The Iliad Summary

A Complete Summary of Homer's Epic

The Iliad covers a few weeks during the Trojan War's final year, focusing on Achilles' rage. It opens with Apollo sending plague after Agamemnon refuses to return a priest's daughter. Agamemnon compensates by taking Achilles' war prize Briseis. Achilles withdraws from battle.

Without Achilles, the Greeks suffer devastating losses. Hector leads the Trojans to the Greek ships. Patroclus begs to fight in Achilles' armor. Achilles agrees but warns him not to go too far. Patroclus ignores the warning and is killed by Hector with Apollo's help.

Mad with grief, Achilles receives new armor from Hephaestus, returns to battle, and slaughters Trojans wholesale. He kills Hector in single combat and drags his body behind his chariot. The poem ends when King Priam comes alone to beg for his son's body. Achilles, moved by the old man's grief, returns Hector for proper burial — a moment of shared humanity between enemies that closes the greatest war poem ever written.

The twenty-four books at a glance

The quarrel, Patroclus and Hector frame the poem, but most of its length is taken up by episodes in between. Here is how the twenty-four books unfold:

Books 1–2. The quarrel. Zeus promises Thetis he will give the Trojans the upper hand. Agamemnon tests his army by proposing to go home and nearly loses it, and Odysseus beats Thersites back into line. The Catalogue of Ships lists the Greek contingents.
Books 3–4. Paris and Menelaus fight a duel for Helen, and Aphrodite snatches Paris away. From the walls Helen points out the Greek leaders to Priam. The Trojan archer Pandarus breaks the truce by wounding Menelaus.
Books 5–7. Diomedes has his great spell of glory and wounds both Aphrodite and Ares. Hector returns to Troy and says goodbye to Andromache and their baby son Astyanax, who is frightened by his father's helmet. Hector and Ajax fight a duel that ends in an exchange of gifts.
Books 8–10. The Greeks are driven back to their camp. Agamemnon sends Odysseus, Ajax and the old tutor Phoenix to Achilles with a huge offer of gifts, and Achilles refuses it. That night Odysseus and Diomedes catch and kill the Trojan spy Dolon.
Books 11–15. Agamemnon, Diomedes and Odysseus are wounded. Hector breaks through the Greek wall. Hera borrows Aphrodite's girdle and the help of Hypnos to seduce Zeus and put him to sleep on Mount Ida, so that Poseidon can rally the Greeks. Zeus wakes up furious and the Trojans reach the ships.
Books 16–17. Patroclus kills Sarpedon, a son of Zeus, before Apollo, Euphorbus and Hector bring him down. The armies fight over his body.
Books 18–19. Thetis gets Achilles new armour from Hephaestus. The shield is described in detail, with cities at peace and at war, harvests, a wedding and a dancing floor. Achilles and Agamemnon are formally reconciled.
Books 20–22. The gods join the fighting. Achilles fills the river Scamander with corpses until the river god rises up against him and Hephaestus has to drive the water back with fire. Hector runs three times round the walls of Troy before Athena tricks him into standing and fighting.
Books 23–24. Patroclus is cremated and honoured with funeral games: a chariot race, boxing, wrestling and archery. Hermes guides Priam through the Greek camp to ransom Hector, and the poem ends with Hector's funeral.

What the Iliad does not contain

Many people expect the Iliad to tell the whole Trojan War, and they are surprised by how much is missing. The judgement of Paris is mentioned only once, near the end. There is no wooden horse, no death of Achilles and no sack of Troy. Those events belonged to other poems of the lost Epic Cycle, the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad and Sack of Troy, which survive mainly as prose summaries attributed to Proclus. The Iliad does point beyond its own ending, though. Thetis says more than once that Achilles will die soon after Hector. The dying Hector names Paris and Apollo as Achilles' killers. Andromache foresees the fall of the city and her son's death. The poem covers only about fifty days, yet the listener is made to feel the whole war.

Reading the poem well

The first word of the Greek text is mēnin, "wrath", and the poem follows that wrath through two stages. The first is directed at Agamemnon and keeps Achilles out of the fighting. The second is directed at Hector and drives Achilles back into it. Readers often treat the embassy in Book 9 as the turning point. Achilles' long speech there questions the whole heroic bargain of dying young for lasting fame, and nothing quite like it appears anywhere else in early Greek poetry. Aristotle praised Homer for building the poem around a single action instead of trying to tell the whole war. The famous similes are worth noticing too. Fighting is again and again compared to farming, weather, lions and the household, which brings the peacetime world into the battle scenes. For themes, characters and essay questions, see the Iliad study guide. For the two central heroes, see Achilles and Hector.

Ancient sources

Homer, Iliad: the epic itself, in twenty-four books, probably composed in the eighth or seventh century BCE.
Proclus, Chrestomathy (summary of the Epic Cycle): prose outlines of the lost poems that told the events before and after the Iliad, including the death of Achilles in the Aethiopis.
Aristotle, Poetics: praises Homer for choosing one part of the war and organising it around a unified plot.
Apollodorus, Epitome 3–4: a mythographer's summary of the Trojan War, including a compressed account of the Iliad's events.
Plato, Republic: criticises Homer's portrayal of the gods' quarrels and Achilles' excessive grief, showing how central the poem was to Greek education.

Frequently asked questions

How long does the Iliad take place?

About fifty days in the tenth year of the war. Most of the fighting is packed into just a few days, and the opening plague and the closing funerals stretch the time frame at either end.

Does Achilles die in the Iliad?

No. His death is foretold several times, but it happens after the poem ends. It was told in the lost Aethiopis and is mentioned in the Odyssey.

Is the Trojan Horse in the Iliad?

No. The horse appears in the Odyssey, where Demodocus sings about it and Menelaus remembers it, and it is told at length in Virgil's Aeneid, Book 2.

How many lines is the Iliad?

About 15,700 lines of dactylic hexameter, split into twenty-four books. The book divisions were probably added by later editors.