The Iliad: The Rage of Achilles and the Trojan War

The oldest story of rage in Western literature — complete, unabridged, and finally readable.

Most people know how the Trojan War ends. Almost nobody has read the poem, because the poem is not about the war.

The Iliad covers seven weeks in the tenth year of the siege. Troy is still standing when it ends. There is no wooden horse, no burning city, no Helen carried home. What there is instead is an argument between two men, and every death that follows from it.

Agamemnon, who commands the Greek army, humiliates Achilles, who is the best fighter alive, by taking a woman from him in front of the whole camp. Achilles walks away from the war. Men die because he is not there — named men, dozens of them, each given a father and a hometown and a wife before the spear goes in.

Then his closest friend borrows his armour, goes out in his place, and is killed.

What comes back is not a soldier. Achilles returns for one reason, kills the man who killed Patroclus, and then refuses to give the body up — dragging it behind his chariot around the tomb, every morning, for eleven days. The poem ends when the dead man's father crosses the battle lines alone at night to kneel in the killer's tent and ask for his son back.

A complete retelling in modern prose

This Lyceum Press edition is an original retelling in clear English prose. It is not a word-for-word translation and does not pretend to be one — it is the whole poem, told again, at the pace of a novel.

Nothing has been cut. All twenty-four books are here in full, including the four passages that popular editions almost always shorten or drop:

• The Catalogue of Ships — every contingent, every commander, every ship count: our fullest surviving picture of Bronze Age Greece, carrying the last traces of stories otherwise entirely lost.
• The night raid — the poem's darkest hour, in which two heroes do something no one ever mentions again.
• The Shield of Achilles — a wedding, a lawsuit, a harvest and a dance, engraved on the armour a man is about to go and kill with.
• The Funeral Games — the afternoon of racing and boxing and cheating that makes the final book bearable.

The individual deaths have been kept individual. Homer names the men who die and tells you who they were; those lines are the poem's moral engine, and summarising them away leaves a faster book and a smaller one.

This edition includes:

• The complete epic — all twenty-four books, unabridged, in flowing narrative prose
• A foreword on what the Iliad actually is, why its structure looks strange, and why the passages readers skip are the ones that matter
• A note on the text, stating plainly what this edition is and how it was made
• A guide to the Greeks, the Trojans, the gods and the places, with pronunciations

Why read it

Because nothing else is quite this honest about war. The gods are partisan and bored. Zeus weighs two men's lives in a pair of scales and one of them simply sinks. Nobody is rewarded for being good, and the best man in the poem is on the losing side.

And then, at the very end, two enemies sit in a tent and weep and eat together and find each other beautiful — which is all the mercy there is, and has been enough to keep the poem alive for nearly three thousand years.

For readers of mythology, ancient history and classic literature — and for anyone who has meant to read the Iliad for years and wanted a way in.