by Homer
24.29–30 who insulted the goddesses, when they came to his shepherd’s steading, and gave the nod to her, the goddess whose gift to him was ruinous lust: This is the only reference in the Iliad to the Judgment of Paris, a story told in many ancient sources. At the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis, the goddess Eris (whose name means “strife”) tossed a golden apple among the assembled guests, saying it should go to the most beautiful goddess. Reluctant to be judge, the gods gave the task to Paris, Priam’s son, who was tending sheep on the slopes of Mount Ida. Each of the contending goddesses offered a bribe: Hera offered power, Athena wisdom and battle-victory, and Aphrodite the love of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Awarding the apple to Aphrodite, Paris incurred the unflagging hatred of Hera and Athena for Troy and all Trojans. The passage in which the Iliadic reference occurs, and especially lines 24.29–30, have a vexed history, leading some scholars to believe they are later interpolation (Nicholas Richardson, The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. 6, Books 21–24 [Cambridge, 1996], 276ff.).
24.544 Makar is a legendary ruler of Lesbos. This passage delineates the range of Priam’s power, from Lesbos to the south, Phrygia to the east, and north to the Hellespont.
24.617 stone though she is: In other traditions, only Niobe was turned to stone. The origin of the story is thought to lie in a natural rock formation on Mount Sipylos, roughly suggesting a woman’s head, down which water coursed like tears.
24.700 the height of Pergamos: The citadel of Troy, above the lower city.
24.735 will hurl you from the ramparts: According to later tradition, this was indeed to be Astyanax’s fate.
24.765 the twentieth year for me: The number of years perhaps should be taken as a poetic figure, with twenty representing “a long time.” The war has been of ten years’ duration, and there is a tradition that it took Paris and Helen some time to make their way from Sparta to Troy.
SELECTED FURTHER READING
COMMENTARIES AND REFERENCES
The most comprehensive commentary is the six-volume series published by Cambridge University Press. While the line-by-line remarks are often technical, the series’ many essays on general themes (“The gods in Homer”; “Typical motifs and themes”) are generally clear and readable.
G. S. Kirk. The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume I: books 1–4 (Cambridge, 2000).
G. S. Kirk. The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume II: books 5–8 (Cambridge, 2000).
Bryan Hainsworth. The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume III: books 9–12 (Cambridge, 2000).
Richard Janko. The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume IV: books 1–4 (Cambridge, 2000).
Mark W. Edwards. The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume V: books 1–4 (Cambridge, 2000).
Nicholas Richardson. The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume VI: books 1–4 (Cambridge, 2000) .
Other general reference works
Margalit Finkelberg (ed.). The Homer Encyclopedia. 3 vols. (Oxford, 2011).
Timothy Gantz. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore, 1993).
Ian Morris and Barry Powell (eds.). A New Companion to Homer (Leiden, 1997).
OTHER EARLY GREEK POETRY
J. S. Burgess. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001) .
Homer. The Odyssey. Translations by Richmond Lattimore (New York, 1967) and Robert Fagles (New York, 1996) are recommended.
Glenn W. Most (ed. and trans.). Hesiod: Volume I: Theogony; Works and Days; Testimonia; Volume II: The Shield; Catalogue of Women; Other Fragments (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).
M. L. West. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics (Oxford, 2013).
M. L. West (ed. and trans.). Greek Epic Fragments from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
M. L. West (ed. and trans.). Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer. (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
THE BRONZE AGE AND THE TROJAN WAR
Greece and Mycenae
John Chadwick. The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambridge, 1958).
John Chadwick. The Mycenaean World (Cambridge, 1976).
Oliver Dickinson. The Aegean Bronze Age (Cambridge, 1994).
Nic Fields. Mycenaean Citadels c. 1350–1200 BC (Botley, Oxford, 2004).
Elizabeth French. Mycenae: Agamemnon’s Capital (Oxford, 2002).
K. A. Wardle and Diana Wardle. Cities of Legend: The Mycenaean World (London, 1997).
Anatolia and Troy
Trevor Bryce. Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford, 2004).
Trevor Bryce. The Trojans and Their Neighbours (Abingdon, Oxon, 2006).
Nic Fields. Troy c. 1700–1250 BC (Botley, Oxford, 2004).
John Victor Luce. Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited (New Haven, 1998).
Craig H. Melchert (ed.). The Luwians (Leiden, 2003).
Studia Troica: Interdisciplinary periodical dedicated to Troy and the Troad through all the many historical phases; includes the annual report of excavations at Troy between 1991 and 2011. Topics can be browsed and copies of the reports purchased through the University of Tübingen’s website: http://www.ufg.uni-tuebingen.de/juengere-urgeschichte/forschungsprojekte/aktuelle-forschungsprojekte/troia/publikationen.html.
Trojan War
Eric H. Cline. The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013).
G. S. Kirk. “History and fiction in the Iliad,” in Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume II: books 5–8 (Cambridge, 2000): 36–50.
Joaquim Latacz. Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Translated from the German by Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland (Oxford, 2004).
Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant. The Trojan War (Westport, Conn., 2005).
Michael Wood. In Search of the Trojan War, rev. ed. (London, 2005).
AGE OF HOMER
Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris (eds.). The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule (Austin, 1998).
J. N. Coldstream. Geometric Greece: 900–700 BC, 2nd ed. rev. (New York, 2003).
Robin Osborne. “Homer’s society,” in Robert Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2007): 206–219.
Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant. Citadel to City-State: The Transformation of Greece, 1200–700 B.C.E. (Bloomington, Ind., 1999).
ORAL POETRY AND TRANSMISSION OF THE HOMERIC POEMS
Robert Fowler. “The Homeric question,” in Robert Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2007): 220–232.
M. Haslam. “Homeric Papyri and the Transmission of the Text,” in Ian Morris and Barry Powell (eds.) A New Companion to Homer (Leiden, 1997): 55–100.
Richard Janko. “The origins and evolution of the epic diction” and “The text and transmission of the Iliad,” both in The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume IV: books 1–4 (Cambridge, 2000): 8–19 and 20–38 respectively.
Minna Skafte Jensen. The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory (Copenhagen, 1980).
G. S. Kirk. The Songs of Homer (Cambridge, 1962).
Albert B. Lord. The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
Gregory Nagy. Homeric Questions (Austin, Tex., 1996).
Barry Powell. “Homer and Writing,” Ian Morris and Barry Powell (eds.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden, 1997): 3–32.
Benjamin A. Stoltz and Richard S. Shannon (eds.). Oral Literature and the Formula (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1976); see especially Ruth Finnegan, “What is oral literature anyway? Comments in the light of some African and other comparative material”: 127–166.
CRITICAL STUDIES
The works below represent useful treatments of the epic’s different themes and features.
Caroline Alexander. The War That Killed Achilles (New York, 2009).
Jasper Griffin. Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1983).
Katherine Callen King. Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1987).
Sarah Morris. “Homer and the Near East,” in Ian Morris and Barry Powell (eds.). A New Comp
anion to Homer (Leiden, 1997): 599–623.
Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore, 1981).
Adam Nicolson. The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (London, 2014).
J. M. Redfield. Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, rev. ed. (Durham, N.C., 1994).
Ruth Scodel. Listening to Homer (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2009).
Jonathan Shay. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York, 1995).
Laura M. Slatkin. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad (Berkeley, 1991).
Simone Weil. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” translated by M. McCarthy, in Christopher Benfey (ed.) War and the Iliad (New York, 2005): 1–37.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first debt of any translator is to the original author; and so my immeasurable gratitude is to the master poet Homer, whose work has informed and directed so much of my life.
My second debt is to Martin L. West, whose Greek text was the basis of my translation. As this book was going into production, I learned with great and unexpected sadness of his death. A towering figure in the world of early Greek poetry and epic, his many works of scholarship have defined this difficult and exciting field. His kind words of support to me meant and mean a great deal, and it is hard to accept that I will now never meet him. Nonetheless, I give my great thanks to him for his personal interest, and for his peerless work.
My great gratitude goes to Dan Halpern and to Ecco Press for the leap of faith that made this work possible. Thanks too to Gabriella Doob for her patient work on the many logistics of production. I would also like to thank illustrator David Cain for another beautiful map.
This translation had its roots in a previous book, The War That Killed Achilles (Viking Penguin, 2009), which featured my translation of Iliad Book 22, as well as some historical material that I have re-used in the introduction to this work. My thanks, therefore, to Wendy Wolf and Viking Penguin for being there at the beginning.
I would also like to thank for supportive words along the way Richard Janko and Jean Strouse; and Glen Bowersock, who inadvertently prodded me to this undertaking.
I owe thanks to friends and family for encouragement over the years; to George Butler and Belinda and John Knight who were there at the origin of this effort; to Hugh Van Dusen and to Annette Worsley-Taylor; to Jenny Lawrence, Simon Prebble, and the New York Society Library; and to my departed friend Marjorie Shuer; to Bruce and Gabriele Dempsey for both moral and practical support over many years; and to my mother who matter-of-factly indicated that whatever else I might do, she expected the Iliad.
My thanks to Anthony Sheil, my dear friend and agent, who, I suspect, always had this project lurking in the back of his heart and mind; and whose close reading of the Greek was an immeasurable asset.
And my greatest thanks to Frank Blair, whose unflagging faith, enthusiasm, warm support, and sharp reading eye—especially for words relating to “wine” and “the sea”—greatly enabled this work; and to Mac and Tybalt.
ALSO BY CAROLINE ALEXANDER
Lost Gold of the Dark Ages:
War, Treasure, and the Mystery of the Saxons
The War That Killed Achilles:
The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War
The Bounty:
The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
The Endurance:
Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition
Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition:
The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-Bound Cat
Battle’s End:
A Seminole Football Team Revisited
The Way to Xanadu:
Journeys to a Legendary Realm
One Dry Season:
In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley
COPYRIGHT
THE ILIAD. Copyright © 2015 by Caroline Alexander. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-204627-7
EPub Edition July 2016 ISBN 9780062046291
Version 01302017
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com