The Iliad and The Odyssey for Seekers

Dear reader — it kind of is, which is why the mix-up isn't dumb. Two epic poems credited to Homer, and they answer each other. The Iliad is about a young man who chooses a short life and glory. The Odyssey is about an older man who chooses to live, whatever it takes. The first is mostly battle, rage and death. The second is mostly cunning, home, and getting there. Read them in that order.

Who Was Homer

Nothing certain is known. The poems came out of an oral tradition of singers who performed long narratives from memory, and were probably written down in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Whether one poet or several made the Iliad is a question people still argue about. Hold that loosely and just read the poems.

The Iliad

An epic in twenty-four books, about 15,700 lines of dactylic hexameter, set in the tenth year of the Trojan War. It doesn't tell the whole war. It covers a few weeks, and the subject is announced in the first word: "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans." The Greeks, led by Agamemnon, have besieged Troy for nine years because Paris, a Trojan prince, took Helen, the wife of Agamemnon's brother Menelaus.

The quarrel (Books I–IX). Apollo sends a plague on the Greek camp because Agamemnon kept the daughter of one of his priests. Under pressure he gives her back, but demands a replacement, and takes Briseis, the captive woman who is Achilles's prize of honor. Achilles nearly draws his sword on him and withdraws from the fight.

With the Greeks in trouble Agamemnon admits his fault and offers Briseis back, a mountain of gifts, and a share of his kingdom. He sends Odysseus, Phoenix, and Ajax to make the case. Achilles turns it down: "Him do I hate even as the gates of hell who says one thing while he hides another in his heart." And he reveals something new. His mother Thetis has told him there are two ways he can end: "If I stay here and fight, I shall not return alive but my name will live for ever: whereas if I go home my name will die." Long life and forgotten, or short life and remembered.

Hector and Troy (Book VI). The Trojan side. Hector meets his wife Andromache at the Scaean gate with their infant son. She begs him to stop fighting at the front. She's already lost her father and seven brothers to Achilles, and her mother to captivity. Hector tells her he can't hide from the fighting. He knows Troy will fall, and his greatest grief isn't for the city but for her, imagining her taken to Greece as a slave. He reaches for his son, who cries at the sight of his helmet. Hector laughs, takes it off and lays it on the ground.

In the same book, on the battlefield, the Greek Diomedes and the Lycian Glaucus meet face to face and begin to introduce themselves. Glaucus gives his lineage with a famous comparison: "Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees." They discover their grandfathers were guest-friends, and decide not to fight each other. They exchange armor instead.

The turn (Books XVI–XXII). With the Greeks nearly beaten, Patroclus, Achilles's closest friend, begs to enter the battle wearing Achilles's armor. He drives the Trojans back and kills Sarpedon, a son of Zeus, but goes too far and is killed by Apollo, a Trojan named Euphorbus, and finally Hector. As he dies, he says Hector too has little time left.

Achilles learns of it and is overcome with grief. His mother Thetis goes to Hephaestus, who forges a new set of armor, including a shield. The poem pauses for a long description of what's on it: earth, sky and sea, two cities, one with weddings and feasts, farming, herding, dancing. The whole world on a shield, in the middle of a war.

Achilles returns to battle and kills many Trojans. They retreat into the city, but Hector stays outside the gates. When Achilles approaches, Hector loses his nerve and runs, and Achilles chases him three times around the walls. Athena tricks him into standing and fighting. Hector knows: "My doom has come upon me; let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter."

The ending (Book XXIV). For days Achilles has dragged Hector's body behind his chariot. The gods are troubled, and Zeus sends Hermes to guide the old King Priam alone through the Greek camp to Achilles's tent. Priam kneels, clasps his knees and kisses the hands that killed his sons. He asks him to think of his own father: "Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me."

And Achilles weeps, and speaks gently. The gods spin a life of sorrow for mortals though they're free of it themselves. "On the floor of Jove's palace there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones." Some get a mix, some only evil. He agrees to a truce so the Trojans can mourn Hector: nine days to gather wood, the burning, the barrow. The women of Troy lament in turn: Andromache, Hecuba, Helen. The poem ends not with victory but a funeral: "Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Hector tamer of horses."

Three ideas the poem keeps returning to. Glory and the short life: the word is kleos, "what is heard of you." Sarpedon puts the bargain most clearly: if fighting meant living forever he wouldn't ask anyone to do it, but death comes either way. Anger and its cost: Achilles's anger over a lost prize leads to his withdrawal and the death of his friend, and by Book XVIII he wishes anger could be wiped from the world, because it "rises up in the soul of a man like smoke, and the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey." And the gods and fate. The gods take sides, argue, trick, and weep, but they don't control everything. In Book VIII Zeus weighs the fates of the two armies on golden scales, and the Greek side sinks. The outcome is set by something he reads rather than writes.

The Odyssey

An epic in twenty-four books, about 12,100 lines, following Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his ten-year journey home from Troy. "Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy." Four movements: Books I–IV, the Telemachy, follow his son looking for news. Books V–VIII bring Odysseus from Calypso's island to the Phaeacians. Books IX–XII are his own account of his wanderings. Books XIII–XXIV are the return. Note the order: the adventures are told in the middle, in flashback.

Home front. Telemachus, now about twenty, sits among the suitors who are eating his household's livestock and courting his mother. A stranger, who's really Athena in disguise, asks who he is. His answer shows how far he is from knowing his father: "My mother tells me I am son to Ulysses, but it is a wise child that knows his own father." More than a hundred suitors have moved into the house hoping to marry Penelope and take the estate. She's put them off for years with a web she wove by day and unpicked by night: "I fooled them in this way for three years without their finding it out."

Calypso and the Phaeacians. Odysseus has been held on Ogygia by the nymph Calypso for seven years. When the gods order her to let him go, she makes a last offer: stay and be immortal. Odysseus is polite and unmoved: his wife Penelope is "nothing like so tall or so beautiful as yourself. She is only a woman, whereas you are an immortal." He still wants home.

Washed up on the island of the Phaeacians, he's found by the princess Nausicaa and hosted by her father Alcinous. At a feast the blind singer Demodocus performs a song about the fall of Troy with Odysseus's own part in it, and Odysseus covers his face and weeps. Then Alcinous asks who he is, and he finally gives the name: "I am Ulysses son of Laertes, renowned among mankind for all manner of subtlety." The next four books are his story.

The wanderings (IX–XII). The Lotus-eaters: scouts eat the lotus and lose all wish to go home. He drags them back to the ships and ties them down. The Cyclops: Odysseus and twelve men are trapped in the cave of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who eats some of them. Odysseus gets him drunk and tells him his name is Noman. When the giant sleeps, they blind him with a burning stake, and when his neighbors ask who's hurting him, he shouts: "Noman is killing me by fraud; no man is killing me by force."

On Circe's advice Odysseus goes to the edge of the world to consult the seer Tiresias and meets the shades of his mother, Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles. When he tries to console Achilles by saying he's a great prince among the dead, Achilles cuts him off: "I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead." That's the Odyssey answering the Iliad. The Sirens: Circe warns that their singing draws sailors to their deaths on a meadow heaped with bones. She tells him to stop his men's ears with wax and, if he wants to hear, have himself tied to the mast.

Ithaca (XVII–XXIV). Disguised as an old beggar, he walks past an old dog lying on a dung-heap. It's Argos, the hound he trained as a puppy. The dog recognizes him at once, wags its tail, and can't get up. Penelope orders the old nurse Euryclea to wash the beggar's feet. She touches a scar left by a boar's tusk when he was a boy, recognizes him, and drops the foot; the basin tips over. He grabs her throat and makes her swear to secrecy.

Penelope announces a contest: she'll marry whoever can string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads. None of the suitors can string it. The beggar asks to try, and does it easily, and turns his arrows on the suitors with Telemachus and two loyal servants beside him: "Dogs, did you think that I should not come back from Troy?"

Even after, Penelope won't accept that he's her husband. She tells the nurse to move their bed out of the bedchamber. Odysseus explodes: nobody could move that bed, he built it around a living olive tree. Only he and Penelope know. And she weeps and embraces him. Then the families of the dead suitors rise up for revenge, a last battle begins, Zeus ends it with a thunderbolt, and Athena, in the shape of Mentor, makes a covenant of peace.

Two ideas. Cunning: Odysseus isn't the strongest warrior or the angriest; his gift is metis, cunning intelligence, the ability to think your way out, from the Cyclops to the bed. And hospitality: guests and beggars are under Zeus's protection, and how you treat them shows who you are. The swineherd Eumaeus, poor, treats the disguised Odysseus as a guest and the rich suitors abuse him. The Cyclops eats his guests. "All strangers and beggars are from Jove."

Reading Them

The passages quoted here are Samuel Butler's prose translations (1898 and 1900), free on Project Gutenberg, clear and quick but prose, with Roman names for the gods and the hero called Ulysses. Most readers do better with a modern verse translation. The Iliad has hundreds of named characters and long battle scenes, but the shape is simple: a quarrel, a stretch of fighting that goes badly for the Greeks, a death that changes everything, and a return and resolution. The Odyssey is easier: a clear plot, fewer characters, a lot of incident. Just keep in mind the adventures come in the middle as flashback.