The Iliad

The Iliad is a powerful, beautiful, and awe-inspiring work of ancient Greece. The work is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters; it combines the horridness and sometimes mundaneness of war into an epic poem filled with art, illustrious descriptions, and a myriad of wonderful literary images. Set in the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of Ilium by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege.