The listeners and readers already knew why the war started – the Trojan prince Paris has abducted Helen of Sparta and her husband Menelaus has persuaded his brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, to form a mighty Greek army to get her back again. This oral heritage is seen in the repetition of epithets, introductory phrases, fighting descriptions, and mirrored parallel sequences in an ever-recurring cycle of themes and ideas.

The story and characters were already familiar to its original Greek audience after centuries of oral tellings and retellings. The poem covers a mere 52 days of the Trojan war between a combined Greek super army and the Trojans, protected by the massive walls of their city, Troy (aka Ilium) in Anatolia.

The poem covers a mere 52 days of the Trojan war between a combined Greek super army & the Trojans, protected by the massive walls of their city, Troy. Above all, the Iliad presents the tragic yet thrilling reality of humanity's mortality, and as the events unfold, we are ever reminded that our lives are shaped and buffeted by the winds of Fate from which even the central character Achilles, magnificent warrior that he is, cannot escape. There is war and gore, honour and betrayal, pain and pathos, love and hatred, a good few villains and even more heroes, all set in the good old days of a glorious but not forgotten past. They also thought him the greatest ever writer and referred to him simply as 'the poet.’ The Iliad is universally acclaimed as a truly great story. The Greeks thought Homer was from Chios or Ionia and credited him with both the Iliad and Odyssey, the two masterpieces of Greek literature. The Greeks themselves imagined the war to have occurred sometime in the 13th century BCE during the Bronze Age. It was probably written in the 8th century BCE after a long oral tradition. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia by Karen Merline.Homer's Iliad describes the final year of the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between an alliance of Greek cities and the city of Troy in Anatolia. The poem concerns events during the tenth and final year in the siege of the city of Iliun, or Troy, by the Greeks. The existence of a single author for the poems is disputed as the poems themselves show evidence of a long oral tradition and hence, multiple authors. The poem is commonly dated to the 8th or 7th century BC, and many scholars believe it is the oldest extant work of literature in the Greek language, making it the first work of European literature. The Iliad, together with the Odyssey, is one of two ancient Greek epic poems traditionally attributed to Homer. Translated by Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902) Download cover art Download CD case insert The Iliad

The illiad book