In the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, a quarrel between Agamemnon, commander of the Achaean army, and Achilles, its greatest fighter, sets the poem in motion. Stripped of the captive woman Briseis, Achilles withdraws from the fighting and asks his mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, to let the Greeks be beaten without him. They are. Only when his companion Patroclus goes out in Achilles' armour and is killed by the Trojan prince Hector does Achilles return to the field — no longer for honour, but for revenge.
The Iliad covers a few weeks of a ten-year war and never reaches the fall of Troy. What it gives instead is the war seen close up: massed armies and single combats, the gods taking sides on Olympus, and the men on both sides of the wall who know how the story ends for them. Homer grants the Trojans the same interior life as the Greeks — Hector's farewell to his wife Andromache, Priam crossing the enemy camp at night to beg for his son's body — which is why the poem has never read as propaganda for either side.
Composed in Homeric Greek in roughly the eighth century BC and running to twenty-four books of dactylic hexameter, it stands with the Odyssey at the head of the Western literary tradition, and is read now both as a war narrative and as a sustained meditation on mortality, honour and rage.