Iliad

The Iliad does not tell the whole war. It begins in the tenth year, with a plague sent by Apollo after Agamemnon refuses to return the daughter of his priest Chryses. When the seer Calchas reveals the cause, Agamemnon gives the girl back but takes Achilles’ prize Briseis in her place. Achilles, publicly dishonoured, withdraws from the fighting and asks his mother Thetis to persuade Zeus to let the Trojans win until the Achaeans learn what his absence means.

The poem’s spine is therefore not “Greece against Troy” but honour, anger, and their price. Battle scenes, divine partisanship, and the farewells of husbands and wives are all strung on the consequences of that quarrel. The Iliad is a war poem that spends as much time on quarrels, councils, and funerals as on killing.

• Books I–VIII: plague, quarrel, and the withdrawal of Achilles; the duel of Paris and Menelaus; the exploits of Diomedes; Hector’s return to the city and his farewell to Andromache; Hector and Aias fight to a draw.
• Books IX–XV: the embassy to Achilles fails; the night raid; Agamemnon is wounded; the Trojans break through the wall and reach the ships.
• Books XVI–XXIV: Patroclus goes into battle in Achilles’ armour and is killed; Achilles is reconciled with Agamemnon and returns; he kills Hector; Patroclus is buried; Priam ransoms Hector’s body, and the poem closes with Hector’s funeral.

The Iliad keeps asking what a hero is fighting for. Is it kléos, the undying report of one’s name? Is it the prize, the wife, the family, the city? Achilles knows that if he kills Hector his own death will follow soon after, and he chooses the short, glorious life anyway. Hector knows that Troy will fall, and still goes out to meet Achilles. Fate and human choice do not cancel one another: a man can still choose how to meet what cannot be avoided.

The other great thread is the violation and repair of xenía, the obligation between host and guest. Agamemnon humiliates Chryses, Achilles drags Hector’s body, and Priam kisses the hand of the man who killed his son. The poem tracks a code of honour being broken and, at the very end, restored.

• Achilles: the strongest Achaean, and the centre of the poem’s anger and grief.
• Hector: Troy’s commander, the defender of a city and a family that he knows are doomed.
• Agamemnon: the Achaean high king, whose authority and touchiness set the plot in motion.
• Patroclus: Achilles’ closest companion; his death brings Achilles back to the war.
• Helen and Paris: the cause of the war and the fracture inside the Trojan royal house.
• Priam and Andromache: the family and the city seen from inside Troy.