by David Elliott

Created on: November 30, 2007   Last Updated: November 15, 2010

The Iliad was written down probably in the 6th century BC by a Greek poet (or poets) known to us only as Homer', though it had certainly been an oral tradition for a long time before that.

The poem's subject matter is the war between the Greeks and Trojans, set off by the elopement to Helen of Troy - daughter of the Greek King Menelaus of Sparta with Paris, son of the Trojan King Priam.

The Greek army, under the command of Menelaus's brother Agamemnon, sets off for Troy to correct the insult to Greek honour and also, of course, to sack the greatest city in that part of the world at the time. One can't help thinking that avenging the elopement was a mere pretext to wage a war that had been brewing for some time, borne from plain old jealousy.

Meanwhile, on Mount Olympus, the gods and goddesses take sides for the grand game. All that's missing is the popcorn, but you can imagine them knocking back the ambrosia and getting as involved as English football fans watching their team playing in Germany.

The initial confrontation of the forces resolves itself fairly quickly into a series of individual duels between the heroes on each side. The overall action, however, concerns itself with the half-divine (on his mother's side) Greek hero Achilles and the Trojan hero Hector, son of King Priam. Although these two actually meet only towards the end of the poem, their polarity forms an invisible force field that arches over the smaller duels, and the tension between them is felt throughout the poem.

Everyone knows what it's all leading up to, and the question they're always asking themselves is when Achilles is going to stop sulking off-stage (over an insult by Agamemnon at the beginning) and make a decisive appearance on the Greek side. Actually, it's only when his best friend Patroclus is killed whilst wearing Achilles' borrowed armour that Achilles finally takes the field.

About the skeleton of the heroic duels is constructed the flesh that makes the Iliad live down the ages, imbued as it is with the common passions, strengths and weaknesses of real men and women, and it is full of marvellous psychological insights that we can all relate to.

In the end, of course, Troy falls and there is the usual rape and pillage by the victors, though this takes place beyond the ending point of the Iliad, the action of which had started ten years after the beginning of the siege. The poem is thus mounted like a jewel in the broader context of the siege, and the fall of Troy itself becomes the launch pad for the epic tale of Aeneas, who escapes the burning city to eventually found Rome, in Virgil's later poem.

The Iliad, with the Odyssey, was memorised by Greeks of the time as Muslims today memorise the Koran. They constituted their moral code and the heroes within them were their life models.

The tragedy of the Iliad is on the grand scale. The gods preside over a field of death, on which men are locked into a pitiless struggle, their individual actions dictated by rules of honour and heroism. Achilles himself is the ultimate tragic hero and man of destiny, fully aware that his life is destined to be cut short in its prime, and motivated only by his own inflexible code of conduct, in which his personal wishes are paramount. Nowadays he would be locked up as a psychopath, and yet there is an overwhelming pathos about him that transcends the carnage he metes out and raises him in our eyes to the point that we accord a respect to him that we would not accord to the gods, those inhuman creatures who dole out death and destruction from their Mount Olympus for the pure pleasure of it, to relieve their immortal boredom

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