What is the Iliad about?

The poem in its first line

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.

The first word of the Greek is mēnin, wrath, and that is the subject. The title only means the poem of Ilion, Troy’s other name, and readers often expect the whole war. They get something narrower and deeper. The Iliad opens nine years into the siege, covers roughly fifty-one days and stops before Troy falls. It runs to twenty-four books, about 15,700 lines of hexameter verse, and is usually dated to the late 8th or the 7th century BC. Herodotus believed Homer had lived about four hundred years before his own time (2.53).

What happens

1. The quarrel (book 1). Apollo sends a plague on the Greek camp. Agamemnon must give back a priest’s daughter, so he takes Achilles’ captive, Briseis. Achilles withdraws and asks his mother Thetis to make Zeus favor the Trojans.
2. The armies (books 2–7). The Catalogue of Ships; Paris and Menelaus fight a duel; Helen names the Greek chiefs from the walls; Hector says goodbye to his wife Andromache and their baby son.
3. The Greeks in trouble (books 8–15). Achilles turns down Agamemnon’s offer of gifts, and the Trojans fight their way to the ships.
4. Patroclus (books 16–17). He goes out in Achilles’ armor and is killed by Hector.
5. Achilles returns (books 18–22). New armor from Hephaestus, a river that fights back, and Hector killed before the walls.
6. The ending (books 23–24). Funeral games for Patroclus, then Priam comes by night to ransom his son.

How it ends

The old king kneels in Achilles’ hut and asks him to remember his own father:

Think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable, for I have steeled myself as no man yet has ever steeled himself before me, and have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son.

Achilles weeps with him, gives back the body and grants a truce for the mourning. The last line is quiet: “Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Hector tamer of horses.” The anger that began in book 1 ends in pity between enemies.

What it leaves out

No golden apple, no heel, no wooden horse and no sack of Troy. Homer knows those stories and glances at some: the goddesses’ contest once in book 24, Achilles’ coming death in a string of prophecies, the city’s fall in Hector’s words to his wife. He simply does not tell them. The apple belongs to the Cypria (what is the apple of discord?), Achilles’ death to the Aethiopis (how did Achilles die?), and the horse to the Odyssey and Virgil. Homer’s other poem picks up after the war: what is the Odyssey about?

Is it only Achilles’ story?

No. Achilles stays out of battle from the end of book 1 until book 20, and the poem spends as much care on the Trojans. Hector fights for a city he expects to lose, and Priam’s night journey gives the ending its weight. Many readers come away remembering the defenders as vividly as the hero, which may be the poem’s quiet point: its subject is one man’s anger, but its sympathy runs to both sides of the wall.