The Iliad

In the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, the commander Agamemnon takes from Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors, the captive woman Briseis, and Achilles withdraws in fury from the war. Without him the Trojans, led by Prince Hector, drive the Greeks back to their ships, while the gods of Olympus take sides and quarrel among themselves. When Hector kills Achilles' beloved friend Patroclus, Achilles returns to the battle to take revenge. The poem ends not in triumph but in grief, when old King Priam comes by night to Achilles' tent to beg for the body of his son.

The Iliad, composed around the eighth century BC and attributed to Homer, was learned by heart by Greek schoolboys for a thousand years. This prose translation, of 1898, is by Samuel Butler, the English novelist, who wanted Homer to read as plainly as a modern book. The story of the war's aftermath is told in The Odyssey.

Homer is the name the Greeks gave to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, probably composed in Ionia in the eighth century BC. Ancient tradition pictured him as a blind singer, and modern scholars have shown that the poems grew out of a long tradition of oral poetry, sung by bards who used repeated phrases to compose as they performed.

Whether one poet or many, Homer stands at the beginning of European literature, and the Greeks learned their heroes, gods and values from him. Sulayman al-Bustani's verse translation of the Iliad, published in 1904 with a long introduction, was a milestone in Arabic letters.