Achilles
Best of the Achaeans, whose wrath is the poem’s engine and whose grief humanizes glory.
Ancient Greek · Epic poem · c. 750 BCE
The Iliad
Homer
In the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles withdraws from battle after a quarrel with Agamemnon. The poem follows rage, friendship, and the death of Hector until a king kneels for his son’s body.
Heroic epic
Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses.
Characters
Hector
Troy’s defender, husband and father, the poem’s measure of civic courage.
Priam
Aged king whose supplication ends the epic in shared mourning rather than triumph.
Themes
Kleos and mortality
Fame is the hero’s answer to death, and the poem never lets either term rest.
Rage
Menis begins as insult and becomes a cosmic weather that consumes friend and enemy.
Motifs
Burial rites restore a human order the battlefield keeps breaking.
War is constantly measured against peacetime crafts, storms, and animals.