The Iliad

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The Iliad

Homer

Poetry

Aug 1, 2018

The Iliad is a narrative of divine stratagems and military exploits, of fierce courage and heroic endeavor—a tale, clearly, of epic imagination. Yet the sense of pageantry the poem evokes obscures what may be its most telling characteristic: the peculiar angle from which Homer chooses to view antiquity’s most fabled war, focusing on only a few weeks in a decade-long struggle. Throughout, The Iliad is filled with astonishing passages of martial valor (see the feats of the Greek warrior Great Ajax, and his engagements with Hector, in books 7, 14, and 15), divine invention (the fashioning of Achilles’s shield by Hephaestus in book 18), and magical inspiration (the scene, in book 19, in which Achilles’s horse foresees his destiny), but what are most stunning in the end are the scenes that unfold on a human scale.

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