Anger of Achilles : The Iliad

'You are the one whom I most detest - you, with your endless pursuit of quarrels, wars, battles!'

War is raging between the Greeks and the Trojans, and Achilles, the great champion of the Greek army, is angrily sulking in his tent and refusing to fight after a furious rove with his commander, Agamemnon. But when the Trojan prince Hector kills Achilles' beloved friend, Achilles plunges back into the battle to seek his bloody revenge - even though he knows it will bring about his own doom. Robert Graves's gripping retelling of The Iliad uses dark, satirical humour to take a revered epic back yo its roots as popular entertainment, portraying a world of quarrelling kings and tarnished heroes, who leave suffering women behind them and are watched over by cunning gods and goddesses.

Interspersing clear, vigorous prose with lyrics, this brilliantly readable translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing The Iliad as part of the bardic tradition and shedding light on Homer's cynical view of power. This edition also contains a map of the Ancient Mediterranean world.

About The Author

Homer was probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. Homer was the first Greek writer whose work survives.

He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. Both works attributed to Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – are over ten thousand lines long in the original. Homer must have had an amazing memory but was helped by the formulaic poetry style of the time.

In The Iliad Homer sang of death and glory, of a few days in the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Mortal men played out their fate under the gaze of the gods. The Odyssey is the original collection of tall traveller’s tales. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. His adventures are many and memorable before he gets back to Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope.

We can never be certain that both these stories belonged to Homer. In fact ‘Homer’ may not be a real name but a kind of nickname meaning perhaps ‘the hostage’ or ‘the blind one’. Whatever the truth of their origin, the two stories, developed around three thousand years ago, may well still be read in three thousand years’ time.