Iliad

The oldest surviving monument of Greek letters, an epic poem attributed to Homer. Over fifteen thousand lines of hexameter tell of fifty days in the final year of the ten-year siege of Troy. Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans, takes the captive Briseis from Achilles, and the insulted hero withdraws from the war, refusing to return even when the kings bring him rich gifts. His friend Patroclus cannot bear the sight of the army falling back, begs Achilles for his armour and dies at the hands of the Trojan Hector. Grief brings Achilles back to the fighting: he kills Hector beneath the city walls and drags the body behind his chariot, taking out his pain on the dead. The poem ends not in victory but in compassion — the old king Priam comes unarmed into the tent of his son's killer, and Achilles gives the body back and declares a truce for the funeral. The fall of Troy and the wooden horse are absent from the poem entirely: both came from later sources. The Iliad took shape in the ninth or eighth century before our era in the Greek cities of Asia Minor, out of oral traditions of the Cretan and Mycenaean age, and the Alexandrian scholar Zenodotus of Ephesus divided it into twenty-four books, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet. Its name comes from Ilion, the second name of Troy. European literature counts itself from this book, and the wrath of Achilles remains its first and most quoted theme.