Tell me now, Muses, who have your homes on Olympus –įor you are goddesses, and ever-present, and know all things,Īnd we hear only rumour, nor do we know anything –.

Before unfolding this impressive muster roll, Homer makes a special, public appeal to the Muses to ensure he gets the facts right: In every respect the Iliad represents great literature that speaks to the present.Early in the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem about the legendary Trojan War, there occurs a famous digression known as the catalogue of ships, which names all the Greek leaders and contingents who came to fight at Troy. In that case the image of a past world merge all to graphically with the image of the present. And few veterans of the Vietnam War can forget the image of the M-113 dragging behind it the dead body of a Viet-Cong guerrilla. From the modern perspective, Achilles’ rage reflects what modern analysts would refer to as PTSD. To the Greeks such human emotions as well as the impact of chance reflected the actions of the gods in influencing the fate of men.

Yet, these seemingly incongruous interferences of the deities represented the Greek effort to explain what is no more than the seemingly inexplicable interactions of tyche (chance) and human emotions on the field of battle, where terror, panic, accident, and heroism are regular occurrences. To the uninitiated modern reader, the constant reference to the influence of the gods throughout the poem may appear strange and out of place. In the end, the gods persuaded Achilles to return Hector’s body to a grief stricken father, Priam, the king of Troy. The death of Patroclus leads Achilles to return to the battlefield, where he slays Hector, and drags the body of the slain Trojan hero behind his chariot around the walls of Troy. Nevertheless, he allows his best friend Patroclus to don his armor, but that armor proves no protection against Hector. As the Trojan hero, Hector, brings death and destruction to the Greeks, Achilles refuses all the entreaties of his comrades to rejoin the fight.

Achilles then goes into a sulk, refusing to leave his tent and fight the Trojans. The leader of the Greek invasion force, King Agamemnon, forces the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles, to give up his concubine. Told in exquisite poetry, the story is deceptively simple.

The first great literary work in the Western literary canon, the Illiad, has gradually declined in its use in American university and college courses, undoubtedly because it is about the murderous sharp end of war and makes no bones about the fact that it regards its heroes as representing the height in human achievement.

Iliade by Homer