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The Iliad; "a poem about Ilium (Troy)" is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. As with the Odyssey, the poem is divided into 24 books and was written in dactylic hexameter. It contains 15,693 lines in its most widely accepted version. Set towards the end of the Trojan War, a ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Mycenaean Greek states, the poem depicts significant events in the siege's final weeks. In particular, the fierce quarrel between King Agamemnon and the celebrated warrior, Achilles.

There are two human beings in the poem who are godlike, Achilles and Helen. Helen, the "cause" of the war, is a sort of human Aphrodite. She is irresistible. Every king in Greece was ready to fight for her hand in marriage, but she chose Menelaus, King of Sparta. When Paris, the Prince of Troy, came to visit, she ran off with him [or was abducted by him, depending on how one interprets the story], leaving husband and daughter, without a thought of the consequences for others. When she left with Paris she acted like a god, with no thought of anything but the fulfilment of her own desire. However, at the beginning of the Iliad, she has already recognised her flaws. She feels responsible for the human misery she sees all around her, something the gods never do. The gods feel no responsibility for the human victims of their private wars.

At the beginning of the Iliad Helen has already broken out of the prison of self-absorption, but this is the point at which Achilles enters it. The Iliad shows the origin, course and consequences of his rage, his imprisonment in a godlike, lonely, heroic fury from which all the rest of the world is excluded, and also his return to human stature. The road to this final release is long and grim, strewn with the corpses of many a Greek and Trojan, and it leads finally to his own death.

Achilles plays no part in the events described in Books 2 through 8; he sits by his ships on the shore, waiting for the fulfilment of his mother's promise. And by the end of Book 8, the supplication of Thetis and the will of Zeus have begun to produce results. The Greeks are in retreat, penned up in their hastily fortified camp at nightfall, awaiting the Trojan assault, which will come with daybreak. And Agamemnon yields to Nestor's advice to send an embassy to Achilles, urging him to return to the battle line. It is a magnificent offer, but there is one thing missing: Agamemnon offers no apology, no admission that he was in the wrong. Therefore, Achilles rejects this embassy and any other that may be sent. He vows to sail home the next day, with all his men.

Due to a string of events [mainly the death of his beloved fellow warrior Patroclus at the hands of Hector, Prince of Troy], Achilles decides to join the war after all. When he does go into battle, the Trojans turn and run for the gates; only Hector remains outside. And the two champions come face-to-face at last. The contrast between the raw, self-absorbed fury of Achilles and the civilised responsibility and restraint of Hector is maintained to the end. It is of his people, the Trojans, that Hector is thinking as he throws his spear at Achilles: “How much lighter the war would be for Trojans then / if you, their greatest scourge, were dead and gone!�

But it is Hector who dies, and as Achilles exults over his fallen enemy, his words bring home again the fact that he is fighting for himself alone; this is the satisfaction of a personal hatred. He taunts Hector with the fate of his body. And in answer to Hector's plea and offer of ransom for his corpse, he reveals the extreme inhuman hatred and fury he has reached: “Beg no more, you fawning dog � begging me by my parents! / Would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now / to hack your flesh away and eat you raw –� This is how the gods hate. His words recall those of Zeus to Hera in Book 4: “Only if you could breach / their gates and their long walls and devour Priam�.

Achilles lashes Hector's body to his chariot, and, in full view of the Trojans on the walls, drags it to his tent, where he organises a magnificent funeral for Patroclus. All through the funeral games he acts with a tact, diplomacy and generosity that seem to signal the end of his desperate isolation, his godlike self-absorption; we almost forget that Hector's corpse is still lying in the dust, tied to his chariot, and that Achilles refuses the will of Zeus, refuses to surrender Hector's body to his father Priam.

Only when Priam himself visits Achilles in his tent and kisses his hand does Achilles break out at last from the prison of self-absorbed, godlike passion. Achilles takes Priam's hands and begins to weep. But not for Priam but for his own aged father, to whose memory Priam had appealed and who will soon, like Priam, lose a son.

Achilles goes to collect the ransom, and when he orders Hector's body to be washed and anointed, he gives orders to have it done out of Priam's sight: “He feared that, overwhelmed by the sight of Hector, / wild with grief, Priam might let his anger flare / and Achilles might fly into fresh rage himself, / cut the old man down …� He knows himself. This is a new Achilles, who can feel pity for others. For the first time he shows self-knowledge and acts to prevent the calamity his violent temper might bring about. It is as near to self-criticism as he ever gets, but it marks the point at which he ceases to be godlike Achilles and becomes a human being in the full sense of the word.

The tragic course of Achilles' rage, his final recognition of human values – this is the guiding theme of the poem, and it is developed against a background of violence and death. But the grim progress of the war is interrupted by scenes which remind us that the brutality of war is not the whole of it. Except for Achilles, whose worship of violence falters only in the final moment of pity for Priam, the yearning for peace and its creative possibilities is never far below the surface of the warriors' minds. This is most poignantly expressed by the scenes that take place in Troy, especially the farewell scene between Hector and Andromache. (<3) But it is not enough. The Iliad remains a terrifying poem. Achilles, just before his death, is redeemed as a human being, but there is no consolation for the death of Hector. We are left with a sense of waste, which is not adequately balanced even by the greatness of the heroic figures and the action; the scale descends towards loss. The Iliad remains not only the greatest epic poem in literature but also the most tragic.

The death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. The images of that night assault � the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery � all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalised in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of war: that no civilisation, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.