The Iliad and The Odyssey
Feature Article | Classical Literature
“ Achilles seeks glory. Odysseus seeks home. Between them lies a world of gods, heroes, betrayal, grief and stories that have never ceased to speak. ”
The Poet Who Gave the Ancient World its Voice
Few names in literature have travelled as far across time as Homer. Some twenty-seven centuries after the poems associated with him took shape, The Iliad and The Odyssey remain among the most enduring works ever composed. Their heroes, gods, journeys and moral questions have inspired poets, dramatists, novelists, painters, composers and filmmakers in every age.
Yet Homer himself remains elusive.
We know remarkably little about the person behind the name. Even his existence, dates and authorship have been debated since antiquity. What survives is the extraordinary power of the poetry traditionally attributed to him.
The Mystery of Homer
Homer is traditionally placed in the eighth century BCE, when Greek culture was changing rapidly. The Greek alphabet had appeared, city-states were developing, trade and colonisation were expanding, and an older heroic past was being turned into song.
But we have no reliable biography. Ancient traditions linked him with cities and islands in the eastern Aegean, such as Chios and Smyrna, and later writers supplied stories about his life. The familiar image of an elderly blind poet is part of that tradition rather than established fact.
The uncertainty gave rise to what is called the Homeric Question: who composed these poems, when, and how did they acquire the form in which we know them? There is no universally accepted answer. Some scholars see individual poets of genius working within a tradition. Others stress the collective, evolving nature of oral performance. Almost all agree that the epics cannot be understood as simple modern written compositions.
Three ways of answering the Homeric Question
A Poetry Born from Oral Tradition
Before Homer became a name attached to manuscripts, the stories lived among singers and listeners. In the 1930s the American scholar Milman Parry showed that Homeric verse is built from traditional formulae, such as set epithets and repeated phrases fitted to the metre, and his student Albert Lord later compared the technique with living oral poets in the Balkans. This did not mean that every performance was improvised from scratch. Rather, oral poets mastered a highly developed system for shaping inherited material into long and complex narratives.
The language of the poems preserves evidence of that history: formulaic expressions and a blend of dialect forms reflect a long period of oral composition and transmission. How and when the poems were first written down remains debated. Some scholars favour dictation to scribes; others think the texts emerged through a more gradual interaction between performers, collectors and copyists. Either way, poetry created for the ear became literature preserved for the eye.
How the poems reached us
The Iliad: War, Rage and the Human Cost of Glory
Of the two epics, The Iliad is the more concentrated and tragic.
It tells part of the story of the Trojan War, the legendary conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, but it does not narrate the entire ten-year war. The poem focuses on a few weeks late in the conflict and centres on the anger of Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior.
It begins with a quarrel. Agamemnon, the Greek commander, is forced to give up his own prize and takes Briseis, a captive woman awarded to Achilles. Humiliated and furious, Achilles withdraws from the fighting. His absence lets the Trojans, led by the formidable Hector, gain the upper hand.
What follows is far more than a sequence of battles. Homer uses the conflict to explore honour, pride, friendship, mortality and the terrible consequences of anger. Achilles’ greatness is inseparable from his vulnerability: he knows his choice carries a price, since he has been told that he can have either a short life and lasting glory, or a long life without renown.
The death of his beloved companion Patroclus brings Achilles back into the war. His grief turns his anger into something more destructive. He kills Hector and dishonours the body, until the old Trojan king Priam comes at night to ask for his son’s remains and Achilles, remembering his own father, finally recognises the humanity of his enemy.
The Iliad in five movements
The poem ends not with the fall of Troy, nor with the death of Achilles, but with Hector’s funeral. Homer turns away from victory and towards mourning, which is why the ultimate subject of the Iliad is human mortality. Glory may preserve a name, but it cannot preserve the person.
Achilles and Hector: Two Kinds of Hero
One of Homer’s greatest achievements is his refusal to make the Trojans merely monstrous. Achilles and Hector stand on opposite sides, yet both are fully human. Achilles is magnificent, furious and almost superhuman in battle, but he is also open to pride, grief and loneliness.
Hector is a warrior, prince and defender of Troy, and also a husband to Andromache and father of the infant Astyanax. In one of the most moving scenes in the poem, he meets them on the walls before returning to battle, and the child shrinks from his father’s plumed helmet.
The scene reminds us that behind every heroic confrontation lies a human life. Hector fights because Troy depends on him; Achilles fights for honour and reputation. Both know that death awaits them. Their courage exists alongside fear, not in its absence, and that complexity is one reason the poem still speaks to readers.
The Gods Among Mortals
The gods of Homer are not distant abstractions. Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the other Olympians intervene directly in human affairs. They favour particular heroes, quarrel among themselves, deceive, encourage and punish. Yet the gods do not control everything: human beings still make choices, suffer consequences and confront the limits of their lives.
The poems profoundly shaped Greek ideas about the gods, although ancient Greek religion had no single sacred book comparable to the scriptures of later religions. Homer’s gods are strikingly human in temperament, with rivalries, desires and jealousies, and their immortality throws human mortality into sharper relief.
The Odyssey: The Long Road Home
If the Iliad is a poem of war, the Odyssey is a poem of return. Its central figure is Odysseus, king of Ithaca and one of the most resourceful Greek heroes at Troy. After the city falls, he tries to return to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.
The journey becomes an extraordinary succession of trials, but The Odyssey is not simply a catalogue of monsters. Its deeper subject is homecoming, and the journey continually tests what home, identity and belonging mean. It is also told with some craft: Odysseus himself narrates the best-known adventures to his hosts, the Phaeacians, in a long flashback.
The road home, station by station
Odysseus: A Different Kind of Hero
.png "Ulysses and the Sirens — The Odyssey")
Achilles represents physical excellence and martial glory. Odysseus represents intelligence, adaptability and cunning, qualities summed up in the Greek word mētis, a practical intelligence that bends circumstances to its purpose. He survives not because he is the strongest, but because he can think, disguise himself, persuade others and recognise opportunity.
His encounter with the Cyclops shows this perfectly. Trapped in Polyphemus’ cave, Odysseus tells the giant that his name is “Nobody”. After he and his men blind Polyphemus with a sharpened stake, the other Cyclopes, hearing that “Nobody” is hurting him, decide that nothing is wrong and do not come to help.
Yet cleverness has consequences. Odysseus cannot resist shouting his true name as he sails away, which brings the anger of Poseidon, Polyphemus’ father, upon him. In Homer’s world, intelligence can save a person, but pride can undo what intelligence has accomplished.
The Sirens and the Power of Temptation
Among the most famous episodes is the encounter with the Sirens, whose irresistible song promises knowledge to all who hear it. Warned by Circe, Odysseus wants to hear it but understands that doing so could destroy him. He orders his crew to stop their ears with wax and to bind him to the mast, and tells them not to release him, however desperately he begs.
The episode captures something essential about him. He does not pretend that temptation does not exist; he recognises his own vulnerability and prepares for it in advance. It is an unusually modern idea in an ancient story: wisdom sometimes means knowing the limits of one’s self-control.
Circe, Calypso and the Women of The Odyssey
.png "Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses — The Odyssey")
The women of The Odyssey are among its most memorable characters. Circe is a powerful enchantress who turns Odysseus’ companions into animals before becoming his ally. Calypso keeps him on her island for years, offering an existence that seems desirable but cannot replace his longing for Ithaca.
Then there is Penelope. While Odysseus is away, she remains in Ithaca, surrounded by suitors who consume her household’s resources and demand that she choose a new husband.
She responds with intelligence and patience. Her famous trick is to promise a decision once she has finished weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father, and then secretly to unpick the work each night. Penelope is therefore far more than a faithful wife waiting at home. She is a strategist whose intelligence mirrors her husband’s.
Women of the Odyssey
Telemachus and the Search for Identity
The Odyssey is also the story of Telemachus. When the poem begins, Odysseus has been absent for some twenty years, counting the war, and Telemachus is a young man whose home is full of suitors behaving as though they have already inherited his father’s household.
Athena encourages him to search for news of his father, and his journey becomes a passage into adulthood. The poem works on several levels at once: Odysseus struggles to return, Penelope to preserve her household, and Telemachus to become the man who can defend it.
The Underworld
One of the darkest episodes comes when Odysseus travels to the edge of the world to consult the dead, including former companions and heroes of the Trojan War. Among them is Achilles, whose earthly glory has not made death desirable. He tells Odysseus that he would rather be a poor man’s labourer on earth than rule over all the dead.
The scene is a profound counterpoint to the heroic values of the Iliad: glory can make a person immortal in memory, but memory is not life.
Homecoming and Recognition
Eventually Odysseus reaches Ithaca, but even then his journey is not over. He returns disguised as a beggar and must discover whom he can trust. His household has changed, and many no longer know him.
The climax comes through recognition. Odysseus and Penelope are reunited, but not sentimentally or at once. Penelope remains cautious and tests him by ordering the marriage bed to be moved out of their chamber. Only Odysseus knows that it cannot be moved, because he built it around a living olive tree. The bed becomes a symbol of something deeper than romance: a shared history that no impostor can imitate.
The Two Epics Compared
The contrast between the two poems is part of their genius. The Iliad asks what it means to seek glory when death is inevitable. The Odyssey asks what it means to return home after becoming someone different through experience. One looks deeply into war; the other travels through the world beyond it. Together they form an extraordinary portrait of the human condition.
The World Behind the Poems
The world described by Homer is not a simple record of Bronze Age Greece. The Trojan War tradition reaches back to the Mycenaean civilisation of the Late Bronze Age, yet the poems emerged centuries later and contain elements from different periods. Archaeology at Hisarlik in north-western Turkey, usually identified with Troy, shows a Late Bronze Age city that was destroyed more than once, but whether any of that lies behind the legend remains debated.
This blend is one reason historians treat Homer carefully. The poems preserve memories of an older heroic age but also reflect the society, language and imagination of the period when they were composed. Objects, weapons, customs and religious practices sometimes preserve echoes of earlier traditions, while other details clearly belong to the later Greek world. Homer therefore stands at an extraordinary meeting point between memory and invention.
Homer and the Greek Imagination
Homer’s influence on ancient Greece was enormous. The poems were more than entertainment: they gave Greek communities, separated by geography and political rivalry, a shared store of stories, characters, ideals and cultural references.
Greek artists repeatedly depicted Homeric scenes on pottery, sculpture and other objects. The poems also became essential objects of scholarship. Centuries after their composition, scholars at the Library of Alexandria collected, compared and edited copies. Ancient papyri show that textual variations existed in antiquity, so the transmission of the poems was itself a long and complex process, and without generations of copying and study they might not have survived in anything like their present form.
Homer and the Birth of Western Literature
It is difficult to overstate that influence. Greek tragedy repeatedly returned to stories from the Trojan cycle. Virgil’s Aeneid grew from the same mythological world and answers both poems. Medieval and Renaissance writers rediscovered Homer, and later poets and novelists transformed his themes for new audiences, from Joyce’s Ulysses to Madeline Miller’s Circe.
His influence extends far beyond literature. Painters have imagined Achilles, Helen, Hector, Odysseus, Circe and the Sirens; sculptors have recreated his heroes; composers, from Monteverdi to the present, have turned his stories into opera. Even the word odyssey has entered everyday English for a long and eventful journey. That is an extraordinary legacy for a poet whose biography is almost completely uncertain.
Homer through the ages
Why Homer Still Matters
Why should a modern reader care about Achilles, Hector or Odysseus? Because the world of the poems is ancient, but the questions are not.
What does honour mean? How much should pride cost us? What happens when anger controls our choices? Can intelligence overcome strength? What do we owe our family? Can a person truly return to the life they left behind?
And perhaps the most enduring question of all: What remains of us after we are gone?
Homer’s answer is, in part, storytelling itself. Achilles dies, but his name survives. Hector dies, but his humanity lives on in the poem. Penelope’s patience, Circe’s power, Priam’s grief and Andromache’s sorrow remain alive because someone remembered them.
The Eternal Poet
Homer may have lived in the eighth century BCE, or the figure behind the name may have been more complicated than tradition suggests. We may never know exactly who composed the poems, how much they inherited from earlier singers, or when their written forms were fixed.
Perhaps that uncertainty is fitting. Homer belongs not to a single historical moment but to a tradition of storytelling that existed before the poems were written and has continued long after. The Iliad gave literature one of its greatest meditations on war, honour, rage and mortality. The Odyssey gave it one of its greatest journeys, a story of exile, temptation, identity, endurance and homecoming.
Together they have crossed languages, religions, empires and centuries. The man called Homer remains partly hidden from history. His poetry does not. The poet himself became a mystery, while his stories became immortal.
Feature Article | Classical Literature
Homer, Greek epic and the oral tradition
Editorial Note
References and further study
Finley, M. I. 1954. The World of Odysseus. New York: Viking Press.
Fowler, Robert, ed. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Graziosi, Barbara. 2002. Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Homer. 2015. The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander. New York: Ecco.
———. 2018. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton.
Latacz, Joachim. 2004. Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Translated by Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nagy, Gregory. 1996. Homeric Questions. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Parry, Milman. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Edited by Adam Parry. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Saïd, Suzanne. 2011. Homer and the Odyssey. Translated by Ruth Webb. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
West, M. L. 2011. The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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