The Iliad

The oldest surviving work of European literature: fifty-one days in the tenth year of the war at Troy, when Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon withdraws the greatest of the Greeks from the field and the fighting turns against them. Across twenty-four books the poem holds rage, grief, and the nearness of death in a single unblinking gaze — gods meddling, heroes boasting and dying, and an old king at last crossing the lines to ransom his son’s body. Read here in Samuel Butler’s plain-spoken prose beside the Homeric Greek, line for line.