
their society’s values, by fleeing in terror.

The poet lavishes attention on Hera’s scheming and her preparations for seduction,

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describing in detail each step of her bathing, dress, and fulfillment of her plan. Though
Aphrodite and Hera are fighting for opposing camps, Aphrodite, who remains unaware of
Hera’s true intentions to benefit the Achaeans, does not hesitate to help her, reiterating that
immortals should not fight among themselves over mortals. They may act on behalf of
opposing sides, but that conflict is play that does not significantly impact their relationship
on Olympus. Hera cannot disguise her intentions from Sleep, however, since she needs him to
put Zeus to sleep after her seduction. Sleep’s reluctance brings Heracles back into the
narrative, since Sleep played a pivotal role in Hera’s plot to delay Heracles’s birth. The hero’s
presence draws attention to the severe consequences that immortals’ schemes and games
can have on mortals. This is amplified by Zeus’s long recounting of the mortal women he
previously lusted after and who bore children by him. Listing previous conquests as a prelude
to seduction is an odd choice, as even ancient commenters noted. It does, however,
underscore Zeus’s security in his own power, his certainty that he will get what he wants.

While Hera seduces Zeus high atop the battlefield, Trojans and Achaeans toil and fight for
their lives. The poet layers list upon endless list of violent confrontations that result in brutal
injuries and death. Victims are beheaded, gored, dismembered. This is not a rose-tinted,
romanticization of battle but an up-close view of war’s gruesome endgame. Both sides
struggle desperately to save their lives, alternately despairing that the gods have forgotten
them or delighting in the gods’ approval. Warriors from both sides read divine signs, but
without insight into the gods’ intentions and plans, they are often mistaken about them, which
portrays mortal knowledge as imperfect and disconnected from fate’s larger plan. The
Achaeans believe they are facing their doom, while the Trojans believe they are on the verge
of victory. The Trojans misinterpret Zeus’s thunderclap, thinking it is approval for them, when
Zeus means it as a response to Nestor’s prayers. Hector foolishly pushes on, believing he is
moments away from victory, as decreed by Zeus, when he is actually being set up to meet his
doom.

Zeus’s grief over his son Sarpedon raises questions about how much control Zeus has over
fate. In this instance it seems he could change his son’s fate but chooses not to because it
would create unrest among the Olympians, which could threaten his leadership’s stability.
This implies that Zeus himself does not dictate mortals’ fates, though he oversees the
implementation of them.

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The fight for Sarpedon’s body receives extensive attention, prefiguring the fight for
Patroclus’s body later. On one level, the warriors’ anxiety to provide proper funeral rites for
their comrades’ bodies seems to be tied to ensuring their passage through Hades, the
afterlife. The concern with properly mourning the hero’s body may also be tied to hero cult
worship that was practiced in ancient Greece.

Books 17-20

Book 17 Summary: “Menelaus’ Finest Hour”

Menelaus and Euphorbus exchange threats and taunts over Patroclus’s body, then stab at
each other. Menelaus kills Euphorbus. Apollo rouses Hector to challenge him. Realizing a god
has inspired Hector, Menelaus retreats. Meanwhile, Hector strips Patroclus’s armor, intending
to behead him and feed his trunk to Troy’s dogs, but Greater Ajax swoops in and protects his
body. Glaucus berates Hector for failing to secure Sarpedon’s armor and Patroclus’s body and
accuses him of being too cowardly to challenge Ajax. Hector rebukes him for being insolent,
straps on the stolen armor, and rouses the Trojan allies. Reflecting that Hector will never
return from this battle, Zeus resolves to give him “great power for the moment” (449).

Three Achaean leaders form a protective circle around Patroclus while Hector and the Trojans
charge in “as a heavy surf roars in against the rip at the river’s mouth” (450). Not wanting to
see Patroclus’s body defiled, Zeus covers the Achaeans in a dense mist. The brutal battle over
the body rages on, with Ajax killing Hippothous and Apollo provoking Aeneas, while in his tent
Achilles has no thought that Patroclus could be dead. His mother Thetis secretly revealed
Zeus’s plans but never mentioned anything about Patroclus dying.

Achilles’s immortal horses weep for Patroclus and refuse to move. Zeus pities them, immortal
beasts serving and grieving for mortal men. He decides not to allow Hector to have them and
breathes strength into them. They gallop into battle with Automedon, and Hector and Aeneas
attempt to capture them. The two Ajaxes and Menelaus join Automedon, and they battle
brutally. Menelaus prays to Athena; she fills him with strength and courage, pleased that he
prayed to her first among all the gods. Apollo stands with Hector, driving him on, and Zeus
releases a thunder crack, giving Trojans victory and striking fear in the Achaeans.

The fight continues with deaths on both sides. Frustrated, Ajax weeps and prays to Zeus to
remove the mist from the field that clouds the Achaeans’ vision. Pitying him, Zeus grants his
prayer. Ajax tells Menelaus to send news of Patroclus’s death to Achilles. Menelaus and the

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Ajaxes fix a strategy to clear Patroclus’s body from the field. The fighting continues “wild as a
flash fire,” but the Achaean leaders are determined “as mules” (465-66). The Ajaxes hold off
the Trojans like “a wooded rocky ridge” holds back a flood (466). Hector and Aeneas are on
their heels, like a falcon or hawk, while the Achaeans flee “like clouds of crows or starlings”
(466).

Book 18 Summary: “The Shield of Achilles”

Watching the Achaean retreat fills Achilles with foreboding. Antilochus bursts in, weeping,
and delivers the tragic news. Achilles falls to the floor, tearing his hair and pouring dirt over
his face. The women he and Patroclus captured feel his grief and join the lament. Fearing that
Achilles will try to kill himself, Antilochus holds his hands. Achilles releases a “terrible,
wrenching cry” that his mother hears (468). She cries out in response; her Nereid sisters
gather around her, mourning with her. She sings a dirge foreshadowing Achilles’s death, then
she and the Nereids go to Achilles.

He tells his mother that Patroclus has died and he has lost his will to live. He will seek
retribution from Hector by killing him, which will lead to his death. Though he mourns his
mother’s sorrow, he asks her not to hold him back. He wants a quick death because he did
not save Patroclus. She tells him not to return to battle until she brings him new armor from
Hephaestus.

Meanwhile, the fight for Patroclus’s body continues. Hera sends Iris to tell Achilles that he
must show himself to frighten the Trojans away from Patroclus’s body. Athena drapes her
shield over him and sets a burning cloud above his head. Achilles releases three piercing
shrieks; the Trojans tremble in terror. Even their horses turn back. Twelve Trojans die on the
spot, crushed or impaled by their own gear. The Achaeans pull Patroclus’s body to safety.
Hera compels the sun to set early, ending the day’s fighting.

The Trojans hold a council. Polydamas recommends withdrawing into and securing the city.
Hector angrily refuses to retreat, sure that Zeus has primed him for glory. The Trojans cheer,
“lost in folly” (477). Meanwhile, Achilles leads ritual laments for Patroclus, though he refuses
to hold funeral rites until he kills Hector. They wash and shroud Patroclus’s body and stay up
all night lamenting.

On Olympus, Zeus notes that Hera has gotten her way: Achilles has returned to battle. Thetis
visits Hephaestus and his wife, the Grace Charis, who welcome her as an “honored friend”

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(480). Recalling how Thetis saved him when his mother Hera threw him off Olympus,
Hephaestus promises to help however he can. Thetis bursts into tears, recalling how Zeus
forced her to marry a mortal against her will. She was given a son whom she will never again
welcome home to Peleus’s house. She recounts his quarrel with Agamemnon and Patroclus’s
death, lamenting her inability to help him. Achilles’s death is fast approaching, and he needs
new armor. Hephaestus regrets that he cannot save Achilles from his destiny but agrees to
make him gear that will inspire awe in “all the years to come” (482).

The poet provides an extended description of Achilles’s new shield, on which Hephaestus
crafts images of the earthy, sky, and sea, two cities, a wedding with a feast and choirs singing
and dancing. In the marketplace two men quarrel over “the blood-price for a kinsman just
murdered” (483). The second city is under siege. The shield also depicts a field being farmed,
a harvest being reaped, and “a thriving vineyard” (485). A boy plays a dirge on his lyre,
accompanied by a choir and dancing. Additional images include a herd of cattle, a meadow
with sheep and shepherds, and a dancing circle of boys and girls. Around the rim, Hephaestus
forges “Ocean River’s mighty power” (487). When he finishes the shield, Hephaestus crafts a
breastplate, helmet, and greaves, and lays the gear at Thetis’s feet.

Book 19 Summary: “The Champion Arms for Battle”

At dawn, Thetis brings Achilles his new armor and finds him weeping over Patroclus. Achilles
praises Hephaestus’s work and wants to dress for battle immediately, but he is concerned
about Patroclus’s body decomposing. Thetis promises to protect it, breathing ambrosia and
nectar into his nostrils and courage into her son.

Achilles calls a council and announces that he is ready to overcome his anger and return to
battle. The Achaeans cheer. Agamemnon says that he is not to blame. Zeus, Fate, and Fury
drove him to madness; gods bring “all things to their fulfillment” (491). He was powerless in
the grip of Ruin, Zeus’s eldest daughter who even blinded her father in the past, when Hera
schemed against Heracles, after which he expelled her from Olympus to “the world of men”
(492). As Ruin blinded Zeus, she blinded Agamemnon, but now he is prepared to set things
right. He offers all the gifts previously promised. Achilles interrupts him to reiterate his desire
to return immediately to battle. Odysseus objects that the men have not eaten and need the
sustenance to endure long days of grueling battle. He also insists that the gifts be displayed,
that Agamemnon swear an oath that he never touched Briseis, and that a feast must be held.

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Agamemnon is pleased and accepts Odysseus’s council. Achilles repeats his desire to fight,
with Odysseus again attempting to calm him by speaking of his comrades’ physical need for
food.

The presents are displayed. Agamemnon sacrifices a boar to Zeus and swears his oath.
Achilles credits his fury and rage to Zeus’s desire to slaughter Achaeans and commands his
troops to feast so they can return to battle. He himself refuses to eat. Briseis enters and
laments Patroclus’s death, recalling his kindness and his promise to ensure that Achilles
married her at the end of the war. The women “wailed in answer”; grieving for Patroclus brings
out “each woman’s private sorrows” (498). Achilles sings a dirge for Patroclus and his hopes
that his beloved companion would survive. The leaders return the mourning. Their grief
provokes Zeus’s pity. He scolds Athena for abandoning Achilles and instructs her to give him
nectar and ambrosia to prevent him from becoming hungry.

Achilles arms himself in Hephaestus’s gear and picks up his spear, a gift to his father from
Chiron that only Achilles has “the skill to weird” (501). Alcimus and Automedon yoke the
immortal horses. Achilles tells them to “do better” and not abandon him as they did Patroclus
(501). One of them replies that they will save him this time, but it is his fate to die soon, as
Patroclus did, by a god’s hand. Achilles retorts that the horse need not waste its breath; he
knows his fate. He releases a cry as he drives out “in the front ranks” (502).

Book 20 Summary: “Olympian Gods in Arms”

Zeus summons all immortals to council and invites them to join the war effort on whichever
side they wish, while he remains on Olympus. Achilles has roared back into battle, terrifying
the Trojans, and Zeus fears that Achilles unchecked will defy his fate and sack Troy. Athena
and Ares each release a war cry, Athena beside the Achaeans and Ares the Trojans.

Disguised as Lycaon, Apollo taunts Aeneas that he is afraid to face Achilles. Aeneas objects
that gods always favor Achilles, and Apollo counters that Aeneas’s divine parent, Aphrodite,
outranks Achilles’s mother, Thetis. Filled with courage, Aeneas charges toward Achilles,
prompting Hera to rouse Athena and Poseidon to encourage Achilles. Poseidon counters that
they should wait to see whether Apollo and Ares act on behalf of the Trojans. The immortals
settle themselves in opposing camps, waiting to see who will make the first move.

Aeneas and Achilles close in on each other. Achilles taunts Aeneas that he is trying to curry
favor with Priam but will not succeed since Priam prefers his own sons. He reminds Aeneas

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that he fled Achilles in fear at their last encounter. Aeneas recites his genealogy as a
descendent of Zeus and Dardanus. They hurl their spears at each other. Aeneas’s hits its
mark but cannot pierce Achilles’s divine shield. Achilles’s strike misses, but he rushes at
Aeneas with his sword. Poseidon rallies the gods to save him since his destiny is to survive
and carry on Dardanus’s line. Poseidon pours mist over Achilles’s eyes, hurls Aeneas out of
danger, then warns him not to challenge Achilles or fight on the front lines for as long as
Achilles lives.

Achilles and Hector rally their men. Apollo orders Hector not to duel Achilles, who begins
slaughtering Trojans. The poet provides a catalogue of his victims, including Priam’s son
Polydorus. His death prompts Hector to charge at Achilles, who urges him on, eager to kill
him. Hector throws his spear, but Athena blows it back to him. Achilles charges, but Apollo
whisks Hector away, wrapped in mist. Achilles resumes his slaughter. One young fighter,
Tros, grasps Achilles’s knees, hoping for mercy; Achilles spears him. He rampages “like
inhuman fire,” “like a frenzied god of battle,” “like oxen broad in the brow” (519).

Books 17-20 Analysis

Achilles’s shield, described at the end of Book 18, portrays the larger world to which the Iliad
belongs. Though the poem revolves around the Trojan war, it weaves in all aspects of life
beyond the battlefield, indicating that everything in the mortal world is interconnected. Events
on the battlefield are not self-contained; they impact women, children, and the elderly, who
may or may not (through their prayers to the gods or good advice to warriors) have control
over their outcomes. This interconnection is further enacted through the poet’s similes that
compare events on the battlefield to events in pastures, on farms, in families, and in the
works of craftsmen. Through the scenes between Andromache and Hector earlier in the
poem, through Thetis’s love for her son, the poem repeatedly demonstrates the
interconnection of seemingly discrete social bodies. Modern readers may tend to elevate the
war as the subject of the poem; it is perhaps more accurate to call it the setting. The Iliad
seems concerned with all facets of mortal experience.

Upon hearing her son’s cry, Thetis and her sister Nereids initiate a ritual lament. Achilles’s
grief prompts Thetis’s grief, as hers provokes her sisters’. After Patroclus’s body is returned to
him, Achilles and his Myrmidons also perform dirges for Patroclus. Later still, Briseis
performs one for Patroclus. In all three cases the poem portrays lament as a public and
communal process that draws in the entire community: captives and captors, women and

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men—all participate in the ritual, and each is understood to be mourning their personal
sorrows. Thetis’s sorrow is that she is an immortal mother who cannot save her mortal son
from death. She will have to mourn her son. Thetis and Hephaestus’s meeting portrays her
grief that she cannot alter his fate, and neither can Hephaestus. Whether Achilles dies at Troy
imminently or many years on in Phthia, Thetis will lose him. Through epic song, however, he
remains eternal in mortal memory.

The prolonged battle for Patroclus’s body prefigures the fight for Achilles’s body, though it
does not happen in the Iliad. Patroclus is wearing Achilles’s armor, which Hector will strip and
wear, and which Achilles will later recover, fusing all three warriors together. Though
audiences would likely know Achilles’s fate, it is not fulfilled within the Iliad but implied
through Patroclus’s death, which can be understood as a ritual substitute for Achilles’s.

The terror that Achilles inspires by unleashing his war cry is reminiscent of the effect of Ares’s
screams when Diomedes injured him: It is capable of terrifying those who hear it and
heightening the divine power coursing through Achilles. The significant difference, however,
continues to be that Achilles is not whining about a flesh wound, as Ares was, but expressing
his deep sorrow at the death of his beloved companion. His all-consuming grief puts him on a
collision course with Hector, Troy’s most powerful defender. At the Trojan council, Polydamas
proposes withdrawing into the city to ensure its protection. Defending the city is the prudent
course, but Hector believes that he is on the brink of vanquishing the Achaeans, destroying
them and the threat they pose. His refusal to turn back will prove to be a fatal mistake.

Achilles announces his intention to return to battle at an Achaean council. The personal
motive that he previously lacked is retribution, exacting the blood price—which Ajax referred
to during the embassy in Book 9 and which is depicted on Achilles’s new shield crafted by
Hephaestus—for Patroclus’s death by killing Hector. That this will result in his own death and,
after that, the fall of Troy does not concern Achilles. He wants only to avenge his beloved
companion. This may suggest that the real pull to immortality for the hero is not glorying in
fighting and violence, without personal concerns, but the hero’s love for those closest to him.
Agamemnon offers all the same gifts and more, but they are of no consequence to Achilles.
He only cares about exacting retribution for Patroclus’s death.

In the council Agamemnon does not take responsibility for committing an outrage by denying
Achilles his prize. Instead, he tells a long story of how Ruin—Ate (άτε) in Greek, meaning
reckless impulse and rendered as “Delusion” in other translations—foiled Zeus, again

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referencing Hera’s scheme to ensure Heracles was born second. Zeus threw Ruin out of
Olympus and into the mortal world, a further instance of mortals paying the price when gods
become fed up.

Zeus’s invitation to the immortals to join the war effort derives from his concern that Achilles
will somehow manage to sack Troy, though he is not fated to do so. This presents another
wrinkle around the issue of fate. Whereas it has previously been depicted as immutable,
apparently mortals can defy it, hence the need for the gods to ensure it comes to pass. The
gods rush to the battlefield to meddle, but as will be revealed in the final books, they fight on
behalf of their personal favorites only insofar as it accords with the will of fate and Zeus. For
example, though he fights on behalf of the Achaeans, Poseidon removes Aeneas to safety
because he is fated to survive the fall of Troy and carry on the Dardanus family line.

At the beginning of this section, Achilles does not know that Patroclus has been killed.
Despite his divine insight, via Thetis, his knowledge is incomplete. By the end of Book 20,
however, Achilles’s emotional state—in this case battle rage—has propelled him beyond
mortal limits, beyond even heroic limits. He cuts down Trojans even when they supplicate, no
longer willing to spare them for lack of personal outrage. Every Trojan will pay for Patroclus’s
death, not only the man who killed him. The poet layers simile after simile at the end of Book
20 to emphasize that Achilles has lost his respect for mortal limits: He is “like inhuman fire,”
“like a frenzied god of battle,” “like oxen broad in the brow” (519).

Books 21-24

Book 21 Summary: “Achilles Fights the River”

Achilles pursues the retreating Trojans into the Xanthus River, choking it with men and
horses, then leaps in, slaughtering wildly. He captures 12 Trojan youths alive, instructing a
comrade to take them to his ship. Resuming his slaughter, he encounters Lycaon, a son of
Priam whom Achilles previously captured and sold into slavery. Lycaon begs for mercy,
pointing out that he has a different mother than Hector. Achilles replies that no son of Troy,
especially of Priam, will escape him alive, and even he, Achilles, has to die, so “[w]hy moan
about it” (523). Achilles drives his sword into Lycaon’s collarbone.

Achilles duels with Asteropaeus, grandson of the river Axius, who wounds Achilles’s arm, but
Achilles kills him, boasting about his superior lineage. Achilles chases down and kills a large
group of Asteropaeus’s comrades. The Xanthus rises up and objects that Achilles is choking

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him with corpses. Achilles refuses to stop killing, and the river fights him, repeatedly
pounding him with a great wave. When Achilles runs away, the river pursues him, crashing
down on his shoulders as Achilles dodges and weaves. He cries out to Zeus in reproach at the
ignominy of dying in the river “like some boy” (529). Poseidon and Athena rouse his courage,
assuring him that the river is not destined to kill him, but Xanthus calls out to the Simois River
for help, threatening to bury him in sand and gravel.

Concerned, Hera calls to Hephaestus. He shoots his fire, burning the plain, corpses, and
vegetation along the riverbank, consuming the river’s strength. Xanthus begs Hera to call off
Hephaestus, promising never again to interfere to save Troy. Hera instructs Hephaestus to
stop, saying that gods should not fight among themselves for mortals; nevertheless, the two
opposing Olympian camps collide in all-out war. Zeus, observing from Olympus, laughs in
delight.

Ares attacks Athena, who hurls a massive boundary stone into his neck, knocking him down,
then taunts him for being inferior. When she turns away, Aphrodite leads Ares off the field,
prompting Hera to urge Athena to go after her. Athena charges, punching Aphrodite in the
chest. As they lie in the dirt, Athena mocks them. Poseidon challenges Apollo, scolding him
for siding with Troy after how Laomedon cheated them and offering him the first shot. Apollo
replies that it would be insane to fight over mortals. He feels ashamed to fight against his
father’s brother. Artemis mocks him for cowardice, enraging Hera, who tears off Artemis’s
bow and quiver then boxes her ears with them. Artemis runs away weeping. Hermes assures
Leto that he will not challenge her since it is inappropriate to fight with a wife of Zeus. Leto
collects Artemis’s discarded bows and follows her daughter, who has returned to Olympus.
Cuddled on her father’s lap, she complains about Hera.

Worried for Troy, Apollo returns to the city while the rest of the immortals decamp for
Olympus. Meanwhile, Achilles continues his relentless slaughter. Priam stands on the walls,
urging the troops into the city to escape Achilles’s rampage. Apollo fills Agenor, a Trojan
prince, with courage, and he braces to face Achilles. The two duel, but Apollo spirits Agenor
away in a mist, taking his place to lure Achilles away from the Scaean Gates, giving the Trojan
armies time to retreat into the city.

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Book 22 Summary: “The Death of Hector”

While the Trojans pour into the city, Hector remains outside the gates. Apollo reveals himself
to Achilles, taunting him. Furious, Achilles sprints back toward the city. Priam begs Hector
not to face Achilles, foreshadowing what will happen when Troy falls, but he cannot change
Hector’s mind. Hecuba pleads with Hector to pity his mother who gave him life and nursed
him, but Hector feels he has no way out. Polydamas warned him, but he did not listen.
Because of his “reckless pride,” the Trojan armies are ruined (545). He would be ashamed to
face the Trojan men after turning back from the fight he himself courted. He briefly considers
trying to speak with Achilles, to offer to return Helen and her treasures, but he quickly accepts
that Achilles will not show him mercy.

At the last moment, Hector loses his nerve and runs. Achilles chases him three times around
the city while the immortals look down on them. Zeus grieves for Hector and considers
saving him, since he offered such excellent sacrifices. Athen advises her father that though
he is the most powerful and can do as he pleases, the others will resent him if he saves
Hector. Zeus tells her to “[h]old back no more,” and she speeds down to the plain (547).
Hector longs for escape, but Zeus holds up his scales; Hector’s side drops, signaling his
death. Apollo immediately leaves him, and Athena goes to Achilles’s side to strategize.

She appears to Hector disguised as his beloved brother Deiphobus, telling him that they will
take on Achilles together. Hector is overjoyed that his brother risked his life to come to his
aid. Lured by Athena, Hector faces Achilles and suggests they swear oaths that the victor will
not mutilate the victim’s body but return it to his comrades. Achilles retorts that there are no
oaths “between men and lions” or “wolves and lambs,” then throws his spear (550). He
misses, but Athena returns his spear to him. Hector’s throw hits but does not pierce Achilles’s
shield. He calls Deiphobus for a replacement spear, but his brother is gone. Hector
understands that a god has tricked him and his death has arrived.

Resolving not to die without glory, he lunges at Achilles with his sword, and Achilles charges
too. He drives his sword into Hector’s neck, at the one vulnerable spot of the armor Achilles
knows so well. With his dying breaths, Hector begs Achilles to return his body to his family,
but Achilles refuses. Hector predicts Achilles’s death at Paris and Apollo’s hands, then dies.
Achilles taunts his body, saying he will meet his death willingly “whenever Zeus and the other

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deathless gods would like to bring it on” (553). Achilles strips off Hector’s armor while the
Achaean armies rush forward to stab his body. Achilles ties Hector’s heels to his chariot and
drags his body through the dirt.

Watching from the walls, Hecuba tears off her veil and screams, tearing out her hair. Priam
and the Trojans cry out in grief. Hecuba leads the Trojan women in a dirge for her son.
Andromache, who had been arranging a bath for Hector upon his return from battle, hears her
mother-in-law’s cries and rushes to the walls. Seeing Hector being driven through the dirt, she
faints, then rips off her headdress (a wedding gift from Aphrodite) and laments for Hector and
the fate of their son. The women wail in response.

Book 23 Summary: “Funeral Games for Patroclus”

After the Myrmidons return to camp, Achilles leads a dirge for Patroclus then oversees a
funeral feast for the Myrmidons. He refuses to eat or wash until Patroclus’s funeral rites are
performed. Patroclus’s shade visits Achilles after he falls asleep and asks him to perform the
rites so he can pass through Hades’s gates. His final request is for their bones to be buried
together. Achilles tries to embrace Patroclus, but he is “like a wisp of smoke” (562).

At dawn, the Myrmidons prepare Patroclus’s funeral pyre. They sacrifice sheep and cattle and
surround his bier with honey and oil, four large stallions, two of Patroclus’s dogs, and the 12
Trojan youths whom Achilles previously captured. Achilles burns everything but Hector, whom
he intends to feed to the dogs. Aphrodite, however, will not allow it and preserves Hector’s
body. The pyre initially refuses to catch, prompting Achilles to pray to the west and north
winds, Zephyr and Boreas, respectively. Iris carries the message to them, and they unleash a
“superhuman roar” that sends “a huge inhuman blaze [...] howling up the skies” (566). Achilles
instructs the Achaean leaders to collect Patroclus’s bones and raise a temporary funeral
mound.

After the rites, Achilles brings out prizes for funeral games. The first competition is a chariot
race. Nestor advises his son Antilochus on strategy. During the race, Eumelus takes the lead,
followed by Diomedes. Apollo sabotages Diomedes by knocking his whip out of his hands, but
Athena returns it to him and causes Eumelus and Admetus to crash. Diomedes takes the lead,
followed by Menelaus and Antilochus. Antilochus swerves dangerously through a narrow
pass, prompting Menelaus to rebuke him, but Antilochus ignores him, surging ahead.
Diomedes wins, followed by Antilochus then Menelaus, and Eumelus last. Achilles wants to
give the second-place prize to Eumelus out of pity, but Antilochus objects. Achilles

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accommodates both. Menelaus accuses Antilochus of deliberately blocking his chariot, and
Antilochus immediately apologizes, deferring to Menelaus as his senior and “the greater man”
and relinquishing the prize (a mare) to him (577). Satisfied, Menelaus cautions Antilochus “to
refrain from cheating your superiors in future” and returns the mare to him (578). Achilles
gives Nestor, who is too old to compete, a gift to remember “the burial of Patroclus” (578).
Thrilled, Nestor tells a story of his past glory.

Boxing and wrestling matches come next. Odysseus and Greater Ajax are evenly matched in
the latter, and Achilles calls a draw. In the foot race that follows, the two men again are neck-
and-neck. Odysseus prays to Athena, and she trips Ajax, causing him to fall in a pile of
manure. Odysseus wins, and the Achaeans laugh at Ajax’s expense. Antilochus teases
Odysseus for being old and praises Achilles, earning a prize from the latter. After the foot
face, a duel in full battle gear is held. Ajax and Diomedes volunteer, but the duel is cut
prematurely short as the Achaeans worry that one of them will be killed. Weight toss and
archery competitions close the games. Lastly, Achilles presents a prize to Agamemnon
though he has not competed because he is “the best by far” (587).

Book 24 Summary: “Achilles and Priam”

The Achaean armies return to their camps after the games, while Achilles continues to grieve
Patroclus, unable to sleep. At dawn, he drags Hector’s body behind his chariot around
Patroclus’s tomb, but Apollo protects the corpse from being harmed. The immortals pity
Hector and consider sending Hermes to steal his body, but Hera, Poseidon, and Athena
object. Twelve days after Hector’s death, Achilles’s outrage continues, prompting Apollo to
rebuke the immortals for allowing it to continue. Zeus will not permit the body to be stolen
behind Achilles’s back, out of respect for Thetis, but he sends Iris to summon her. He
instructs Thetis to inform Achilles that the gods are angry with him, and he must accept
ransom for Hector’s body from Priam. After speaking with his mother, Achilles consents.

Zeus sends Iris to Priam. Finding the king and city in deep mourning, she instructs Priam to
prepare a cart with gifts and deliver them to Achilles, traveling only with a herald; Hermes will
guide him and ensure his safety. Hecuba objects to the plan, but Priam trusts Iris’s word and
insists on going, even if it leads to his death. He orders his surviving sons to prepare his cart,
filling it with gifts. Hecuba urges Priam to pray for an omen, and he complies. Zeus sends an
eagle, filling the Trojans with joy. Observing Priam’s progress fills Zeus with pity, and he
sends Hermes in the guise of a Myrmidons prince to deliver Priam safely to Achilles. Priam is

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initially frightened, but Hermes tells him, “you remind me of my dear father, to the life” (600).
Priam asks him if Achilles has mutilated Hector, and Hermes assures him that the gods are
preserving his body because they “love him dearly” (602).

When they arrive, Hermes reveals himself and instructs Priam to enter and supplicate
Achilles. Priam obeys, kneeling before Achilles, grasping his knees, and kissing his “terrible,
man-killing hands / that had slaughtered Priam’s many sons in battle” (604). Achilles and his
men marvel at Priam, who begs Achilles to remember his own father. Priam’s word hit their
mark. Achilles gently pushes Priam away, and both weep, each for their own sorrows. After a
while, Achilles lifts up Priam, praising his courage and seeing his father’s joys and hardships
reflected in his enemy’s father. He asks Priam to rest, but he wants to see his son
immediately. Achilles warns Priam not to “tempt my wrath” (607). Frightened, Priam obeys,
while Achilles and his comrades lead in the herald and unload the ransom. Achilles orders
Hector’s body bathed and anointed. He personally carries out the body, asking Patroclus not
to be angry with him.

Achilles tells Priam that Hector has been set free and asks Priam to eat with him, recalling
Niobe who ate even though Apollo and Artemis killed her children. After their meal, they gaze
at each other, marveling at each other’s beauty and nobility. Priam asks to rest, and while his
bed is being made, Achilles asks how long the Trojans need to perform Hector’s funeral rites,
promising to hold himself and the Achaeans back for as long as he needs. Priam goes to his
bed, while Achilles sleeps beside Briseis. Hermes rouses Priam and leads him safely out of
the Achaean camp.

Cassandra is the first to see her father returning and cries out, alerting the city. The Trojans
stream out of the gates to meet Priam. Andromache and Hecuba are the first to throw
themselves on the cart. Singers begin the dirges, then Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen each
lead one, lamenting Hector’s fate and their own, and the Trojan women answer. Priam orders
preparation for the funeral rites, “[a]nd so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses” (614).

Books 21-24 Analysis

Achilles’s outrageous slaughter culminates, in Book 21, in him fighting the river god Xanthus,
who is being choked by the corpses from Achilles’s rampage. Fighting a god is excessive,
even for preeminent heroes with divine lineage, and it seems the river god can kill Achilles. His
survival is not due to his own skill but the intervention of Hephaestus, who sends an all-
consuming blaze that drains the river’s strength. Achilles is the mortal pawn in the battle

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between these two gods, whose powers are set against each other. It seems the gods can
always find a way to challenge each other, if they choose the proper allies with the proper
skills and Olympian status. Thus, Hera seeks the help of the god of fire to counteract the river
god.

While Xanthus begs for mercy, all-out war breaks out among the two Olympian camps.
Cautionary tales and social values are encoded in their struggles. The two war gods—Ares
and Athena—face off, and Ares’s reckless violence cannot overcome Athena’s superior
tactics, indicating that strategy trumps strength, and foresight trumps impulsivity. Athena
vaunts her superiority over him and Aphrodite, whom Zeus previously warned to stay away
from the battlefield, suggesting the importance of not stretching beyond one’s proper social
function. In addition to the confrontations, there are retreats, inspired by the gods’ recognition
that they should not allow mortals to become sources of strife among them. Apollo feels
uncomfortable challenging his uncle Poseidon directly, while Hermes refuses to attack his
father’s consort Leto. Artemis mocks her brother, earning a beating from a furious Hera.
Artemis does not confront her but runs away weeping. The culmination of the Olympian battle
is Zeus snuggling his young daughter on his lap and gently asking who harmed her.

After they have had their fill, the gods—with the exception of Apollo, who returns to Troy—
decamp to Olympus and continue as they always have. Mortals, whose lives pass in a divine
blink, are not worth creating strife and instability among the Olympians. Not even Zeus can
be convinced to intervene to save Hector, though he loves and values him, because it will
anger the others. In any case, Hector must die at some point, whether fighting the best
warrior among the Achaeans or in old age.

At the moment that Zeus’s scales drop, indicating that Hector’s day of death has arrived,
Apollo leaves his side. Whatever his personal feelings, Apollo defers to his father’s will.
Hector’s parents cannot compel him to return to safety, perhaps for the same reason Zeus
does not save him from his fate: All fates lead to the same end, death. Hector chooses the
one that creates more narrative for him, via his fight with Achilles and the events that follow.
Hector’s choice to fight means that he is forever woven into Achilles’s kleos. At his moment
of death, he predicts Achilles’s death. Achilles’s response reiterates the desire that kept
Hector outside the city: Achilles will accept death whenever it comes, and he will go down
fighting. Priam expresses a similar ethos later, when Hermes sends him a message to present

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a ransom to Achilles for Hector’s body. He trusts in the goddess Iris, and if she is leading him
to his death, so be it. He will die at some point, and if it is while recovering his beloved son’s
body, so much the better.

At Patroclus’s funeral games, Achilles’s magnanimity contrasts with his inflexibility

throughout much of the poem. He negotiates quarrels and disagreements among the
participants, ensuring that prizes are distributed fairly, accepting criticism when competitors
protest his disbursements and adjusting them to ensure all feel honored. When he wants to
award the mare to Eumelus out of pity, Antilochus objects, prompting Achilles to find an
alternate prize for Eumelus. Both end up feeling happy and honored. Achilles awards Nestor,
who is too old to compete, a prize of honor and Agamemnon a prize as expedition leader.
Throughout, Achilles demonstrates the proper conduct for a leader. Menelaus and
Antilochus’s concessions to each other echo Nestor’s advice to Agamemnon and Achilles in
Book 1. Each concedes to the other’s status, not allowing the prize to become a source of
long-lasting strife between them. Had Agamemnon and Achilles followed this model, their
quarrel would not have erupted as it did.

Despite his magnanimous leadership at the funeral games, Achilles continues to succumb to
grief and rage. He seeks relief by dragging Hector’s corpse through the mud every morning at
dawn, outraging Apollo but not sating his grief. Zeus, conscious of the need to show Thetis
due respect, will not allow Hermes to steal the body, as was done for Sarpedon, but he
determines a proper course of action to end Achilles’s disrespect, demonstrating strategically
effective leadership.

Disguised as a Myrmidon prince, Hermes tells Priam that he reminds him of his own father.
This can be read as foreshadowing as well as expressive of the cyclicality that recurs in the
poem in a variety of ways.

Achilles was forewarned of Priam’s visit and agreed to the ransom even before Priam
requests it, yet the fragility of their truce hovers over the scene. The poet describes Priam
kneeling at the feet of his son’s killer, kissing his hands, weeping, and imploring him to think
of his own father. Aware that he will die soon, Achilles is moved by Priam’s vision, as he
knows that his father will also be left defenseless in his old age, without a strong son to
protect him. When Priam wants to see his son immediately, however, Achilles becomes angry.
His grief for Patroclus’s death and his feelings of guilt for not protecting him have not passed,

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but rather than acting on them, he warns Priam, who heeds him. After he dishonored Hector’s
corpse, Achilles himself carries the body to the cart, a gesture of reconciliation that would
have seemed unimaginable at the beginning of the book and poem.

A poem that began with men arguing at a war council ends with women performing funeral
rites. The last impression the poem leaves with readers/listeners is a community coming
together to mourn their greatest warrior, each having a voice and a space for their private
sorrows within the larger experience of communal grief. The final celebration is not for the
victors but for the hero who gave his life in so remarkable a fashion that it was woven into
eternal memory through song. Zeus gave mortals strife, and in response, they created poetry.

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Character Analysis

Achilles

The root of Achilles’s name in Greek is akhos (άχος), meaning sorrow or pain; his name
roughly means “man of many sorrows.” This correlates with his representation in the Iliad.
From the first word of poem, it is evident that Achilles is suffering. After his disastrous
argument with Agamemnon, he withdraws from battle, appearing infrequently but
significantly until the final books. Achilles has been portrayed as inflexible because he
refuses the embassy and holds tightly to both grief and rage throughout the poem. Yet the
Achilles readers/listeners encounter in Book 1 is markedly different from the one they are left
with in Book 24.

Achilles begins the poem preoccupied with how he is honored and furious when he feels
disrespected. The implication is that he has fought efficiently and exceptionally, above all
other Achaeans, and is a source of terror for the Trojans, but Achilles is not fighting for a
personal cause. He is at Troy because it will lead him to fame, in ways he may not know or
understand at the beginning of the poem, by way of the Iliad. The source of his fame
becomes, ironically, the story of his unquenchable rage and grief; it is the fame of going too
far and being humbled, having to accept that he is not a god. He has limits, and the process
of accepting them becomes the source of his fame.

Hector

In contrast to Achilles, Hector is fighting, from the outset, for a very personal cause: the
survival of his city and his family. He would return Helen to the Achaeans, along with her
treasure, but his brother Paris, who is portrayed as far more inclined to party than fight,
refuses to give up his prize from Aphrodite. Thus, Hector is forced to lead the defense of Troy,
the responsibility falling on him because he is the best Trojan warrior. Winning does not offer
the opportunity to plunder treasures but the prize of living, and like other heroes in the Iliad,
Hector values his life, his wife and son, his home and people.

The poem portrays Hector as beloved by the gods, in particular Zeus, who wants to save him
but is restrained from doing so by Athena. Zeus pities Hector for his fate and, as
compensation, allows him to feel the joy of victory, if only momentarily. The problem is that
Hector misreads these moments of success, interpreting them as harbingers of ultimate

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victory. When Hector realizes he has been fooled, partly from his own folly in ignoring
Polydamas’s measured advice, he goes down fighting. His personal cause lost, he fights to be
remembered as a brave fighter who faced his fate head-on. In this sense his narrative arc is
an inversion of Achilles’s.

Helen

Though Helen occupies relatively little space in the narrative, she is a central figure who
perhaps most starkly exemplifies mortal powerlessness in the face of divine forces. Her first
appearance in the narrative is in Book 3, weaving a web of the Trojan War, at which she is the
center but over which she has no say. Even the longing she feels for her former home and
husband is instilled in her by Iris. Helen’s own feelings and desires are never truly
individuated. After Aphrodite saves Paris from Menelaus, she fetches Helen, insisting that
Helen go to his bed. Helen lashes out, expressing her feelings of helplessness and
powerlessness, her frustration and grief at being passed from one man to another, according
to Aphrodite’s whims and schemes. The goddess of love responds with threats of violence
and worse, prompting Helen to comply instead of taking out her resentment at Paris.

Helen’s presence in Troy has brought the city to the edge of ruin within the Iliad; in the events
that follow the poem, it will cause the fall of the city, the death of its men and enslavement of
its women. Yet when she appears on the walls to watch the duel between Menelaus and
Paris, the Trojan elders remark on her beauty, saying it is “no wonder the men of Troy and
Argives under arms have suffered / years of agony all for her, for such a woman,” describing
her beauty as “terrible” (133). Hesiod’s Works and Days can again suggest a way of reading
their perception of beauty as both terrible and desirable. According to the myth of Pandora in
Hesiod, Zeus instructed the gods to create Pandora, the first woman, as both a gift and curse
to men. Pandora is conceptualized as an affliction, a punishment for men because
Prometheus outsmarted Zeus on their behalf, but she is pleasurable pain, a paradoxical
fusion that pervades the ancient Greek imagination.

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Themes

Journey of the Hero

Heroes in ancient Greek tradition are defined not by their inherent goodness and moral
correctness, as they are in modern times; rather, they belong to an earlier age of mortals who
were closer to the gods and possessed superhuman abilities. This conception comes down
through Hesiod’s Works and Days , which dates to the same broad historical period as Homer
(archaic Greece). Hesiod describes his generation as belonging to the fifth age of mortals that
followed the age of heroes, mortals who were descended directly from the gods. Because
they were so close to the gods, heroes caused quarrels among them. Fearful that these
quarrels would destabilize his rule, Zeus destroyed the heroes through wars, at Thebes and
Troy. The Iliad makes several cryptic references to this underlying goal complementing Zeus’s
promise to Thetis, most notably in the opening stanza: “the will of Zeus was moving toward
its end” (77). The competition and conflicts among the gods occupy much of the narrative, as
Achaean defenders Athena, Poseidon, and Hera face off against Apollo, Ares, and Aphrodite,
who support Troy.

The warriors whom readers/listeners encounter in the Iliad belong to Hesiod’s age of heroes,
as suggested by repeated references to their superhuman physical strength, divine parentage,
and direct contact (antagonistic and supportive) with the gods. Modern readers may be
puzzled by their often-excessive behavior and poor decision-making, but both are
characteristics that heroes possess. Just as their strengths are excessive, so are their
mistakes, and they repeatedly take things too far. For example, Achilles warns Patroclus to
turn back after securing the ships, but Patroclus becomes so caught up in his success that he
fails to heed his limits. When Apollo orders Patroclus three times to retreat from Troy’s walls,
Patroclus defies before he is finally killed by him. In Book 10, when Diomedes and Odysseus
raid the Thracian camp for their prized horses, Diomedes pauses to consider what outrageous
act he might commit. However, unlike Patroclus, when Athena prompts Diomedes to restrain
himself, lest he draw the attention of an antagonistic god, Diomedes heeds her advice, and he
and Odysseus make it safely back to the Achaean camp.

Diomedes and Patroclus’s experiences can be understood as compressed narratives that

echo the larger narrative around Achilles and Hector, the Iliad’s two central heroes who
undergo similar, though in some ways inverted, journeys. Both expect high honors, from

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mortals and gods, that push them beyond their limits, and both are ultimately compelled to
humbly accept their mortality.

Achilles’s rage is so all-consuming that he allows scores of warriors to die rather than
intercede on their behalf. His grief after Patroclus’s death also pushes him past mortal limits
set or overseen by the gods: He slaughters Trojans indiscriminately, ignoring suppliants,
fights the river god Xanthus, and drags Hector’s body in the dirt. It is not until he stops
obsessing about being honored that he connects to his mortality. This does not necessarily
mean only accepting that he must die or going willingly to his death but also seeing others’
mortal limits in himself. When Priam asks him to remember his father, it is a reminder that
Achilles, like Hector, will die, leaving his father unprotected. In Hector’s case, he assumes the
gods’ support means that he is destined for victory and supremacy, but it is instead a cruel
prelude to the fulfillment of prophecy that he will die and Troy will fall.

It is possible that the heroes’ journeys in the poem enact the hero as he was conceptualized
and worshipped in ancient hero cults, as a legendary ancestor whose sacrifice becomes a
community rallying point. The importance placed on securing heroes’ remains—Achaeans
and Trojans fight tirelessly over their comrades’ corpses—may speak to the importance of the
hero’s body being entombed and that tomb serving as a lodestone, as Ilus’s tomb does in the
Iliad’s narrative. Further, the funeral rite of burning, which was not practiced during the
archaic age, may be a reference to the process of immortalization. In the myth of Heracles,
which is repeatedly referenced in the Iliad, his immortalization occurs at the moment his body
goes up in flames. The poet also repeatedly refers to the funeral garments that warriors are
wrapped in as ambrosial or deathless. The funeral games held for Patroclus resemble
seasonal festivals held in honor of past heroes.

Fragility of Human Life and Creations

The poem repeatedly sets up contrasts between mortals and gods as well as between mortal
and divine creations that underscore the fragility of humans against the eternal, unchanging
gods.

One of the most pervasive contrasts in the poem is the frequently mentioned Trojan walls. As
referenced in Book 21, Poseidon and Apollo built the walls for the legendary Trojan ancestor
Laomedon. According to that piece of myth, Zeus punished Poseidon and Apollo for
insurrection by sending them to Troy for a year to serve Laomedon, who instructed the two
gods to build incorruptible walls around his city. These god-made walls prevented the

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Achaeans from sacking Troy for 10 years. When they do get close, as Patroclus does in Book
16, Apollo himself defends them, and when the city does eventually fall after the events in the
Iliad, it is through trickery, not brute force. In contrast, the man-made walls the Achaeans
erect around their camp fall within days under the combined Trojan attack, led by Apollo.

In addition to the walls, the poem references god-made armor that protects heroes who are
fortunate enough to be gifted it by a god. The one that receives the most attention is
Achilles’s new armor crafted by Hephaestus. It functions as a virtual divine shield that
protects Achilles. Gods and goddesses also at times serve as figurative armor, protecting
their favorite heroes from harm by misdirecting spears or arrows, as Athena does, or even
whisking them out of harm’s way, as Aphrodite and Apollo do.

Superior godly strength is also contrasted with inferior mortal strength, which is then
contrasted with the even more inferior strength of mortals of Homer’s “current” generation.
Thus, Apollo can knock down the Achaeans’ wall with the ease of a small child knocking down
a sandcastle and stun Patroclus with a single slap of his hand. Athena can hurl a massive
boundary stone at Ares. Mortal men of this heroic age are also noted to be stronger than
current mortals, so Nestor easily lifts a cup that even two “current” mortals would struggle to
hold.

The gruesome war injuries that the poet describes in excruciating detail are another facet of
this contrast. Warriors die holding their bowels in their hands, having their heads smashed
apart or their eyeballs knocked out, or from beheadings, but their cries of pain are relatively
muted. The gods, on the other hand, make a big fuss about their injuries even though they are
not fatal. In Book 5, for example, Diomedes plunges his spear into Ares’s belly, a deadly injury
for a mortal. Ares terrifies both sides with a “shriek, roaring, thundering loud as nine, ten
thousand combat soldiers,” yet he flies back to Olympus, where Zeus summons the god of
healing to restore him (192).

Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization

In Book 3 Iris is sent to fetch Helen and finds her “weaving a growing web, a dark red folding
robe, / working in the weft the endless blood struggles / stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives
armed in bronze / had suffered all for her at the god of battle’s hands” (132). This image
encapsulates how poetry is conceptualized in the Iliad, as an ever-growing web of

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interconnected stories. This web enfolds past and present, ancestors and descendants,
tellers and listeners, a process that exists eternally through repetition each time the poem is
performed (or, in modern times, read).

The Iliad is self-referential about poetry’s ability to immortalize heroes. Throughout the poem
gods and mortals revisit the deeds that they have performed. Stories about Heracles recur
throughout the narrative. Phoenix tells his friends the story of Meleager. Glaucus tells
Diomedes the story of Bellerophon. Additional poetic forms are evoked through Achilles
playing his lyre in Book 9 and women (Andromache, Thetis, Helen, and Hecuba) performing
laments throughout the narrative. The Iliad is the larger eternal web in which these stories
and poetic forms exist.

In many English translations, Fagles’s included, the Greek word kleos is often rendered as
“glory,” giving the impression that poetry exists to extol heroes’ excellent deeds. This
understanding, however, is predicated on a modern reading of what it means to be a hero and
a limited expression of kleos, which does mean remarkable deeds, but in the most literal
sense: deeds that are worthy of being remarked upon, that inspire awe and wonder, whether
great or terrible. The Iliad weaves together stories of men and gods, married couples, beloved
companions, parents and children, victors and vanquished. All coexist in the poem, receive
names and genealogies, and are memorialized and relived with each performance (or reading)
of the poem.

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Symbols & Motifs

Ilus’s Tomb

Ilus was the legendary founder of Troy, whose name gave the city its alternate name, Ilium.
His tomb is mentioned at seminal moments in the narrative. In Book 8, for example, Paris
steadies himself to take a shot at Diomedes by leaning on Ilus’s tomb: “the archer leaning
firmly against a pillar / raised on the man-made tomb of Dardan’s son, / Ilus an old lord of the
realm in ancient days” (308). Diomedes is in the process of stripping off the armor of a Trojan
he had just killed, but Paris’s shot hits its mark. Diomedes is wounded and must withdraw
from battle. Later, in Book 10, the Trojans hold a council at the tomb.

An ancestor’s tomb seems to function as a lodestone for the community. It rallies them and
gives them strength, reminding them that they belong to something larger than themselves.
They connect to each other and their history through the common reference point of the hero.
The references to Ilus’s tomb allude to the importance of ancestors in the ancient Greek
imagination and possibly to the practice of hero cult worship in ancient Greece.

Zeus’s Scales

Zeus’s scales are a source of some debate. They appear at few but significant life-or-death
moments in the poem and seem to represent Zeus’s power, though whether this power is to
determine fate or simply ensure that it is executed remains unclear. In Book 8, when Zeus
decides to give the Trojans victory, he holds out “his sacred golden scales” and places “two
fates of death that lays men low,” one for the Trojans and the other for the Achaeans (233).
Zeus holds up the scales, allowing the losing side to drop: “gripping the beam mid-haft the
Father raised it high / and down went Achaea’s day of doom, Achaea’s fate / settling down on
the earth that feeds us all / as the Fate of Troy went lifting toward the sky” (233).

Almost identical language is used when Zeus lifts his scales at the moment of Hector’s death:
“Father Zeus held out his sacred golden scales; / in them he placed two fates of death that
lays men low— / one for Achilles, one for Hector breaker of horses” (548). As with the
Achaeans and Trojans, the falling of the scales indicates whose death has arrived: “gripping
the beam mid-haft the Father raised it high / and down went Hector’s day of doom, dragging

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him down / to the strong House of Death” (548). The scales do not exist to demonstrate
balance and harmony, as the goal is not to achieve equality between two but to announce
who will die.

Cyclicality

The Homeric poems are striking for their repetition, evident in the repeated use of epithets
(descriptive phrases attached to characters, e.g., “Hector breaker of horses”) and type scenes
(e.g., descriptions of duels that march chronologically through the same steps) as well as
repeated grammatical formulations. Groundbreaking research by Milman Parry in the 1930s
explained this repetition in terms of oral poetic composition. Poets who compose orally,
especially in performance, may rely on formulaic phrases and patterns that allow them to
improvise in performance while remaining inside the boundaries of their form. In this sense,
repetition is essentially understood as a mnemonic device.

The poem also demonstrates awareness of repetition as a naturally occurring phenomenon in

which mortals participate. References to the heroes’ peacetime lives place them within that
cycle: Mortals are born, grow up, and die, ideally succeeded by offspring who experience that
same cycle, in perpetuity. Mortals also participate in the seasons through the endeavors they
undertake, planting and farming being the most obvious examples, another being the
formation of families through marriages, births, and deaths.

Conscious acceptance of mortal experiences’ cyclicality can provide perspective on tragedy.

Achilles tells Lycaon not to moan about being killed because all men must die. Priam implores
Achilles to see the repetition of his plight in that of Achilles’s father. Cyclicality also provides
continuity. Mortals die bodily deaths, but their stories continue to be passed down through
their surviving lines.

Andromache’s Headdress

After Andromache sees Hector’s body being dragged through the dirt, she tears off her
“glittering headdress,” which the poet describes elaborately:

the cap and the coronet, braided band and veil,

all the regalia golden

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Aphrodite gave her once,

the day that Hector, helmet flash in sunlight,

led her home to Troy from her father’s house

with countless wedding gifts to win the heart (557).

In the moment of Andromache’s devastating grief at the loss of her husband, the poet invokes
her wedding day and the divine genealogy of her headdress, a gift from the goddess of love
herself. Ripping it off externalizes her grief. The force of it is so strong that it cannot be
contained by the propriety of dress.

The fusion of wedding and death here is not a unique association. The association of
marriage and death in ancient Greek poetry exists through the myth of Persephone, whom
Hades, god of the underworld, kidnaps to become his wife. Her mother Demeter, goddess of
the harvest, becomes so inconsolable with grief that crops die and famine descends. Only
when her daughter is permitted to return to her for regular visits does Demeter allow the earth
to bloom again. Andromache’s headdress represents this association as well as the cycle
that all mortal families are subject to, beginning with marriage and ending with death.

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Important Quotes

1. “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon, lord of men and brilliant Achilles.”
(Book 1, Page 77)

The Iliad’s opening stanza operates as a compressed narrative of the whole poem, identifying
the central conflict that moves the plot, Achilles’s all-consuming rage at Agamemnon and the
destruction it wreaks. The ancient Greeks had numerous words to express anger-like feelings.
The one used in the Greek text, which Fagles translates here as “rage,” is menin (μηνιν), a
type of long-lasting anger associated with gods. This divine-level rage may be inappropriate
for a mortal, as Achilles is owing to his mortal father, but it is tied to Zeus, who is identified
from the outset as the driver of the poem’s tragic events.

2. “And the whole assembly surged like big waves at sea,

the Icarian Sea when East and South Winds drive it on,
blasting down in force from the clouds of Father Zeus,
or when the West Wind shakes the deep standing grain
with hurricane gusts that flatten down the stalks—
so the massed assembly of troops was shaken now.”
(Book 2, Page 102)

The Iliad has paradoxically been called both an antiwar poem and a poem that glorifies war.
The poet’s simile comparing the surging troops to a surging wave suggest an alternative
perspective that the poem neither glorifies nor decries war but accepts it as a force of nature
whose tragic scope inspires awe and wonder. In the Homeric imagination, forces of nature
are personified as gods and goddesses, as with, in these similes, the East, South, and West

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Winds, and Zeus. The poet frequently layers similes, as in this instance, perhaps attempting
to overwhelm listeners/readers’ senses in the way that nature’s uncontrollable elements often
do.

3. “Sing to me now, you Muses who hold the halls of Olympus!

You are the goddesses, you are everywhere, you know all things—
all we hear is the distant ring of glory, we know nothing—
who were the captains of Achaea? Who were the kings?
The mass of troops I could never tally, never name,
not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,
a tireless voice and the heart inside me bronze,
never unless you Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus
whose shield is rolling thunder, sing, sing in memory
all who gathered under Troy.”
(Book 2, Page 115)

The poet invokes the Muses several times in the poem. As goddesses, they see the whole,
unlike mortals, whose vision is limited and partial. The poet appeals to the Muses to become
their voice so as to convey the full scope of the Achaean allied armies, since mortals do not
know all but can hear “the distant ring of glory”—kleos in the Greek text, perhaps referring to
the epic song/poem that the Muses transmit through the poet’s voice. The section that
follows, in which the poet reviews the Achaean allied states, their leaders, and the troops they
command, is called the Catalogue of Ships. It may have served to rally ancient audiences
around a Panhellenic concept, as they listened for their particular island or city to be
mentioned and connected to a shared heroic past.

4. “Soon as the warrior Menelaus marked him,

Paris parading there with his big loping strides,
flaunting before the troops, Atrides thrilled
like a lion lighting on some handsome carcass,
lucky to find an antlered stag or wild goat
just as hunger strikes—he rips it, bolts it down,
even with running dogs and lusty hunters rushing him.
So Menelaus thrilled at heart—princely Paris there,
right before his eyes. The outlaw, the adulterer...

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‘Now for revenge!’ he thought, and down he leapt

from his chariot fully armed and hit the ground.”
(Book 3, Page 129)

Similes saturate the poem, and they generally fall into three categories: nature, animal, and
domestic. In this instance the poet uses an animal simile to depict the warriors and their
relationship to each other. Lions are a common choice for describing warriors, as in this
passage that compares Menelaus’s predatory delight at spotting Paris to a lion finding a stag
or goat. Paris’s “parading,” “loping strides,” and “flaunting before the troops” indirectly
associate him with the stag or goat that Menelaus’s lion ravages (129).

5. “And Iris came on Helen in her rooms…

weaving a growing web, a dark red folding robe,
working into the weft the endless bloody struggles
stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives armed in bronze
had suffered all for her at the god of battle’s hands.”
(Book 3, Page 132)

Iris has come to fetch Helen to watch the duel between her former and current husbands,
Hector and Paris, and finds her weaving images from the war into a garment. Poetry and
weaving are often linked in the ancient Greek imagination. Helen weaving the war could
represent her role as the token cause, provoked by the gods to construct a web into which
men are lured to their deaths via Ares, “the god of battle” (132). The act of weaving the war
could also be metaphoric, referring to the poet’s work of crafting epic poetry from the war.

6. “But you,
Menelaus, the blessed deathless gods did not forget you,
Zeus’s daughter the queen of fighters first of all.
She reared before you, skewed the tearing shaft,
flicking it off your skin as quick as a mother
flicks a fly from her baby sleeping softly.”
(Book 4, Page 149)

“Zeus’ daughter the queen of fighters” refers to Athena, who has returned to the battlefield
after the aborted duel to ensure the war continues (149). After prompting Pandarus to break
the truce by shooting an arrow at Menelaus, she then ensures Menelaus’s safety by brushing
it away. Comparing the virgin goddess to a mother is unexpected but draws attention to life

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beyond the battlefield, particularly the many mothers who cannot save their sons from death
so easily. The simile also draws attention to the goddess’s power to impose her will, both
through the manipulation of Pandarus and the protection of Menelaus. Fate and the
immortals exert more power over events and outcomes than human choices.

7. “And Telamonian Ajax struck Anthemion’s son,

the hardy stripling Simoisius, still unwed...
His mother had borne him along the Simois’ banks
when she trailed her parents down the slopes of Ida
to tend their flocks, and so they called him Simoisius.
But never would he repay his loving parents now
for the gift of rearing—his life cut short so soon,
brought down by the spear of lionhearted Ajax.”
(Book 4, Page 161)

The poet records 240 deaths in the Iliad, and none of the victims go unnamed. In addition to
identifying the victim and the victim’s father by name, the poet typically records details about
the warrior’s life before the war. In the case of Telamonian Ajax’s (i.e., Greater Ajax) victim
here, the poet describes the circumstances of his birth and draws attention to his parents’
loss: They lose their potential protector and caregiver in their old age. Instances such as
these, which saturate the narrative, evoke pathos for the victims but do not villainize the
victor.

8. “High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask about my birth?

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.”
(Book 6, Page 200)

As a prelude to dueling, Diomedes has asked Glaucus to identify himself, which means giving
his name and genealogy. Glaucus replies that it hardly matters since mortals’ lives are like
trees that fall and scatter, undifferentiated. Their lives are absorbed into the cycle of nature,
fertilizer for future generations. Glaucus proceeds to defy his own words by launching into a

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long story about his ancestor, the hero Bellerophon, which alerts Diomedes to their guest-
friendship relationship. Though mortal lives come to an end, they are individuated through
memory and poetry, through the stories that are sung about them.

9. “Reaching the Myrmidon shelters and their ships,

they found him there, delighting his heart now,
plucking strong and clear on the fine lyre—
beautifully carved, its silver bridge set firm—
he won from the spoils when he razed Eetion’s city.
Achilles was lifting his spirits with it now,
singing the famous deeds of fighting heroes...
Across from him Patroclus sat alone, in silence,
waiting for Aeacus’ son to finish with his song.”
(Book 9, Page 257)

When Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix arrive to convince Achilles to return to battle, they find him
playing the lyre and singing about “the famous deeds of fighting heroes” (257). The passage
is one of several instances where characters within the song-poem themselves sing, other
notable instances being the many performances of lament among both Achaeans and
Trojans. The lyre is also significant, as it was a spoil of war from the sack of Thebes, the city
of Eetion, who was Andromache’s father. While Achilles may not feel a personal stake in the
war until Patroclus is killed, Hector himself may be nursing a personal grievance that moves
him to challenge Achilles, though it leads to his death.

10. “I say no wealth is worthy my life! Not all they claim

was stored in the depths of Troy, that city built on riches,
in the old days of peace before the sons of Achaea came—
not all the gold held past in the Archer’s rocky vaults,
in Phoebus Apollo’s house on Pytho’s sheer cliffs!
Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man’s life breath cannot come back again—
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.”
(Book 9, Page 265)

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Achilles demonstrates that he is keenly aware of the finality of death on the mortal body.
Once the hero’s life force leaves his body, it cannot be restored. Promises of material wealth
do not move him because it cannot compensate for or restore life once its lost. He rejects
Agamemnon’s piles of gifts for this reason. This episode suggests that Achilles is a warrior
who values his life and does not give it up easily. When he does finally return to battle, it is
not for the gifts that are once again offered but to avenge his beloved companion, the
compensation he accepts for his loss of life.

11. “So it was in the old days too. So we’ve heard

in the famous deeds of fighting men, of heroes,
when seething anger would overcome the great ones.
Still you could bring them round with gifts and winning words.
There’s an old tale I remember, an ancient exploit,
nothing recent, but this is how it went...
We are all friends here—let me tell it now.”
(Book 9, Page 269)

Phoenix entreats Achilles to overcome his anger, following the example provided by ancient
heroes whose “famous deeds” the present company have heard about—klea anthron eroon
(κλέα ανδρών ηρώων) in the Greek text. These past heroes were, like Achilles, prone to
dramatic fits of anger, perhaps justifiably, but their anger could be soothed with “gifts and
winning words” (269). Phoenix claims to remember “an old tale […], an ancient exploit,”
implying that what he remembers is not a personal experience but a poetic rendering that
functions as collective memory. Phoenix proceeds to tell the story because the present
company “are all friends,” φίλοισι in Greek, implying also the people to whom you are bound
and for whom you are responsible.

12. “Achilles—
he’s made his own proud spirit so wild in his chest,
so savage, not a thought for his comrades’ love—
we honored him past all others by the ships.
Hard, ruthless man...
Why, any man will accept the blood-price paid
for a brother murdered, a child done to death.
And the murderer lives on in his own country—

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the man has paid enough, and the injured kinsman

curbs his pride, his smoldering, vengeful spirit,
once he takes the price.
You—the gods have planted
a cruel, relentless fury in your chest! All for a girl,
just one, and here we offer you seven—outstanding beauties—
that, and a treasure trove besides.”
(Book 9, Page 273)

Ajax expresses his frustration with Achilles, who has rejected Phoenix’s plea and cautionary
tale, through the modified myth of Meleager. Ajax points out that even a man whose loved
one was murdered will accept a blood-price as compensation for his loss. Ajax portrays
Achilles’s loss as much less significant than the death of a loved one, since Briseis is “just
one” girl (273). Ajax’s implication is that Achilles is violating his society’s norms, but this
somewhat deflects from the underlying obsession that fuels Achilles’s rage: Whatever he
does or does not feel for Briseis, she represents his honor. Neither Agamemnon’s gifts nor the
embassy address this deeper significance.

13. “And Dolon son of the herald blurted out, ‘Yes, yes,
I’ll tell you everything, down to the last detail!
Hector’s holding council with all his chiefs,
mapping plans on old King Ilus’ barrow,
clear of the crowds at camp.”
(Book 10, Page 290)

After being captured by Odysseus and Diomedes, Dolon quickly reveals all that he knows
about the Trojans’ plans, adding that their council met “on old King Ilus’ barrow” (290). Ilus
was Laomedon’s son and Priam’s grandfather, thus an important ancestor to the Trojan royal
family. That the city’s leaders hold council at his burial mound (his barrow) could signal the
significance of mythic ancestors in hero cults. It has been posited since antiquity that Book
10 is a late addition to the Iliad that has come down to modern times, but Ilus’s barrow makes
several appearances at significant moments.

14. “Iphidamas, the rough and rangy son of Antenor

bred in the fertile land of Thrace, mother of flocks.
Cisseus reared him at home when he was little—

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his mother’s father who sired the fine beauty Theano—

but once he hit the stride of his youth and ached for fame,
Cisseus tried to hold him back, gave him a daughter’s hand
but warm from the bridal chamber marched the groom,
fired up by word that Achaea’s troops had landed.”
(Book 11, Page 303)

The poet has asked the Muses to reveal the men who battled against Agamemnon, one of
whom is Iphidamas of Thrace, a Trojan ally. Young and newly married, Iphidamas joins the
Trojan defensive effort though it may lead to his death, prefiguring Sarpedon and Glaucus’s
conversation in Book 12. The description of him “ach[ing] for fame” suggests a different kind
of personal motive: being included in and achieving immortality through the epic song of
Ilium.

15. “Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray

and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,
I would never fight on the front lines again
or command you to the field where men win fame.
But now, as it is, the fates of death await us,
thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive
can flee them or escape—so in we go for attack!
Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!”
(Book 12, Pages 335 - 336)

Zeus’s son Sarpedon has explained to Glaucus why they, as leaders, must fight on the front
lines: because leaders are most honored “with pride of place, choice meats and brimming
cups,” and being regarded “like gods” (335). Unlike gods, however, mortals must die, one way
or another. Since death is inevitable, they may as well face it willingly and find some measure
of honor through it, by performing deeds worthy of being woven into the epic poem that is the
song of Ilium.

16. “He brought him down with a glinting jagged rock,

massive, top of the heap behind the rampart’s edge,
no easy lift for a fighter even in prime strength,
working with both hands, weak as men are now.
Giant Ajax hoisted it high and hurled it down,

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crushed the rim of the fighter’s four-horned helmet

and cracked his skull to splinters, bloody pulp—
and breakneck down like a diver went the Trojan
plunging off and away from the steep beetling tower
as life breath left his bones.”
(Book 12, Page 337)

This passage depicts Greater Ajax’s awe-inspiring strength, as contrast with the weakness of
the poet’s contemporaries. This and other descriptions like it peppered throughout the poem
speak to the hero as a superhuman tribe of men of an earlier generation. The force of Ajax’s
blow inflicts devastating injuries on his victim, which the poet describes in brutal, gory detail.

17. “A spearhead punched his gullet under the chin

and the bronze point went ripping through his nape
and down the Trojan fell as an oak or white poplar falls
or towering pine that shipwrights up on a mountain
hew down with whetted axes for sturdy ship timber—
so he stretched in front of his team and chariot,
sprawled and roaring, clawing the bloody dust.”
(Book 13, Page 354)
The poet describes the death of Trojan Asius, whom Idomeneus cuts down as he is trying to
protect his comrade’s corpse from being stripped of its armor. The simile is one the poet uses
frequently to describe warriors’ deaths; they are likened to trees being cut down to serve
another purpose (in this case to build a ship). These similes can be understood as conveying
the meaning of heroic ancestors. Their remarkable deeds—great and terrible—are woven into
songs that, through repeated performance, become collective memory, conveying the history,
values, and rituals of the hero’s people.

18. “Holding formation now the Trojans rolled across it,

Apollo heading them, gripping the awesome storm-shield
and he tore that Argive rampart down with the same ease
some boy at the seashore knocks sandcastles down—
he no sooner builds his playthings up, child’s play,
than he wrecks them all with hands and kicking feet,
just for the sport of it. God of the wild cry, Apollo—

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so you wrecked the Achaeans’ work and drove the men

who had built it up with all that grief and labor
into headlong panic rout.”
(Book 15, Page 399)

This passages highlights the ease with which gods can destroy creations that humans labor
over. The wall that the Achaeans toiled to construct proves as insubstantial as a sandcastle
under Apollo’s hands. Further, for the gods, eternal life means they have nothing to lose or to
gain, rendering everything but a game for their diversion and entertainment. The ease with
which the Achaeans’ wall, which they did not secure with a prayer to the gods, falls also
contrasts with the Scaean Gates that protect Troy. The Achaeans must sack the city with
trickery because they are unable to raze the city’s god-built walls.

19. “Look down. Many who battle round King Priam’s

mighty walls are sons of the deathless gods—
you will inspire lethal anger in them all.
No,
dear as he is to you, and your heart grieves for him
leave Sarpedon there to die in the brutal onslaught,
beaten down at the hands of Menoetius’ son Patroclus.
But once his soul and the life force have left him,
send Death to carry him home, send soothing Sleep,
all the way till they reach the broad land of Lycia.
There his brothers and countrymen will bury the prince
with full royal rites, with mounded tomb and pillar.
These are the solemn honors owed the dead.”
(Book 16, Page 427)

After Zeus expresses his wish to save his son Sarpedon from death at Patroclus’s hands,
Hera warns him that the other gods will resent his attempt to save his son when their own
must die. Even if Zeus can prevent a mortal’s fate from being fulfilled, it may not be prudent,
as it could provoke other gods who wish to do likewise to rebel against him. As long as the
gods remain tied to and invested in their mortal children, those children will be a source of
competition among the gods. The burial rites and tomb that Hera describes may refer to a
hero’s tomb.

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20. “Patroclus though—the spear in his grip was shattered,

the whole of its rugged bronze-shod shadow-casting length
and his shield with straps and tassels dropped from his shoulders,
flung down on the ground—and lord Apollo the son of Zeus
wrenched his breastplate off. Disaster seized him—
his fine legs buckling—
he stood there, senseless—.”
(Book 14, Page 438)

The prelude to Patroclus’s death involves Apollo smacking him with the flat of his hand,
stunning him and shattering his spear, then removing his protective armor. The direct
interference of a god to stun Patroclus and expose him on the battlefield seems to load the
moment with ritual significance. Euphorbus leaps in to stab Patroclus between the shoulders,
and he tries, unsuccessfully, to retreat into the Achaean line. Seeing his opportunity, Hector
strikes the death blow. In predicting Hector’s death, Patroclus’s last word is “Achilles” (440).
Patroclus’s manner of death, dressed in Achilles’s armor, prefigures the latter’s offstage
death, also at the hands of a son of Priam and Apollo.

21. “Yes, I gave birth to a flawless, mighty son...

the splendor of heroes, and he shot up like a young branch,
like a fine tree I reared him—the orchard’s crowning glory—
but only to send him off in the beaked ships to Troy
to battle Trojans! never again will I embrace him
striding home through the doors of Peleus’ house.
And long as I have him with me, still alive,
looking into the sunlight, he is racked with anguish.
And I, I go to his side—nothing I do can help him.
Nothing. But go I shall, to see my darling boy,
to hear what grief has come to break his heart
while he holds back from battle.”
(Book 18, Page 469)

Thetis’s speech above is introduced as “launch[ing] a dirge,” suggestive of lament as a choral

community ritual (469). It is Patroclus not Achilles who has died, but Thetis sings the lament
for her son, which alludes to Patroclus’s death being a rehearsal or substitute for Achilles’s
future death. Thetis knows this because she is a goddess, possessing divine insight into

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future events but no power to alter them. Her description of Achilles as “young branch” that
“shot up” to become “the orchard’s crowning glory” only to be cut down alludes to the warrior
dying at the peak of his beauty, though his bodily death will precede his immortalization.

22. “‘So grief gives way to grief, my life one endless sorrow!
The husband to whom my father and noble mother gave me,
I saw him torn by the sharp bronze before our city,
and my three brothers—a single mother bore us:
my brothers, how I loved you!—
you all went down to death on the same day...
But you, Patroclus, you would not let me weep,
not when the swift Achilles cut my husband down,
not when he plundered the lordly Mynes’ city—
not even weep! No, again and again you vowed
you’d make me godlike Achilles’ lawful, wedded wife,
you would sail me west in your warships, home to Pythia
and there with the Myrmidons hold my marriage feast.
So now I mourn your death—I will never stop—
you were always kind.’

Her voice rang out in tears

and the women wailed in answer, grief for Patroclus
calling forth each woman’s private sorrows.”
(Book 19, Page 498)

Laments are woven through the Iliad, increasing in intensity as the poem moves toward its
climax and conclusion. This passage is Briseis’s lament for Patroclus. It begins not for him
but for her husband, father, and brothers, all of whom Achilles killed. Patroclus did not allow
her to lament, a gesture she seems to characterize as “kind” (498). As difficult as this may be
for modern audiences to relate to, its significance in the poem may be that Patroclus’s death
reawakens the grief she felt but perhaps did not fully express for her previous losses.
Similarly, her losses provoke the women with her to experience their own “private sorrows”
(498). Grief is both personal and communal, lament both solo and choral. The women weep
for men who have died, but this grief is not individuated from their own.

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23. “She flung to the winds her glittering headdress,

the cap and the coronet, braided band and veil,
all the regalia golden Aphrodite gave her once,
the day that Hector, helmet a flash in sunlight,
led her home to Troy from her father’s house
with countless wedding gifts to win her heart.
But crowding round her now her husband’s sisters
and brothers’ wives supported her in their midst,
and she, terrified, stunned to the point of death,
struggling for breath now and coming back to life,
burst out in grief among the Trojan women: ‘O Hector—
I am destroyed!’”
(Book 22, Page 557)

Andromache witnesses Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse behind his chariot through the dirt
and faints. When she revives, she tears off her complex headgear, a gesture of intimacy and
vulnerability. The reference to Aphrodite introduces a tragic allusion to her wedding day. Now,
as then, the women closest to her surround her and sing with her, not in celebration but to
lament her young husband’s premature death, which prefigures the fall of the city, which will
lead to Andromache’s enslavement and their infant son’s death, the fate they knew would
befall Hector’s family if he fell. Andromache’s lament expresses her grief not only for her
husband but for herself and her son, as their fates are interwoven.

24. “A last request—grant it, please.

Never bury my bones apart from yours, Achilles,
let them lie together...
just as we grew up together in your house,
after Menoetius brought me there from Opois,
and only a boy, but banished for bloody murder
the day I killed Amphidamas’ son. I was a fool—
I never meant to kill him—quarreling over a dice game.
Then the famous horseman Peleus took me into his halls,
he reared me with kindness, appointed me your aide.
So now let a single urn, the gold two-handled urn
your noble mother gave you, hold our bones—together!”
(Book 23, Page 562)

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Patroclus’s final request to Achilles, for their bones to be placed in a single urn and buried
together, has been cited as possible evidence of the substitutive role Patroclus’s death plays
in the Iliad. He dies simultaneously in place and advance of Achilles, as a hero’s death in cult
worship may also be conceptualized as substitutive. Hero ancestors died dramatic, tragic
deaths and became immortalized in song, and their tombs may provide communal rallying
points, as Ilus’s tomb seems to function in the Iliad.

25. “Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right,

remember your own father! I deserve more pity...
I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before—
I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

These words stirred within Achilles a deep desire

to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief.”
(Book 24, Page 605)

The Iliad ends not in the fiery blaze of battle or the crowning of victors but in a moment of
shared grief and reconciliation between a grieving father and his son’s killer, a grieving friend
and the father of his beloved companion’s killer. These tragic events were set in motion by
Eris at the wedding of Achilles’s parents, escalated with the dishonor of Menelaus, then of
Achilles, then by Thetis’s “disastrous prayer” (407). Despite exacting his blood-price by killing
Hector, performing Patroclus’s funeral rites, and repeatedly venting his rage on Hector’s body,
Achilles cannot overcome his anger. What finally causes his anger to dissipate is seeing his
own father in his enemy’s father, his fate in his enemy’s fate.

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Essay Topics

1. In the first stanza the poet refers to the Achaean deaths as “the will of Zeus […] moving
toward its end” (77). Why does Zeus want to kill the heroes? What does he hope to achieve?
Use at least three specific examples from the text to support your answer.

2. Examine the relationship between mortals and immortals. Draw on at least three specific
interactions in your discussion.

3. What is the function of nature similes in the poem? Explore their meaning using at least
three similes from the poem.

4. What defines a hero, according to the Iliad? Discuss using at least three examples from the
text.

5. In Book 4 Athena flicks an arrow away “as quick as a mother / flicks a fly from her baby
sleeping softly” (149), while Apollo in Book 15 knocks down the Achaeans’ walls “with the
same ease / some boy at the seashore knocks sandcastles down” (399). Discuss the similes
used to describe the gods. How do they differ from the similes that describe mortals? Use at
least four examples in your discussion.

6. The poet invokes the Muses several times in the poem. Consider the significance of these
invocations by analyzing at least two examples of them.

7. Is the Iliad a poem about a war or set during a war? Support your answer using at least four
examples from the text.

8. Analyze the visual description of Achilles’s shield. What does it represent?

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9. When Andromache sees Achilles dragging Hector’s body through the dirt, she rips out her
headdress, a gift from Aphrodite on their wedding day, and leads the Trojan women in a
lament. Discuss the significance of Andromache’s actions in the context of women’s roles in
the Iliad.

10. What, if anything, enables Achilles to overcome his rage? How do you know?

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Teaching Guide
Teacher Introduction

The Iliad

Genre: Fiction; heroic epic in verse

Originally Published: Unknown; written origins often dated to 8th century BCE; translation
by Robert Fagles published in 1990
Reading Level/Interest: Grades 11-12; college/adult
Structure/Length: Approx. 15,700 lines of dactylic hexameter divided into 24 books
(original Greek translation)
Protagonist and Central Conflict: The epic poem follows Greek hero Achilles into the later
violent and deadly episodes of the Trojan War, exploring themes of fate, anger, pride, and
the hero’s journey.
Potential Sensitivity Issues: War; death; violence; objectification of women

Homer, Author

Bio: The authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey continue to be debated; in fact, the
name “Homer” may refer to the tradition of epic hexameter verse rather than a writer.
Scholars tend to think the poem was established in the oral tradition over centuries, then
written down sometime around mid-8th century BCE.
Other Works: The Odyssey (Greek epic poem typically attributed to Homer); other Robert
Fagles translations: The Odyssey (1996); The Aeneid (2006)
Awards: Academy of American Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award (1991)

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

Journey of the Hero

Fragility of Human Life and Creations
Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

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Develop an understanding of the historical contexts of oral traditions and Poetry as a

Medium of Immortalization.
Analyze short paired texts to make connections between contemporary works and the
characters and thematic concerns of The Iliad.
Evaluate the role of women in Greek society in The Iliad through post-reading and paired
text activities.

BEFORE READING

Reading Context

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their
interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What is a myth? What roles do myths play in our society? What is a retelling of a myth?

Teaching Suggestion: Encourage students to think beyond myths as “cool stories” and to
think critically about what they might reflect about a culture. This can also lead to a
conversation about the role of retellings.

“What is a Myth?” is an article on the companion website for the PBS series In Search of
Myths & Heroes. The article discusses what a myth is and what myths have typically
reflected. Links within the article point to additional resources.
Xo Orpheus includes 50 retellings of classic myths that can be used to discuss what
constitutes a retelling.

2. What does “oral tradition” mean? In what context have you heard this phrase?

Teaching Suggestion: Part of the experience of reading The Iliad is knowing that Troy will fall,
that Achilles will ultimately die, and that Odysseus will take another ten years to return home
to Ithaca. Encourage students to think about what it would be like to hear this story from a
poet retelling it. This prompt also opens up conversations about authorship and who “Homer”
is.

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The Iliad – Prelude to War – Extra Mythology #1 provides a useful introduction to the
lead-up to the Trojan War.

Short Activity: Telephone

In groups of 4 or 5, designate one person as the “storyteller.” That person should write down a
2-3 sentence story without showing the others. When the story is complete, sit in a circle, with
the storyteller leaning to the person to their left and whispering their short story into that
person’s ear. The listener should then whisper what they heard into the ear of the person next
to them. Repeat this process until the storyteller hears the story from the last person in the
group. The storyteller should then repeat for everyone the story they wrote down.

After the activity, discuss the following questions as a whole class:

What was it like? What stayed the same? What changed about the story?
How might this be like hearing a story from a poet?
What does this activity tell us about how stories can change over time?

Teaching Suggestion: Students will likely be familiar with telephone, so encourage them to
apply their experiences with this game to their understanding of what an oral tradition is.

Icebreaker Ideas has sample sentences for Telephone.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who are hard of hearing, this activity can be done by
drawing, based roughly on the game Telestrations. Students should work in groups of 4. Each
student should get a stapled packet of 4 numbered pages and a random object or activity to
draw. They should then draw their item or activity and flip the page to the next sheet. After 30
seconds, they should pass it to the next person who looks back at the first page, then
guesses. After 30 more seconds, that person should flip the page. The third person should
look back at page 2 (where the previous person wrote their guess) and draw that item or
activity. Finally, the fourth person should turn to page 4 and make their guess about what the
item or activity is on page 3 before handing the packet back to its original owner. Students
should continue alternating guessing and drawing until the packet returns to its original
owner. Students should then flip through and show how their original contribution changed
over the activity.

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Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection
homework before reading the story.

Do you believe in destiny? Would you do anything differently if you knew what your fate was?
Would you want to know your fate?

Teaching Suggestion: Fate plays a major role in the decisions of the characters, particularly
Achilles. Encourage students to reflect in ways that will help prepare them for study of this
aspect of The Iliad.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English language learners, an alternative approach would be

to have them write a list of the pros and cons of knowing what their fate is.

DURING READING

Reading Questions & Paired Texts

Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key plot points are designed for guided
reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.

Books 1-4

Reading Check

1. Why is Chryses at the Achaean camp?

2. What is the epithet most often applied to Achilles?
3. Who stops Achilles from killing Agamemnon?
4. Who agrees to fight Menelaus?
5. Why is Troy Zeus’s favorite city?

Short Answer

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Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. The Iliad opens with “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles” (Line 1). How
might this be an example of foreshadowing?
2. What role does honor play in this section of the story?
3. Why does Helen regret coming to Troy?
4. Why does Agamemnon declare Menelaus the winner of the duel?

Paired Resource

“Mythology for Dummies Cheat Sheet”

Provides a helpful guide to the Greek gods

What role do the gods seem to be playing in this war? What might this suggest about the
relationship between the human and the divine?

“This Is How The Iliad Sounded When Its Original Readers Recited It”

A brief article with audio recording

Students can hear a short portion of the story read aloud in ancient Greek.
As the article indicates, the sounds of the language convey “an appropriate dignity for the
message they transmit.” How do the reader’s intonation and expression subtly represent
the theme of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization?

Books 5-8

Reading Check

1. What is the effect of Athena’s removing the mist from Diomedes’s eyes?
2. On whose side is Ares?
3. Why does Astyanax cry when Hector reaches for him?
4. Who forbids the gods from interfering in the war?

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Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. Why does Diomedes decide not to fight Glaucus?

2. Why does Helen think that Hector is the one “hit hardest by the fighting” (Book 6)?
3. What is the effect of Nestor’s taunting when Hector agrees to duel one of the Greeks?

Books 9-12

Reading Check

1. Who convinces Agamemnon that Achilles needs to return to battle?

2. Who goes with Diomedes to spy on the Trojans?
3. What does Zeus instruct Hector to do?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. When Odysseus entreats Achilles to return to battle, what does Achilles plan to do? Why?
2. What does Hector say when Polydamas urges him to stop fighting because a bird omen
appears?

Books 13-16

Reading Check

1. Who sneaks into the Greek camp to lift the soldiers’ spirits?
2. Who wears Achilles’s armor into battle?

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3. Who stops Patroclus from seizing Troy?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. After Nestor begs Zeus to let the Greeks keep fighting, what does the god’s thunderclap
symbolize?
2. How does Patroclus contribute to his own death?
3. What does the death of Sarpedon, Zeus’s son, show about Zeus’s power?

Books 17-20

Reading Check

1. Who protects Patroclus’s body?

2. Who makes Achilles’s new armor?
3. What is the delay between Achilles’s being ready for battle and the actual battle itself?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. Why is Hector able to rouse the Trojan army after Patroclus’s death?
2. What has Achilles’s mother, Thetis, kept from him about her deal with Zeus?
3. What makes Achilles decide to kill Hector?
4. Why does Aeneas charge toward Achilles, and what happens?

Books 21-24

Reading Check

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1. What geographical feature does Achilles fight?

2. Even though he considers it, why does Zeus ultimately decide not to save Hector?
3. What is Patroclus’s last request?
4. Who protects Hector’s corpse?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. How does Apollo buy time for the Trojans as Achilles goes on a killing spree?
2. Why does Hector decide to fight Achilles?
3. Who convinces Achilles to give Hector’s body to his father? How?

Paired Resource

“A Krater: Achilles and Ajax Playing Backgammon”

A poem by Andrew Davis imagining Achilles and Ajax playing a simple game of chance
Just before Priam arrives, Achilles oversees funeral games in honor of Patroclus, and the
games themselves perhaps seen out of place in a long war. What commentary does this
poem offer about the role of fate and mortality in The Iliad?

“No Second Troy”

Poem by William Butler Yeats relating his long-time love Maud Gonne to Helen of Troy
Yeats’s poem relates the legacy of the Trojan War and Helen of Troy to his own life. What
does the poem suggest about the lasting effect of this myth?

Recommended Next Reads

Elektra

A novel by Jennifer Saint telling the story of the Trojan War from the perspectives of
Clytemnestra (Agamemnon’s wife), Cassandra (sister of Hector and Paris), and Elektra

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(daughter of Agamemnon)
It closely parallels many of the epic’s major events.
Touches on the themes of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization and Fragility of Human
Life and Creations

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

A YA retelling of the love story between Achilles and Patroclus

Touches on the themes of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization and Fragility of Human
Life and Creations
Song of Achilles on SuperSummary

Reading Questions Answer Key

Books 1-4

Reading Check

1. He has arrived to pay a ransom for his daughter Chryseis. (Book 1)

2. “the best of the Achaeans” (Book 1)
3. Athena (Book 1)
4. Paris (Book 3)
5. They sacrifice a lot to him. (Book 4)

Short Answer

1. Achilles becomes angry that Agamemnon takes Briseis from him. (Book 1)
2. Ideas about honor drive many of the characters’ decisions. As an example, students could
list Agamemnon’s sense of honor in being the leader of the Greek army, Achilles’s sense of
honor being diminished by his prize being taken, Chryses’s honor being disrespected when
the Achaeans at first refuse to return his daughter, Odysseus’s rhetoric of disgrace in
convincing the Achaeans to stay, and Hector’s insults toward Paris. (Books 1-4)
3. Helen’s leaving her husband and coming to Troy sparked the war. (Book 3)
4. Since Paris disappeared in the middle of the duel, Agamemnon declares Menelaus the
leader by default, meaning that the Trojans have to return Helen. (Book 3)

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Books 5-8

Reading Check

1. He can see all of the gods on the battlefield. ( Book 5)

2. The Trojan side (Book 5)
3. He is afraid of his helmet. (Book 6)
4. Zeus (Book 8)

Short Answer

1. Diomedes’s grandfather had hosted Glaucus’s grandfather, and they are governed by the
rules of “guest-friendship.” (Book 6)
2. Hector has been the leader of the Trojans, even though Paris is the reason for the start of
the war. When Hector visits with Andromache and Astyanax, he worries that the visit will be
his last. He also fears that, should the Trojans lose, his wife will be enslaved by a Greek
leader. (Book 6)
3. It encourages nine to volunteer to fight Hector. (Book 7)

Books 9-12

Reading Check

1. Nestor (Book 9)
2. Odysseus (Book 10)
3. To hold back until Agamemnon is injured (Book 11)

Short Answer

1. He plans to sail home because he heard a legend that he will either live a long but boring
life or a short but glorious one. (Book 9)
2. Hector tells him that he trusts the plans of Zeus, not birds. (Book 12)

Books 13-16

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Reading Check

1. Poseidon (Book 13)

2. Patroclus (Book 16)
3. Apollo (Book 16)

Short Answer

1. The Trojans see it as approval of their endeavors. The Greeks see it as an answer to
Nestor’s prayers and a sign that they can press on. (Book 15)
2. He continues on to try to take Troy. (Book 16)
3. It suggests that Zeus does not control mortal fates, but only oversees the implementation
of them. (Book 16)

Books 17-20

Reading Check

1. Greater Ajax (Book 17)

2. Hephaestus (Book 18)
3. The Greeks need to eat. (Book 19)

Short Answer

1. The armies see him wearing Achilles’s armor. (Book 17)

2. She did not tell Achilles that Patroclus would die. (Book 17)
3. Hector killed Patroclus. (Book 18)
4. Apollo teases Aeneas about being afraid to face Achilles, but because Aeneas’s fate is to
escape and continue his life, the gods help him escape. (Book 20)

Books 21-24

Reading Check

1. The Xanthus River (Book 21)

2. The other gods resent him. (Book 22)

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3. To be buried with Achilles (Book 23)

4. Apollo (Book 24)

Short Answer

1. He encourages a priest to fight Achilles, then spirits him away in a mist so that he himself
fights Achilles, giving Trojans time to get into the city. (Book 21)
2. He feels that he has acted with “reckless pride” and that he’d be ashamed to face the
Trojan men if he were to retreat. (Book 22)
3. Thetis does because the gods are angry with him. (Book 24)

AFTER READING

Discussion/Analysis Prompt

Throughout this epic, we see hundreds, if not thousands, of people die on the battlefield. We
learn of their fear of the consequences of battle, from Achilles’s death to Andromache’s
enslavement by Greek victors. What might this epic be trying to teach us about war and about
those who win and those who lose wars? How does this connect to the theme of the Fragility
of Human Life and Creations?

Teaching Suggestion: So much of the power of The Iliad is in knowing that Troy will fall.
Achilles loses his best friend. Andromache—with Hecuba, Helen, and Cassandra—will be
taken from Troy. The story depicts a great tragedy. Encourage students to think about this
and about what sticks with us about The Iliad.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who struggle with speaking in front of people, an
alternative approach could be to draw a portrait of one of the characters and to try to visually
represent the stakes of the war for that character.

Activities

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and
incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

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“Goddess, Sing the X of Y”

After thinking about characters’ development, arcs, and roles in The Iliad, students write their
own retellings of one character’s story.

The Robert Fagles translation of The Iliad strikingly begins “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of
Peleus’s son Achilles, / murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses” (Lines
1-2). Pick a character from The Iliad, whether they are a major figure like Achilles or a once-
mentioned Trojan soldier. Then, choose from the following options. You can either:

Imagine that they had a made a different choice (participating in the war, going to battle,
fighting a particular person); or
Tell a short version of the Trojan War from their perspective.

Imagine that you are Homer—or the many poets comprising Homer over time—and write this
story like a poem. It should begin just as The Iliad does, except substituting a prominent
quality and the name of your chosen character in the first line. For example, if you choose
Hector, you might begin “Bravery—Goddess, sing the bravery of Priam’s son Hector.”
Take 20 minutes and write a stanza or two centered around your character. Then, get into
groups of five and take turns reading these to your classmates, just as if you were
participating in the oral tradition of The Iliad.
When everyone has finished, consider the following questions:

How did you approach this activity?

How did you decide between retelling a story from a different perspective or changing
your character’s actions? Why?
What might your myth reflect about our society?

Teaching Suggestion: Encourage students to be creative; these retellings don’t have to even
take place in ancient times. Perhaps provide them with a few examples of an opening line or
concepts to get them started.

Paired Text Extension:

Read Cassandra by Christa Wolf (Content warning: Sexual violence)

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This is a retelling of the events of the Trojan War told entirely from Cassandra’s perspective.
Wolf’s retelling also focuses on the role of women in Greek society and the ways in which
Cassandra was overlooked by her father, brothers, and peers, even though she predicted the
city’s downfall. It does contain graphic sexual violence, and students should be warned of
this.

Some sample discussion questions could include:

Compare and contrast this story of the Trojan War with that of The Iliad.
How is the role of women highlighted in Wolf’s text?
How might this novel still speak to the role of women in today’s society?

After reading this text, students can follow a similar path for the activity, but they might offer
a more nuanced retelling and should be required to address a contemporary issue in what
they choose to highlight about their chosen character.

Teaching Suggestion: This text can be helpful for thinking about the political stakes of
retellings and about who is or is not included in a narrative.

Essay Questions

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers,
and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work
well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted
outlines. Cite details from the work over the course of your response that serve as examples
and support.

1. Though Paris is the one who brought Helen to Troy, Hector leads the Trojan army against
the attacking Greeks.

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What does Hector symbolize, to the Greeks, to the Trojans, and even to the gods? ( topic
sentence)
Choose three examples from the text offering different perspectives on Hector and
connect them to your central argument.
In your concluding sentence or sentences, connect Hector’s character to the theme of
Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization.

2. The Iliad begins with Achilles’s rage.

How does Achilles as a character shift over the course of the epic? ( topic sentence)
What prompts Achilles’s actions throughout the poem? How do his responses change?
In your concluding sentence or sentences, consider what Achilles is remembered for and
how he develops over the course of the text. Connect this to the theme of the Journey of
the Hero.

3. We as readers know that Troy is doomed.

What effect does this knowledge have on our reading experience? ( topic sentence)
Give examples from the text that appeal to our emotion and to our knowledge of the
Trojan War’s end and connect them to your main argument.
In your concluding sentence or sentences, connect the reading experience you have
described to the theme of the Fragility of Human Life and Creations.

Full Essay Assignments

Student Prompt: Write a structured and well-developed essay. Include a thesis statement, at
least three main points supported by text details, and a conclusion.

1. The initial conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon is centered around the “possession”
of a “prize” in Chryseis and Briseis, yet they remain mostly silent as characters. On the other
hand, we hear from Andromache, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, and other goddesses. Together,
what is the role of women in the Trojan War? How do women shape the war and its conflict?

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How do they exert force over the male actors, even if the epic does not acknowledge them as
it does its male heroes? Make an argument with a strong central thesis and use at least three
examples from the text to support your argument.

2. Certain epithets are repeated throughout this text, and even some scenes are remarkably
similar, such as the duels between Greek and Trojan heroes. What is the summative effect of
this cyclicality? Use at least 3 examples to support your answer and, ultimately, connect your
analysis back to the theme of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization. How does repetition
shape how heroes are remembered?

3. There are several occasions on which Zeus wishes to intervene to save a mortal, most
notably when it comes to Hector, whom all of the gods seem to admire. Yet, he refrains from
doing so, despite having interfered with the war frequently throughout its ten years. What is
the relationship between gods and mortals? How do mortals entreat their deities and how do
the gods respond? You could also consider more broadly, in myth, what this might suggest
about ancient Greek society. Ultimately, make an argument that draws on at least three
examples from the text to support your analysis and connect it back to the theme of the
Fragility of Human Life and Creations.

Cumulative Exam Questions

Multiple Choice and Long Answer questions create ideal opportunities for whole-book review,
unit exam, or summative assessments.

Multiple Choice

1. What epithet is repeated to describe Achilles through The Iliad?

A) “the son of Thetis”
B) “the best of the Achaeans”
C) “the swiftest in battle”
D) “the destroyer of Troy”

2. What does it suggest about Priam that he does not blame Helen for the war?
A) That he is a kind and benevolent king
B) That he knows that it is his son’s fight
C) That he doesn’t see women as a factor in war

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D) That he blames himself

3. Beyond being upset that Briseis was taken from home, why did Achilles stop fighting for
Agamemnon?
A) Because he has been fighting for his whole life and is now tired of fighting
B) Because he is concerned that he may die, as according to legend he will only live a short
life
C) Because he is such a strong fighter and does not wish to contribute to Greek victory and
therefore Agamemnon’s honor
D) Because he is doing what Zeus has ordered him to do, and he defers to the king of the
gods

4. What is implied by the fact that the war between the Trojans and the Achaeans is not
portrayed as a battle between good and evil?
A) It implies that the speaker of the poem is split in their loyalty to either side.
B) It implies that the gods only care about themselves and not the individual human nations.
C) It implies that warriors who kill one another are not redeemable.
D) I implies that war is complicated and that it cannot be so evenly divided.

5. In Book 5, what best explains why the poet gives details about each Achaean and Trojan
killed?
A) To heighten the excitement of the story’s battle scenes
B) To show their humanity
C) To illustrate that every soldier is a leader
D) To honor them

6. What does Hector’s reminder that “no one alive has ever escaped” their fate most
accurately foreshadow (Book 6)?
A) That Hector himself will have to face fate in the form of Achilles
B) That Hector’s greatest fears will come true
C) That Paris will be the one remembered for the war, not Hector
D) That Hector’s son will have to avenge him

7. Why does Zeus tell Poseidon to stop complaining that the Trojan wall may become more
famous than the Scaean Gates that he built with Apollo?
A) Zeus believes that the gods must always be the ones most worshipped.

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B) Zeus sees it as blasphemy to suggest that human work could last longer than work of the
gods, even in memory.
C) Zeus is tired of speaking of the war and wishes for it to end.
D) Zeus does not care for discussion of human work; rather, he only wants to gain humans’
favor.

8. What effect does Achilles’s continual refusal to fight have on the Greeks?
A) It makes them decide to leave for Greece since they can’t win without Achilles.
B) It reinforces the fact that Agamemnon is a strong and steadfast leader.
C) It escalates their sense of fear that they will not be able to defeat the Trojans.
D) It causes Nestor to regret encouraging Achilles to come to Troy.

9. Why does Achilles weep with Priam?

A) He fears his death and knows that, in giving up Hector, he brings his own death close.
B) He believes that giving up Hector’s body besmirches his honor.
C) He is tired of fighting and can see that Priam is too.
D) He knows that they both weep for someone dear to them.

10. What does Hector realize when he notices that Deiphobus has left him when he fights
Achilles?
A) That he has been tricked by a god and that death has come for him
B) That he has been accompanied by a god and that they must be in his favor
C) That he has been tricked by a god but that his brothers will be okay
D) That he has been led here by fate and that this is his chance to save Troy

11. Why are the gods angry with Achilles after he kills Hector?
A) They are upset he killed Hector.
B) They are upset that he wishes to desecrate Hector’s body and that he is keeping it from
Hector’s family.
C) They are upset that he did not continue to fight and finally end the war.
D) They are upset that he is putting his vengeance before the priorities of the Greeks.

12. What is significant about Thetis asking Hephaestus to craft new armor for Achilles?
A) She accepts that he is going to fight in the war, even though it will mean his certain death.
B) She will do anything to stop him from dying.
C) She wants Hephaestus to imbue the armor with enough power to make Achilles invincible.

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D) She believes that his old armor is tainted with the blood of Patroclus.

13. Why are the Greek ships so significant in the battle with the Trojans?
A) They are a symbol of the Greeks’ wealth.
B) They are where the Greeks camp; without them, they will be vulnerable.
C) They are the Greeks’ only way home to Greece.
D) They are a representation of Greek shipbuilding and foreshadow the building of the Trojan
horse.

14. What is different about Achilles’s response when Agamemnon first takes Briseis away
and when Odysseus and two of the other kings later come to visit him to ask him to return to
battle?
A) Achilles was rage-filled in the beginning, uncaring about those dying around him because
his honor had been tarnished. Later, he is pensive and has given up hope of victory.
B) Achilles was rage-filled in the beginning, so focused on his honor. Later, he is more
concerned with his own mortality and prophesy about living either a short or long life.
C) Achilles was pensive in the beginning, trying to show only that without his strength, the
Greeks couldn’t win. Later, he is enraged that it has taken so long for others to beg him to
rejoin the fray.
D) Achilles was pensive in the beginning. Later, he is more concerned with the likelihood of his
death in battle, having chosen to live a long, quiet life.

15. What is the most compelling reason that phrases like “Hector breaker of horses,” or
similar repetitions, occur throughout the Iliad?
A) Poets reciting The Iliad would have relied on repetition to improvise in their performance of
the story.
B) Poets use repetitive phrases to encourage listeners to remember characters’ names.
C) Poets performing the epic would use such phrases to describe characters.
D) Poets retelling the story of Troy would use repetition to honor those who died in the Trojan
war.

Long Answer

Compose a response of 2-3 sentences, incorporating text details to support your response.

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1. Identify two similarities between Zeus and Agamemnon and explain their narrative
significance: how do the shared qualities or traits that you have identified shape the beliefs
and behaviors of each character?
2. What is the role of mist in this story? How do the gods use it?
3. How do women shape the war, even if they aren’t acknowledged like male heroes?

Exam Answer Key

Multiple Choice

1. B (Book 1)
2. A (Book 3)
3. C (Book 1)
4. D (All books)
5. B (Book 5)
6. A (Book 6)
7. B (Book 7)
8. C (Books 9-12)
9. D (Book 24)
10. A (Book 22)
11. B (Book 23)
12. A (Book 18)
13. C (Books 9, 13, and 14)
14. B (Books 1 and 9)
15. A (All books)

Long Answer

1. Students could discuss how Zeus and Agamemnon are both the eldest and therefore take
control of situations. Even though Menelaus was the one whose wife was stolen,
Agamemnon takes charge, just as Zeus takes the lead among the gods. Additionally,
Agamemnon believes that everyone must defer to him and is unafraid of exacting his
revenge. (Books 1-4)
2. The gods use the mist to hide their involvement in the war and to manipulate events. Zeus
uses the mist to hide Patroclus’s body so that it isn’t desecrated while Athena allows
Diomedes to see through the mist so that he can see the gods on the battlefield. (Book 5)

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Poseidon also uses the mist to rescue Aeneas from Achilles in Book 20.
Many of the goddesses work to shape the result of the war, including Achilles’s mother,
Thetis. Andromache tries to provide strength for Hector, and his fears of her being enslaved
by the Greeks spur him to action. Even Chryseis and Briseis hold great power as “prizes” of
Agamemnon and Achilles, despite the fact that the men’s chauvinistic treatment of them is
really behind their decision making. Helen, of course, is the woman who launched a thousand
ships. (All books)

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Introduction
The Iliad

Genre: Fiction; heroic epic in verse

Originally Published: Unknown; written origins often dated to 8th century BCE; translation
by Robert Fagles published in 1990
Reading Level/Interest: Grades 11-12; college/adult
Structure/Length: Approx. 15,700 lines of dactylic hexameter divided into 24 books
(original Greek translation)
Protagonist and Central Conflict: The epic poem follows Greek hero Achilles into the later
violent and deadly episodes of the Trojan War, exploring themes of fate, anger, pride, and
the hero’s journey.
Potential Sensitivity Issues: War; death; violence; objectification of women

Homer, Author

Bio: The authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey continue to be debated; in fact, the
name “Homer” may refer to the tradition of epic hexameter verse rather than a writer.
Scholars tend to think the poem was established in the oral tradition over centuries, then
written down sometime around mid-8th century BCE.
Other Works: The Odyssey (Greek epic poem typically attributed to Homer); other Robert
Fagles translations: The Odyssey (1996); The Aeneid (2006)
Awards: Academy of American Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award (1991)

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

Journey of the Hero

Fragility of Human Life and Creations
Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

Develop an understanding of the historical contexts of oral traditions and Poetry as a

Medium of Immortalization.

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Analyze short paired texts to make connections between contemporary works and the
characters and thematic concerns of The Iliad.
Evaluate the role of women in Greek society in The Iliad through post-reading and paired
text activities.

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Before Reading
Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their
interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What is a myth? What roles do myths play in our society? What is a retelling of a myth?

Teaching Suggestion: Encourage students to think beyond myths as “cool stories” and to
think critically about what they might reflect about a culture. This can also lead to a
conversation about the role of retellings.

“What is a Myth?” is an article on the companion website for the PBS series In Search of
Myths & Heroes. The article discusses what a myth is and what myths have typically
reflected. Links within the article point to additional resources.
Xo Orpheus includes 50 retellings of classic myths that can be used to discuss what
constitutes a retelling.

2. What does “oral tradition” mean? In what context have you heard this phrase?

Teaching Suggestion: Part of the experience of reading The Iliad is knowing that Troy will fall,
that Achilles will ultimately die, and that Odysseus will take another ten years to return home
to Ithaca. Encourage students to think about what it would be like to hear this story from a
poet retelling it. This prompt also opens up conversations about authorship and who “Homer”
is.

The Iliad – Prelude to War – Extra Mythology #1 provides a useful introduction to the
lead-up to the Trojan War.

Short Activity: Telephone

In groups of 4 or 5, designate one person as the “storyteller.” That person should write down a
2-3 sentence story without showing the others. When the story is complete, sit in a circle, with
the storyteller leaning to the person to their left and whispering their short story into that

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person’s ear. The listener should then whisper what they heard into the ear of the person next
to them. Repeat this process until the storyteller hears the story from the last person in the
group. The storyteller should then repeat for everyone the story they wrote down.

After the activity, discuss the following questions as a whole class:

What was it like? What stayed the same? What changed about the story?
How might this be like hearing a story from a poet?
What does this activity tell us about how stories can change over time?

Teaching Suggestion: Students will likely be familiar with telephone, so encourage them to
apply their experiences with this game to their understanding of what an oral tradition is.

Icebreaker Ideas has sample sentences for Telephone.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who are hard of hearing, this activity can be done by
drawing, based roughly on the game Telestrations. Students should work in groups of 4. Each
student should get a stapled packet of 4 numbered pages and a random object or activity to
draw. They should then draw their item or activity and flip the page to the next sheet. After 30
seconds, they should pass it to the next person who looks back at the first page, then
guesses. After 30 more seconds, that person should flip the page. The third person should
look back at page 2 (where the previous person wrote their guess) and draw that item or
activity. Finally, the fourth person should turn to page 4 and make their guess about what the
item or activity is on page 3 before handing the packet back to its original owner. Students
should continue alternating guessing and drawing until the packet returns to its original
owner. Students should then flip through and show how their original contribution changed
over the activity.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection
homework before reading the story.

Do you believe in destiny? Would you do anything differently if you knew what your fate was?
Would you want to know your fate?

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Teaching Suggestion: Fate plays a major role in the decisions of the characters, particularly
Achilles. Encourage students to reflect in ways that will help prepare them for study of this
aspect of The Iliad.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English language learners, an alternative approach would be

to have them write a list of the pros and cons of knowing what their fate is.

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During Reading
Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key plot points are designed for guided
reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.

Books 1-4

Reading Check

1. Why is Chryses at the Achaean camp?

2. What is the epithet most often applied to Achilles?
3. Who stops Achilles from killing Agamemnon?
4. Who agrees to fight Menelaus?
5. Why is Troy Zeus’s favorite city?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. The Iliad opens with “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles” (Line 1). How
might this be an example of foreshadowing?
2. What role does honor play in this section of the story?
3. Why does Helen regret coming to Troy?
4. Why does Agamemnon declare Menelaus the winner of the duel?

Paired Resource

“Mythology for Dummies Cheat Sheet”

Provides a helpful guide to the Greek gods

What role do the gods seem to be playing in this war? What might this suggest about the
relationship between the human and the divine?

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“This Is How The Iliad Sounded When Its Original Readers Recited It”

A brief article with audio recording

Students can hear a short portion of the story read aloud in ancient Greek.
As the article indicates, the sounds of the language convey “an appropriate dignity for the
message they transmit.” How do the reader’s intonation and expression subtly represent
the theme of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization?

Books 5-8

Reading Check

1. What is the effect of Athena’s removing the mist from Diomedes’s eyes?
2. On whose side is Ares?
3. Why does Astyanax cry when Hector reaches for him?
4. Who forbids the gods from interfering in the war?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. Why does Diomedes decide not to fight Glaucus?

2. Why does Helen think that Hector is the one “hit hardest by the fighting” (Book 6)?
3. What is the effect of Nestor’s taunting when Hector agrees to duel one of the Greeks?

Books 9-12

Reading Check

1. Who convinces Agamemnon that Achilles needs to return to battle?

2. Who goes with Diomedes to spy on the Trojans?
3. What does Zeus instruct Hector to do?

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Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. When Odysseus entreats Achilles to return to battle, what does Achilles plan to do? Why?
2. What does Hector say when Polydamas urges him to stop fighting because a bird omen
appears?

Books 13-16

Reading Check

1. Who sneaks into the Greek camp to lift the soldiers’ spirits?
2. Who wears Achilles’s armor into battle?
3. Who stops Patroclus from seizing Troy?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. After Nestor begs Zeus to let the Greeks keep fighting, what does the god’s thunderclap
symbolize?
2. How does Patroclus contribute to his own death?
3. What does the death of Sarpedon, Zeus’s son, show about Zeus’s power?

Books 17-20

Reading Check

1. Who protects Patroclus’s body?

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2. Who makes Achilles’s new armor?

3. What is the delay between Achilles’s being ready for battle and the actual battle itself?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. Why is Hector able to rouse the Trojan army after Patroclus’s death?
2. What has Achilles’s mother, Thetis, kept from him about her deal with Zeus?
3. What makes Achilles decide to kill Hector?
4. Why does Aeneas charge toward Achilles, and what happens?

Books 21-24

Reading Check

1. What geographical feature does Achilles fight?

2. Even though he considers it, why does Zeus ultimately decide not to save Hector?
3. What is Patroclus’s last request?
4. Who protects Hector’s corpse?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to
support your response.

1. How does Apollo buy time for the Trojans as Achilles goes on a killing spree?
2. Why does Hector decide to fight Achilles?
3. Who convinces Achilles to give Hector’s body to his father? How?

Paired Resource

“A Krater: Achilles and Ajax Playing Backgammon”

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A poem by Andrew Davis imagining Achilles and Ajax playing a simple game of chance
Just before Priam arrives, Achilles oversees funeral games in honor of Patroclus, and the
games themselves perhaps seen out of place in a long war. What commentary does this
poem offer about the role of fate and mortality in The Iliad?

“No Second Troy”

Poem by William Butler Yeats relating his long-time love Maud Gonne to Helen of Troy
Yeats’s poem relates the legacy of the Trojan War and Helen of Troy to his own life. What
does the poem suggest about the lasting effect of this myth?

Recommended Next Reads

Elektra

A novel by Jennifer Saint telling the story of the Trojan War from the perspectives of
Clytemnestra (Agamemnon’s wife), Cassandra (sister of Hector and Paris), and Elektra
(daughter of Agamemnon)
It closely parallels many of the epic’s major events.
Touches on the themes of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization and Fragility of Human
Life and Creations

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

A YA retelling of the love story between Achilles and Patroclus

Touches on the themes of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization and Fragility of Human
Life and Creations
Song of Achilles on SuperSummary

Books 1-4

Reading Check

1. He has arrived to pay a ransom for his daughter Chryseis. (Book 1)

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2. “the best of the Achaeans” (Book 1)

3. Athena (Book 1)
4. Paris (Book 3)
5. They sacrifice a lot to him. (Book 4)

Short Answer

1. Achilles becomes angry that Agamemnon takes Briseis from him. (Book 1)
2. Ideas about honor drive many of the characters’ decisions. As an example, students could
list Agamemnon’s sense of honor in being the leader of the Greek army, Achilles’s sense of
honor being diminished by his prize being taken, Chryses’s honor being disrespected when
the Achaeans at first refuse to return his daughter, Odysseus’s rhetoric of disgrace in
convincing the Achaeans to stay, and Hector’s insults toward Paris. (Books 1-4)
3. Helen’s leaving her husband and coming to Troy sparked the war. (Book 3)
4. Since Paris disappeared in the middle of the duel, Agamemnon declares Menelaus the
leader by default, meaning that the Trojans have to return Helen. (Book 3)

Books 5-8

Reading Check

1. He can see all of the gods on the battlefield. ( Book 5)

2. The Trojan side (Book 5)
3. He is afraid of his helmet. (Book 6)
4. Zeus (Book 8)

Short Answer

1. Diomedes’s grandfather had hosted Glaucus’s grandfather, and they are governed by the
rules of “guest-friendship.” (Book 6)
2. Hector has been the leader of the Trojans, even though Paris is the reason for the start of
the war. When Hector visits with Andromache and Astyanax, he worries that the visit will be
his last. He also fears that, should the Trojans lose, his wife will be enslaved by a Greek
leader. (Book 6)
3. It encourages nine to volunteer to fight Hector. (Book 7)

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Books 9-12

Reading Check

1. Nestor (Book 9)
2. Odysseus (Book 10)
3. To hold back until Agamemnon is injured (Book 11)

Short Answer

1. He plans to sail home because he heard a legend that he will either live a long but boring
life or a short but glorious one. (Book 9)
2. Hector tells him that he trusts the plans of Zeus, not birds. (Book 12)

Books 13-16

Reading Check

1. Poseidon (Book 13)

2. Patroclus (Book 16)
3. Apollo (Book 16)

Short Answer

1. The Trojans see it as approval of their endeavors. The Greeks see it as an answer to
Nestor’s prayers and a sign that they can press on. (Book 15)
2. He continues on to try to take Troy. (Book 16)
3. It suggests that Zeus does not control mortal fates, but only oversees the implementation
of them. (Book 16)

Books 17-20

Reading Check

1. Greater Ajax (Book 17)

2. Hephaestus (Book 18)

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3. The Greeks need to eat. (Book 19)

Short Answer

1. The armies see him wearing Achilles’s armor. (Book 17)

2. She did not tell Achilles that Patroclus would die. (Book 17)
3. Hector killed Patroclus. (Book 18)
4. Apollo teases Aeneas about being afraid to face Achilles, but because Aeneas’s fate is to
escape and continue his life, the gods help him escape. (Book 20)

Books 21-24

Reading Check

1. The Xanthus River (Book 21)

2. The other gods resent him. (Book 22)
3. To be buried with Achilles (Book 23)
4. Apollo (Book 24)

Short Answer

1. He encourages a priest to fight Achilles, then spirits him away in a mist so that he himself
fights Achilles, giving Trojans time to get into the city. (Book 21)
2. He feels that he has acted with “reckless pride” and that he’d be ashamed to face the
Trojan men if he were to retreat. (Book 22)
3. Thetis does because the gods are angry with him. (Book 24)

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After Reading
Throughout this epic, we see hundreds, if not thousands, of people die on the battlefield. We
learn of their fear of the consequences of battle, from Achilles’s death to Andromache’s
enslavement by Greek victors. What might this epic be trying to teach us about war and about
those who win and those who lose wars? How does this connect to the theme of the Fragility
of Human Life and Creations?

Teaching Suggestion: So much of the power of The Iliad is in knowing that Troy will fall.
Achilles loses his best friend. Andromache—with Hecuba, Helen, and Cassandra—will be
taken from Troy. The story depicts a great tragedy. Encourage students to think about this
and about what sticks with us about The Iliad.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who struggle with speaking in front of people, an
alternative approach could be to draw a portrait of one of the characters and to try to visually
represent the stakes of the war for that character.

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and
incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Goddess, Sing the X of Y”

After thinking about characters’ development, arcs, and roles in The Iliad, students write their
own retellings of one character’s story.

The Robert Fagles translation of The Iliad strikingly begins “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of
Peleus’s son Achilles, / murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses” (Lines
1-2). Pick a character from The Iliad, whether they are a major figure like Achilles or a once-
mentioned Trojan soldier. Then, choose from the following options. You can either:

Imagine that they had a made a different choice (participating in the war, going to battle,
fighting a particular person); or
Tell a short version of the Trojan War from their perspective.

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Imagine that you are Homer—or the many poets comprising Homer over time—and write this
story like a poem. It should begin just as The Iliad does, except substituting a prominent
quality and the name of your chosen character in the first line. For example, if you choose
Hector, you might begin “Bravery—Goddess, sing the bravery of Priam’s son Hector.”
Take 20 minutes and write a stanza or two centered around your character. Then, get into
groups of five and take turns reading these to your classmates, just as if you were
participating in the oral tradition of The Iliad.
When everyone has finished, consider the following questions:

How did you approach this activity?

How did you decide between retelling a story from a different perspective or changing
your character’s actions? Why?
What might your myth reflect about our society?

Teaching Suggestion: Encourage students to be creative; these retellings don’t have to even
take place in ancient times. Perhaps provide them with a few examples of an opening line or
concepts to get them started.

Paired Text Extension:

Read Cassandra by Christa Wolf (Content warning: Sexual violence)

This is a retelling of the events of the Trojan War told entirely from Cassandra’s perspective.
Wolf’s retelling also focuses on the role of women in Greek society and the ways in which
Cassandra was overlooked by her father, brothers, and peers, even though she predicted the
city’s downfall. It does contain graphic sexual violence, and students should be warned of
this.

Some sample discussion questions could include:

Compare and contrast this story of the Trojan War with that of The Iliad.
How is the role of women highlighted in Wolf’s text?
How might this novel still speak to the role of women in today’s society?

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After reading this text, students can follow a similar path for the activity, but they might offer
a more nuanced retelling and should be required to address a contemporary issue in what
they choose to highlight about their chosen character.

Teaching Suggestion: This text can be helpful for thinking about the political stakes of
retellings and about who is or is not included in a narrative.

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers,
and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work
well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted
outlines. Cite details from the work over the course of your response that serve as examples
and support.

1. Though Paris is the one who brought Helen to Troy, Hector leads the Trojan army against
the attacking Greeks.

What does Hector symbolize, to the Greeks, to the Trojans, and even to the gods? ( topic
sentence)
Choose three examples from the text offering different perspectives on Hector and
connect them to your central argument.
In your concluding sentence or sentences, connect Hector’s character to the theme of
Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization.

2. The Iliad begins with Achilles’s rage.

How does Achilles as a character shift over the course of the epic? ( topic sentence)
What prompts Achilles’s actions throughout the poem? How do his responses change?

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In your concluding sentence or sentences, consider what Achilles is remembered for and
how he develops over the course of the text. Connect this to the theme of the Journey of
the Hero.

3. We as readers know that Troy is doomed.

What effect does this knowledge have on our reading experience? ( topic sentence)
Give examples from the text that appeal to our emotion and to our knowledge of the
Trojan War’s end and connect them to your main argument.
In your concluding sentence or sentences, connect the reading experience you have
described to the theme of the Fragility of Human Life and Creations.

Full Essay Assignments

Student Prompt: Write a structured and well-developed essay. Include a thesis statement, at
least three main points supported by text details, and a conclusion.

1. The initial conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon is centered around the “possession”
of a “prize” in Chryseis and Briseis, yet they remain mostly silent as characters. On the other
hand, we hear from Andromache, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, and other goddesses. Together,
what is the role of women in the Trojan War? How do women shape the war and its conflict?
How do they exert force over the male actors, even if the epic does not acknowledge them as
it does its male heroes? Make an argument with a strong central thesis and use at least three
examples from the text to support your argument.

2. Certain epithets are repeated throughout this text, and even some scenes are remarkably
similar, such as the duels between Greek and Trojan heroes. What is the summative effect of
this cyclicality? Use at least 3 examples to support your answer and, ultimately, connect your
analysis back to the theme of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization. How does repetition
shape how heroes are remembered?

3. There are several occasions on which Zeus wishes to intervene to save a mortal, most
notably when it comes to Hector, whom all of the gods seem to admire. Yet, he refrains from
doing so, despite having interfered with the war frequently throughout its ten years. What is
the relationship between gods and mortals? How do mortals entreat their deities and how do

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the gods respond? You could also consider more broadly, in myth, what this might suggest
about ancient Greek society. Ultimately, make an argument that draws on at least three
examples from the text to support your analysis and connect it back to the theme of the
Fragility of Human Life and Creations.

Multiple Choice and Long Answer questions create ideal opportunities for whole-book review,
unit exam, or summative assessments.

Multiple Choice

1. What epithet is repeated to describe Achilles through The Iliad?

A) “the son of Thetis”
B) “the best of the Achaeans”
C) “the swiftest in battle”
D) “the destroyer of Troy”

2. What does it suggest about Priam that he does not blame Helen for the war?
A) That he is a kind and benevolent king
B) That he knows that it is his son’s fight
C) That he doesn’t see women as a factor in war
D) That he blames himself

3. Beyond being upset that Briseis was taken from home, why did Achilles stop fighting for
Agamemnon?
A) Because he has been fighting for his whole life and is now tired of fighting
B) Because he is concerned that he may die, as according to legend he will only live a short
life
C) Because he is such a strong fighter and does not wish to contribute to Greek victory and
therefore Agamemnon’s honor
D) Because he is doing what Zeus has ordered him to do, and he defers to the king of the
gods

4. What is implied by the fact that the war between the Trojans and the Achaeans is not
portrayed as a battle between good and evil?
A) It implies that the speaker of the poem is split in their loyalty to either side.
B) It implies that the gods only care about themselves and not the individual human nations.

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C) It implies that warriors who kill one another are not redeemable.
D) I implies that war is complicated and that it cannot be so evenly divided.

5. In Book 5, what best explains why the poet gives details about each Achaean and Trojan
killed?
A) To heighten the excitement of the story’s battle scenes
B) To show their humanity
C) To illustrate that every soldier is a leader
D) To honor them

6. What does Hector’s reminder that “no one alive has ever escaped” their fate most
accurately foreshadow (Book 6)?
A) That Hector himself will have to face fate in the form of Achilles
B) That Hector’s greatest fears will come true
C) That Paris will be the one remembered for the war, not Hector
D) That Hector’s son will have to avenge him

7. Why does Zeus tell Poseidon to stop complaining that the Trojan wall may become more
famous than the Scaean Gates that he built with Apollo?
A) Zeus believes that the gods must always be the ones most worshipped.
B) Zeus sees it as blasphemy to suggest that human work could last longer than work of the
gods, even in memory.
C) Zeus is tired of speaking of the war and wishes for it to end.
D) Zeus does not care for discussion of human work; rather, he only wants to gain humans’
favor.

8. What effect does Achilles’s continual refusal to fight have on the Greeks?
A) It makes them decide to leave for Greece since they can’t win without Achilles.
B) It reinforces the fact that Agamemnon is a strong and steadfast leader.
C) It escalates their sense of fear that they will not be able to defeat the Trojans.
D) It causes Nestor to regret encouraging Achilles to come to Troy.

9. Why does Achilles weep with Priam?

A) He fears his death and knows that, in giving up Hector, he brings his own death close.
B) He believes that giving up Hector’s body besmirches his honor.
C) He is tired of fighting and can see that Priam is too.

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D) He knows that they both weep for someone dear to them.

10. What does Hector realize when he notices that Deiphobus has left him when he fights
Achilles?
A) That he has been tricked by a god and that death has come for him
B) That he has been accompanied by a god and that they must be in his favor
C) That he has been tricked by a god but that his brothers will be okay
D) That he has been led here by fate and that this is his chance to save Troy

11. Why are the gods angry with Achilles after he kills Hector?
A) They are upset he killed Hector.
B) They are upset that he wishes to desecrate Hector’s body and that he is keeping it from
Hector’s family.
C) They are upset that he did not continue to fight and finally end the war.
D) They are upset that he is putting his vengeance before the priorities of the Greeks.

12. What is significant about Thetis asking Hephaestus to craft new armor for Achilles?
A) She accepts that he is going to fight in the war, even though it will mean his certain death.
B) She will do anything to stop him from dying.
C) She wants Hephaestus to imbue the armor with enough power to make Achilles invincible.
D) She believes that his old armor is tainted with the blood of Patroclus.

13. Why are the Greek ships so significant in the battle with the Trojans?
A) They are a symbol of the Greeks’ wealth.
B) They are where the Greeks camp; without them, they will be vulnerable.
C) They are the Greeks’ only way home to Greece.
D) They are a representation of Greek shipbuilding and foreshadow the building of the Trojan
horse.

14. What is different about Achilles’s response when Agamemnon first takes Briseis away
and when Odysseus and two of the other kings later come to visit him to ask him to return to
battle?
A) Achilles was rage-filled in the beginning, uncaring about those dying around him because
his honor had been tarnished. Later, he is pensive and has given up hope of victory.
B) Achilles was rage-filled in the beginning, so focused on his honor. Later, he is more
concerned with his own mortality and prophesy about living either a short or long life.

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C) Achilles was pensive in the beginning, trying to show only that without his strength, the
Greeks couldn’t win. Later, he is enraged that it has taken so long for others to beg him to
rejoin the fray.
D) Achilles was pensive in the beginning. Later, he is more concerned with the likelihood of his
death in battle, having chosen to live a long, quiet life.

15. What is the most compelling reason that phrases like “Hector breaker of horses,” or
similar repetitions, occur throughout the Iliad?
A) Poets reciting The Iliad would have relied on repetition to improvise in their performance of
the story.
B) Poets use repetitive phrases to encourage listeners to remember characters’ names.
C) Poets performing the epic would use such phrases to describe characters.
D) Poets retelling the story of Troy would use repetition to honor those who died in the Trojan
war.

Long Answer

Compose a response of 2-3 sentences, incorporating text details to support your response.

1. Identify two similarities between Zeus and Agamemnon and explain their narrative
significance: how do the shared qualities or traits that you have identified shape the beliefs
and behaviors of each character?
2. What is the role of mist in this story? How do the gods use it?
3. How do women shape the war, even if they aren’t acknowledged like male heroes?

Multiple Choice

1. B (Book 1)
2. A (Book 3)
3. C (Book 1)
4. D (All books)
5. B (Book 5)
6. A (Book 6)
7. B (Book 7)
8. C (Books 9-12)

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9. D (Book 24)
10. A (Book 22)
11. B (Book 23)
12. A (Book 18)
13. C (Books 9, 13, and 14)
14. B (Books 1 and 9)
15. A (All books)

Long Answer

1. Students could discuss how Zeus and Agamemnon are both the eldest and therefore take
control of situations. Even though Menelaus was the one whose wife was stolen,
Agamemnon takes charge, just as Zeus takes the lead among the gods. Additionally,
Agamemnon believes that everyone must defer to him and is unafraid of exacting his
revenge. (Books 1-4)
2. The gods use the mist to hide their involvement in the war and to manipulate events. Zeus
uses the mist to hide Patroclus’s body so that it isn’t desecrated while Athena allows
Diomedes to see through the mist so that he can see the gods on the battlefield. (Book 5)
Poseidon also uses the mist to rescue Aeneas from Achilles in Book 20.
Many of the goddesses work to shape the result of the war, including Achilles’s mother,
Thetis. Andromache tries to provide strength for Hector, and his fears of her being enslaved
by the Greeks spur him to action. Even Chryseis and Briseis hold great power as “prizes” of
Agamemnon and Achilles, despite the fact that the men’s chauvinistic treatment of them is
really behind their decision making. Helen, of course, is the woman who launched a thousand
ships. (All books)

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