Nonfiction · about 750 BC
The Iliad
Homer · translated by Samuel Butler
A quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the tenth year of the siege of Troy, the withdrawal of the greatest of the Greek warriors from the fighting, the death of his friend Patroclus, and his return to kill Hector — the Iliad tells a few weeks of a ten-year war and is the beginning of European literature.
Samuel Butler’s prose translation of 1898 aims at plainness and speed, as his Odyssey does; he wanted a reader without Greek to follow the fighting and the argument at the same pace, and he refused the archaic diction that had made the poem sound like scripture. The twenty-four books are given here complete.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Poetry.
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About the author
-751–-651 · Ancient
Homer is the name the Greeks gave to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epics composed in the eighth or seventh century BC that stand at the beginning of European literature. Nothing is reliably known of his life; ancient tradition made him blind and placed him in Ionia. Whether the poems are the work of one poet, or of a tradition, has been argued since antiquity.
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