"The Greeks considered The Iliad their greatest literary achievement, and no epic poem in any language has ever rivalled it.

"The Iliad is the culmination of a long-standing oral tradition. The oral technique enabled a master bard like Homer to develop what may historically have been an event of minor importance into a fully fledged epic. So, out of a single episode in the legendary Trojan War - Achilles' withdrawal from the fighting and return to kill the Trojan hero, Hector - Homer generated the twenty-four books of The Iliad.

"What the oral technique does not automatically provide, however, is the genius of the poem which is rendered here so elegantly and clearly in E.V.Rieu's acclaimed translation. Homer has created a timeless, dramatic tragedy. His characters are heroic but their passions and problems are human and universal, and he presents them with compassion, understanding and humour against the harsh background of the war and the quarrels of the gods."

(Taken from back of 'Penguin Classics' edition)

My Thoughts

The author: apparently (once again, the translator has provided an extremely informative introduction to the book) one of the big questions that causes much debate is regarding Homer's identity. It has not yet been determined beyond all doubt whether a single author is responsible for The Iliad and The Odyssey, nor even a likely date that the books were penned. What seems certain is that the books were a culmination of centuries' worth of mythology and legend, drawn together into the kind of tale you can imagine a minstrel telling in a warm tavern of an evening. Whether Homer existed as a single entity or not is, in my opinion (as an unlearned reader), irrelevant - what matters is the brilliant tales that are related in the books, and the manner in which they are told - colourful, inspiring and emotional.

The translator: as Mr. Rieu himself points out in his introduction, a good translation does not simply consist of a word-for-word conversion of an original text. Indeed, in the case of Homer's work, such a literal translation would be practically unreadable, if not impossible to produce (there are many ancient Greek phrases and concepts where a direct translation would be meaningless or equivalent words do not exist). Mr. Rieu has done a fantastic job of bringing The Iliad to life for a modern reader, through careful use of today's terminology - he freely admits that he has had to rewrite many phrases so that the idea comes through without being buried in complex vocabulary. If you decide to read The Iliad or The Odyssey, I recommend you search for this edition/translation. Unless, of course, you are a student of ancient Greek, in which case go for the original! Alas, I do not fall into this category...

The tale: The Iliad has everything one might want in a book - drama, romance (to some degree), action, intrigue, religion, even horror - you name it, it's probably in there somewhere. One should not be deterred by the fact that the story revolves around the last days of a 10-year war - it does not feel like a typical 'war story'. In fact, most of the text is concerned with the complex interactions between Achilles, Agamemnon, the other chieftains, and the Olympian gods themselves (who are amusingly depicted as behaving like naughty children - perhaps the inspiration for their characters in 'Eric the Viking'?). Homer's triumphant style adds a wonderful colour to the prose (originally, this would have been an epic poem, but this would be almost impossible to achieve in translation) - his (perhaps extravagant use of adjectives gives an overwhelming impression of the power of his characters.

Achilles is presented as the hero of the story, even though he spends the majority of the time being referred to, rather than actually doing anything! After a quarrel with Agamemnon, he retires from the fighting, and does not return until towards the end of the story. During his absence, the rest of the characters spend a lot of their time wishing he was there...

Once again, the reader of The Iliad is likely to be surprised at how little people, society and attitudes have changed in the 3,000 years or so since the book was written. People still behave and react in very much the same way as Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Hector, etc. did in times of old.

And so on to The Odyssey, my next endeavour...!