The Iliad: The Story of Achilles’ Wrath

The Iliad is the first of the two great epic poems attributed to Homer, and it is one of the foundational works of Western literature. Composed in the eighth century BCE, the Iliad tells the story of a single episode in the tenth year of the Trojan War: the quarrel between the Greek hero Achilles and the Greek king Agamemnon, the withdrawal of Achilles from the fighting, the deaths of his beloved companion Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan hero Hector, and Achilles’ return to battle to avenge Patroclus. The poem is at once a war story, a meditation on the meaning of heroism and the inevitability of death, a study of the relationship between gods and humans, and a complex work of literary art that has been admired, imitated, and reinterpreted for almost three thousand years.

This page is a concise summary and analysis of the Iliad. It explains the structure of the poem, the story of the Wrath of Achilles, and the themes of the work. It links back to the Greek Mythology cluster, the Odyssey page, and the Trojan War page.

The Plot

The Iliad is set in the tenth year of the Trojan War, the great war fought by a coalition of Greek kings against the city of Troy on the coast of Asia Minor. The Greeks have gathered a thousand ships, led by Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. The Trojans are led by Hector, the son of King Priam. The Greeks have won several battles but have been unable to break the stalemate, and the war is dragging on.

The poem begins with a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. Agamemnon has taken as his prize the captive Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo, and when her father comes to ransom her, Agamemnon refuses. Apollo punishes the Greek army with a plague. The Greek seer Calchas reveals that Apollo is angry because of Agamemnon’s refusal, and Agamemnon, forced to give Chryseis back, takes Achilles’ prize Briseis as compensation. Achilles, enraged, withdraws from the fighting and asks his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, to persuade Zeus to help the Trojans.

The next several books of the Iliad describe the Greek defeat at the hands of the Trojans. Agamemnon attempts to apologize to Achilles, but Achilles refuses. The Trojans attack the Greek ships, and the Greeks are on the verge of being pushed into the sea. Achilles, although he refuses to fight himself, agrees to let his companion Patroclus lead the Myrmidons (his own troops) into battle. Patroclus pushes the Trojans back from the ships, but is then killed by Hector.

Achilles, hearing of Patroclus’ death, is overwhelmed with grief. He returns to battle, and the gods lend him new armor forged by Hephaestus. He defeats the Trojan army, kills Hector, and drags the body behind his chariot back to the Greek camp. Priam, the aged king of Troy, comes secretly to Achilles’ tent to beg for the body of his son, and Achilles, moved by Priam’s grief, returns the body. The poem ends with the funeral of Hector.

The Major Themes

The Wrath of Achilles (Mēnis)

The first word of the Iliad in Greek is mēnin — wrath. The poem is, fundamentally, the story of Achilles’ wrath: his withdrawal from the fighting, his grief over the death of Patroclus, and his terrible, pitiless anger against Hector. The wrath of Achilles is the central theme of the poem, and it is presented as both heroic and tragic.

Heroism and Death

The Iliad is obsessed with the relationship between heroism and death. The Greek heroes are constantly reminded that they will die. Achilles himself knows that he has two fates: a short, glorious life, or a long, obscure one. He chooses the short, glorious one, and his choice shapes the whole poem. The heroes of the Iliad are great because they accept their mortality and fight on anyway, knowing that their fame will be the only thing to survive them.

Gods and Humans

The Iliad is a meditation on the relationship between gods and humans. The gods of the Greek pantheon are constantly intervening in the war, sometimes on the Greek side, sometimes on the Trojan side, often for personal reasons. They quarrel, they make bets with each other, and they are bound by the ancient decrees of fate. The human heroes are at the mercy of the gods, but the gods themselves are not all-powerful: they are subject to the older gods, to fate, and to the constraints of their own characters.

The Glory of War

The Iliad is, paradoxically, both a celebration and a critique of war. The poem celebrates the heroism of the warriors on both sides, the glory of the battlefield, the beauty of the weapons, and the dignity of the death of a hero. But it also shows the suffering of war: the widows, the orphans, the broken families, the cities burned and the people enslaved. The famous passage in Book 6, in which Hector’s wife Andromache begs her husband not to go to battle, is one of the most moving anti-war passages in all of Western literature.

The Composition of the Poem

The Iliad was probably composed orally in the eighth or early seventh century BCE, and it was written down shortly afterwards. The poem is the work of a single, very great poet (whom later tradition named Homer), but it draws on a long tradition of oral epic about the Trojan War. The poem is written in dactylic hexameter, the standard meter of Greek epic poetry, and it uses a highly traditional set of formulas and themes.

The historicity of the Trojan War is debated, but most scholars now accept that there was a real war, that the city of Troy was a real city, and that the war was probably fought around 1200 BCE. The full story is told in the Trojan War long-tail.

The Structure of the Poem

The Iliad is divided into 24 books. The poem is structured around a series of parallel and contrastive scenes: the quarrel and reconciliation of Agamemnon and Achilles, the death of Patroclus and the death of Hector, the funeral of Patroclus and the funeral of Hector. The poem uses a sophisticated set of narrative devices, including the epic simile (the famous comparison of the armies to swarms of flies, the comparison of Hector to a lion, etc.), the formal speech, the messenger speech, and the catalog (the famous Catalog of Ships in Book 2).

The Influence of the Iliad

The Iliad has been one of the most influential works in the Western tradition. It is the model for the long epic poem of war (Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Indian Mahabharata). It is the source of countless images and phrases: Achilles’ heel, the Trojan Horse, the wrath of Achilles, the river of blood, the arms of Achilles. It is the origin of the literary archetype of the heroic warrior, the devoted companion, the faithful wife, the grieving father. The Iliad is, quite simply, the foundation of Western literature.