Western literature begins with the Iliad, an epic

poem that celebrates humanity by showing its

destruction at the hands of competitive, vengeful
young men. It is a war story told from a godlike
perspective, but also through the eyes of a parent
who spent twenty years raising a child at home, only
to see him cut down in an instant on the battlefield. It
is, in the minds of many readers, not only the
foundation but also the summit of the Western
literary tradition.
The extraordinary balance in the Iliad between
simplicity of means and grandeur of vision, between
pathos and objectivity, between flights of fancy and
gritty realism, has never been equalled in any

product of the human imagination. As in the case of

Shakespeare, the work is of such a high level that it is
difficult to imagine an actual individual sitting down
to compose it... and as in the case of Shakespeare,
there is mystery wrapped around the historical
identity of the poet.
What we can say with some certainty is that the Iliad
was composed in the early 8th century BCE in the
eastern part of Greece called Ionia (present-day
Western Turkey) by a poet working in an ancient
tradition of oral poetry, chanting the exploits of
heroes to the accompaniment of a 4-stringed lyre.
The oral epic tradition provided formulaic epithets
("swift-footed Achilles") and formulaic incidents
which were reworked by the monumental composer
we know as Homer with the possible assistance of a
newly invented method of writing, to narrate events
from the ninth year of the Trojan War, an actual war
that had occurred four centuries earlier, pitting
Eastern Greece against Western Greece, and
furnishing rich material for generations of bards.
The language of the Iliad is a mixture of Ionian Greek and Aeolian
Greek, which fits in with the traditional story that Homer was born in
Smyrna (present-day Izmir), an Aeolian city that had joined the Ionian
league. But much of the language is an archaic admixture derived from
the oral tradition. It appears that the Iliad was passed down orally by

Homeric rhapsodes for two hundred years, and then put into written
form in the 6th century BCE for government-sponsored recitations at
the Panathenaea Festival in Athens. As we are well aware from the
publication history of Shakespeare's plays, such a process does not
result in a single, authoritative version. The Alexandrian librarians
who edited the Iliad in the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE -- Zenodotus,
Aristophanes of Byzantium and, above all, Aristarchus -- had to
reconcile variants when establishing the text that we use today.
As for the text of the Iliad here, on this website, I have tried to carry it
forward into the new millennium by taking it backward in time. The
digamma ( = English w) has been restored wherever the meter
indicates that a digamma originally intervened. On rare occasions, an
initial sigma () has been restored as well. But there is a limit to
acceptable strangeness, which is why I have not restored the digamma
to Ilium itself: the proper historical spelling would be F
(pronounced "Wheelius"). Additionally, on the assumption that
connective/correlative (= "both/and") and gnomic (=
"habitually/ characteristically") represent two different lexemes, rather
than two different senses of the same lexeme, I have designated the
latter with a grave accent, .
Modern emendations and modern punctuation have been avoided
wherever possible, especially in the case of commas, which are usually
an unwelcome intrusion upon the exquisite system of particles that
give both clarity and effervescence to the epic hexameters.
The architecture of the Iliad is rooted, at every level, in the idea of
parallelism. But I will not comment any further on the poem. My
dissertation defense was mercifully short, in large part because the
Iliad is such a personal experience that most people would rather not
listen to someone telling them what it means. Part of the spell it casts
over us comes through the way that the Iliad forces us to develop our
own sense of what is happening, without any guidance from the poet.
There is no cinematic background music to manipulate our responses.
Enjoy!