Work
Iliad
Ἰλιάς
By Homer.
- Kind of writing
- Epic poetry
- Dialect
- Ionic/Epic
- Written
- 8th c. BC
- Length
- 129,604 words analysed
- Vocabulary
- 56% common words
- In the library
- 1 Greek text, 2 English translations
The texts
Each is the collection's own file, read unchanged from the Perseus Digital Library or Open Greek and Latin. The description is theirs too.
- Greek textHomer. Homeri Opera, Volumes 1-2. Monro, D. B. (David Binning), editor; Allen, Thomas W. (Thomas William), editor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908-1920.
- English translationHomer. The Iliad, Volume 1-2. Murray, A. T. (Augustus Taber), translator. London: William Heinmann; New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1924-1925.
- English translationHomer. The Iliad of Homer, rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original. Butler, Samuel, 1835-1902, translator. London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1898.
In The Painted Stoa
Entries that quote or point to this work's Greek.
The oldest written Greek, read at last in 1952Linear BFor half a century after they were dug up, thousands of clay tablets from the Bronze Age palaces of Crete and mainland Greece kept their secret.Where Greeks went when doctors failed: a night in the god's hallAsclepius and the healing sleepA sick Greek who could afford the journey might go to a sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing, wash, make an offering, and lie down for the night in a special hall, hoping the god would come in a dream and cure him.Windows onto a world at peace, opened in the middle of a warHomer's similesThe Iliad is a poem about a few weeks of killing outside Troy.Homer's city of Agamemnon, and the graves Schliemann opened in 1876Mycenae, rich in goldHomer called Mycenae "rich in gold".Minos' city in legend, and the palace Arthur Evans dug up and rebuilt in concreteKnossos and the labyrinthHomer knew Knossos as "a great city" where Minos was king, and later Greeks told of the labyrinth that Daedalus built there for the Minotaur.Homer's sacred Ilios, the Greek town that claimed to be it, and the mound of many citiesTroy at HisarlikFor Homer, Troy was "sacred Ilios", the city whose fall everyone in the Iliad knows is coming.