For the nearly three millennia since its creation, the Iliad's Real Story has gone undiscovered. Homer, a blind poet as antiquity believed him to be, created a powerful war story which must have enthralled his listening audiences. But this story concealed another one, far grander in design, and immensely more clever in execution, which can be discovered only by careful examination of the written text. Living in an age where literacy was minimal, Homer created this story for the gods, and undoubtedly never expected any mortal to understand it. Homer's imaginative fantasy radically undermines traditional Trojan War mythology, and exposes the speciousness of war's glory, the folly of the warriors who (supposedly) fight for it, and the amorality of the gods who help them do so. Homer's great war poem, great indeed, war poem indeed, is in its depths antiwar. In piecing together the Iliad's web of secret plans, deeply hidden motives, and subtle lies and deceptions, and in the process identifying and discarding post-Homeric corruptions to the text, we will find an Iliad which is not a prelude to Achilles' glorious early death and the Fall of Troy, but the opposite. In a concealed ending, towards which the entire story has been leading, Homer's own words will tell us how Achilles, as supplicated by Priam, chooses a long life without renown, and goes home. The Greek army, unwilling to fight without its greatest warrior, leaves also, sparing peaceful, holy Troy, Zeus’ favorite city and best hope for mankind. Homer tells this story with a brilliance that is almost unimaginable, until one actually encounters it. The Real Iliad is an immense intellectual challenge and an inexhaustible source of surprises. Far from a formalistically "heroic" epic, as has long been thought, it is an imaginative expression of the full creative powers of Western antiquity's greatest author.

Presents a series of critical essays discussing the structure, themes, and subject matter of Homer's The Iliad.

A “compelling and impressive” (Sunday Times) reassessment of the Iliad, uncovering how the poem was written and why it remains enduringly powerful The Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem—heroic battle and divine fate set against the Trojan War. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving, but great questions remain: Where, how, and when was it composed and why does it endure? Robin Lane Fox addresses these questions, drawing on a lifelong love and engagement with the poem. He argues for a place, a date, and a method for its composition—subjects of ongoing controversy—combining the detailed expertise of a historian with a poetic reader’s sensitivity. Lane Fox considers hallmarks of the poem; its values, implicit and explicit; its characters; its women; its gods; and even its horses. Thousands of readers turn to the Iliad every year. Drawing on fifty years of reading and research, Lane Fox offers us a breathtaking tour of this magnificent text, revealing why the poem has endured for ages.

The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer's Iliad investigates each of the Iliad's twenty-four books, proceeding in order from book 1 to book 24 and devoting one chapter to each one. Contributors summarize the plot of a book and then explore its themes and poetics, providing both close readings of individual passages and synthetic reviews of current scholarship. This format allows readers to study the poem in the same manner in which they read it: book by book. Differing from other introductions to the Iliad that comprise chapters on specific topics and themes, the volume offers accessible and actionable discussions of concepts pertinent to each book of the poem. Differing from other introductory volumes that are written by a single author, this volume allows for a polyphony of critical voices and showcases the diversity of approaches to the Iliad. Finally, differing from commentaries keyed to the Greek text, this volume is completely accessible to those who do not read Homeric Greek. These features make the volume an essential resource for those studying the Iliad in translation and in the original Greek, for those in classical studies and in other disciplines, and for teachers and students, both those at the undergraduate level and those at the graduate level.

Walter Leaf (1852–1927) was a banker and classicist, whose various positions as chairman of the Westminster Bank, founder of the London Chamber of Commerce and president of the Hellenic Society reflected his wide-ranging professional and scholarly interests. Leaf was educated at Harrow School and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1870. He became senior classic in 1874 and was elected to a fellowship the following year. As a scholar Leaf was concerned with uncovering the physical reality of the classical world, a stance which set him apart from Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritual School. Leaf's The Iliad, with introduction and notes, first appeared in two volumes (1886–1888), and was regarded for several decades as the best English edition of Homer's epic poem. Volume 2 of the 1902 edition comprises Leaf's preface, an introduction to books 13–24 of the poem, and the annotated text.

This book examines the character and function of the documents mentioned in the biblical texts in relation to comparable references in literature from wider antiquity. Citing various references to written documents in the Hebrew Bible, Stott takes into consideration both those references that may point to external sources, for example, the many literary citations in the books of Kings and Chronicles, as well as certain other documents that play a role in the narrative, such as "the book of the law" in 2 Kings, the scrolls of Jeremiah, and the tablets of the law. The aim of this study is not to determine to which texts external to the world of the narrative, if any, these documents refer, or to identify the content of these documents, or to reconstruct their origins and historical development. Instead, the primary focus is to understand these references within their literary context, asking why indeed they are mentioned at all and what purpose they serve in the narrative, regardless of whether they existed or not in the "external world", or whether the stories about them have basis in historical reality "as it happened

This is a truly ground breaking analysis of Homer's Iliad. The author, a natural scientist, embarks on a journey through this eternal masterpiece employing an arsenal of conceptual tools from Anthropology (ethnology), Ethology, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, and Philosophy. A terrifying and at the same time tender look into the darkness of the male soul. Seldom has Homer emerged so majestic and insightful. A landmark in Homeric scholarship. The new concept of the male totem that this book creates is destined to provide insights into the pressing problems our world faces today, for example, conflict of Islam with western ideas, Sharia, and Jihad.

This is the third volume in the major six-volume Commentary on Homer's Iliad prepared under the General Editorship of Professor G.S. Kirk. It opens with two introductory chapters: the first on Homeric diction (on which emphasis is maintained throughout the Commentary); the second on the contributions that comparative studies have made to seeing the Homeric epics in sharper perspective. In the commentary Dr Hainsworth confronts in an intentionally even-handed manner the serious problems posed by the ninth, tenth and twelfth books of The Iliad, seeking by means of a succinct discussion and a brief bibliography of recent contributions to furnish the user with a point of entry into the often voluminous scholarship devoted to these questions. The Greek text is not included.