What it is
The Iliad is the older of the two Homeric epics: a poem of around fifteen thousand lines in dactylic hexameter, divided in the transmitted tradition into twenty-four books. The conventional dating of its composition is the eighth century BCE; the text was further stabilised in the work of the Alexandrian scholars (Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus) in the third and second.
What it is about
The poem takes a small slice of the tenth and final year of the war the Greeks have been waging against Troy and makes its subject the mēnis, the wrath, of Achilles. It opens with Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon, follows the withdrawal of Achilles from the fighting and the resulting catastrophe for the Greeks, the death of Patroclus, the return of Achilles to battle, the killing of Hector, and the visit of Hector's father Priam to the tent of Achilles to ransom his son's body. The fall of Troy itself is not narrated in the poem.
The famous structural features — the catalogue of ships in Book II, the embassy to Achilles in Book IX, the shield of Achilles in Book XVIII, the ransom of Hector in Book XXIV — are part of the architecture of the work as it has come down to us, and are part of how the philosophical tradition reads it.
Why it matters for Virtue & Power
The classical philosophical inquiry into courage, honour, the bearing of grief, the shape of a heroic life and the experience of war begins with the Iliad and returns to it. Plato's Republic contains a long, careful argument about whether Homer should be the educator of the young; the very seriousness of Plato's worry is a measure of the place the poem held in classical Greek life. To read the philosophers without the poem is to read the second half of the conversation.
Citing the Iliad
The standard citation is by book and line, in the form Iliad 1.1. The standard Greek text is the Oxford Classical Texts edition by Monro and Allen; see our Sources page.