An epic poem of some 15,000 lines recounting several weeks near the end of the ten-year Trojan War, centered on the wrath of the Greek warrior Achilles after a quarrel with his commander Agamemnon over a captured woman. Rather than narrating the whole war or Troy's fall, the poem concentrates on Achilles' withdrawal from battle, its catastrophic cost, and his eventual return to avenge his companion Patroclus, killed by the Trojan prince Hector. Its influence on later Western epic, tragedy and the broader literary tradition's treatment of heroism, mortality and rage is difficult to overstate.
Facts
Disputed
Composed, From (Year)Given as circa 750 to 700 BCE by most modern classical scholarship, reconstructed from linguistic layering within the text and comparison with the archaeological record rather than any external date; the poem's roots in oral tradition reach considerably further back than its written composition, and some scholars argue for a later, seventh-century fixation in writing. See the Homeric Question for the deeper authorship dispute this dating is bound up with. Classification
Original LanguageAncient Greek (to 1453) (grc, ISO 639-3) 1 Connections
Authored By
Homer, Authors Why this is disputed. Attribution to a single poet named Homer is itself the Homeric Question; the poem is cited here under the traditional attribution, which remains the scholarly convention even though it is not treated as settled fact.
Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature
In Genre
Influenced
Source Wikipedia: The Aeneid
Sources
1. The Norton Anthology of World Literature
W. W. Norton & Company
Wikipedia: The Aeneid
Wikimedia FoundationInfluenced: The Aeneid, Story sectionQuote, Influenced: The Aeneid, Story section
reflecting Virgil's ambition to rival Homer by treating both the Odyssey's wandering theme and the Iliad's warfare themes
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