Table Of ContentThe University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1951, 2011 by The University of Chicago
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Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47048-1 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47049-8 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-47048-2 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-47049-0 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47048-1 (e-book)
Homer.
[Iliad. English. 2011]
The Iliad of Homer / translated by Richmond Lattimore ; introduction and notes by Richard Martin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47048-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-47048-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47049-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-47049-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Lattimore, Richmond Alexander, 1906–1984.
II. Martin, Richard P. III. Title. IV. Title: Iliad.
PA4025.A2L38 2011
883′.01—dc22
2011007970
This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
RICHMOND LATTIMORE
was professor emeritus of Greek at Bryn Mawr College at the time of his death in 1984. He was
coeditor (with David Grene) of The Complete Greek Tragedies, translator of Greek Lyrics, and author of
Poems from Three Decades, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
RICHARD MARTIN
is the Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
THE ILIAD
OF
HOMER
TRANSLATED BY RICHMOND LATTIMORE
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY RICHARD MARTIN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
Contents
Cover
Copyright
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Maps
THE ILIAD
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Book Five
Book Six
Book Seven
Book Eight
Book Nine
Book Ten
Book Eleven
Book Twelve
Book Thirteen
Book Fourteen
Book Fifteen
Book Sixteen
Book Seventeen
Book Eighteen
Book Nineteen
Book Twenty
Book Twenty-One
Book Twenty-Two
Book Twenty-Three
Book Twenty-Four
Notes to the Iliad
Bibliography
Glossary of Names
Introduction to Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad
RICHARD P. MARTIN
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
THE TROJAN WAR IN TIME AND PLACE
The literature that has come to be called “Western” begins with a long poem
about the siege of a great city on the coast of what is now Turkey by heroic
warriors from Greece. Yet, in the early twelfth century BC—the time period in
which this story is set—there were no identifiable concepts of “Western” and
“Eastern” cultures (much less “Greece” or “Turkey” as nation-states). Even
when the Iliad was composed, somewhere in the “archaic” period of Greek
history between 750 and 550 BC, there seems to have been little concern among
cultures bordering the Mediterranean to differentiate East from West: from
Sicily to Sardis and beyond, trade goods, musical modes, stories, artistic styles,
and people circulated and interacted in creative profusion.
It was early in the fifth century BC that attitudes changed. In 490 and again
480–79 BC, invasions by the massive forces of the expanding Persian empire
(centered in modern-day Iran) were turned back by a ragtag coalition of Greek
city-states, on Greek soil. This spectacular, unexpected victory was celebrated
by Greeks of the ensuing “Classical” age through temple sculpture, murals, vase
painting, oratory, and dramatic literature that proudly made verbal and visual
analogies between the Persian wars of recent times and the heroic successes of
the Trojan War. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the middle of the fifth
century, attributes to Persian intellectuals (logioi: Histories 1.1) the view that the
ancient expedition to bring home Helen of Sparta was the beginning of
antagonism between Asia and Europe. But it is clear that Greeks of the
historian’s own time were thinking the same way.
The singular beauty and importance of our Iliad stand out starkly in contrast
to such later, politicized interpretations of the story of Troy and to an insidious
Orientalism that has its roots in Greek antiquity. It is not about a clash of
civilizations, much less so a contest between evil and good. Unlike many a later
epic (including Virgil’s Aeneid), this poem does not deal with ethnic, national,
religious, or ideological conflicts and aspirations. In fact, it is difficult to
determine the poem’s real protagonist: the Greek Achilleus and his victim, the
Trojan Hektor, are attractive and repellent in equal degrees. Some would say
Hektor is actually the more sympathetic character. The Iliad is about heroes as
humans, and what constitutes humanity. Its enduring value lies in the poem’s
recognition that even the worst enemies are deeply, fundamentally the same—
desirous of glory and immortality, while subject to pain and death. Its power—
like that of so much Greek literature—comes from the realistic depiction of
mortals as they gradually learn that they can never be gods. In this existential
recognition, it transcends the anxieties of tribe or state.
The story of a war to take Troy, in other words, is primarily a backdrop for
human concerns that fascinate audiences in any age. The Iliad would be just as
compelling a piece of art even if Troy existed only in the imagination of poets.
Nevertheless, through the centuries, the attractive power of the epic has been
compounded for many readers by the dark mysteries that surround it. Did a
Trojan War really take place? How did the poet Homer know of it? Did a man
named Homer even exist? When, where, and how was the epic composed? How
did it achieve such perfection and influence? In what follows, we shall explore
briefly the answers that have been offered for these questions—though never
totally agreed upon—while placing the Iliad in a series of relevant historical and
cultural contexts.
First of all, it is important to realize that the Iliad is an Iron Age poem about
an event supposed to have taken place in the Bronze Age. Historians in ancient
Greece, working with family memories and temple records, came up with a
range of dates for the Trojan War from 1184 BC (Eratosthenes), to around 1250
BC (Herodotus) to 1334 BC (Douris). More than four centuries thus elapsed
between the latest traditional date given by the ancient Greeks themselves for the
destruction of Troy and the earliest possible recording of the epic in written form
—a longer gap than that which separates us from the time of Shakespeare’s
maturity. Therefore, the Iliad as we have it cannot be based directly on an
eyewitness account, or even a reliable reminiscence from the poet’s great-
grandfather. It is not impossible that it ultimately derives from poems and stories
originating with actual survivor tales, but the form in which we have it cannot
possibly itself date to the twelfth or thirteenth century BC. To begin with, most of
the linguistic forms in the Iliad come from a later period. By extension, the
concerns of the poem are most likely not those of the original fighters at Troy
but of a society—or multiple societies—generations later that looked back to the
Trojan War as an important symbolic event, perhaps for the very foundation of
their own communities. Even if the kernel of the Iliad was put into poetic form
nearer to the time of the fall of Troy, in the intervening centuries before it
achieved its final status the story was certainly subjected to all sorts of changes
in length, expansiveness, and detail, through stylization, shifts of emphasis, and
innovations in characterization and plot. Above all—as literary critics since
Aristotle have acknowledged—the epic makes no attempt to narrate the whole
story of a war against Troy, focusing instead on only a few days in the tenth and
final year of the Greek siege against the city, and on a personal dispute (albeit
one with vast consequences) within the ranks of the assembled Greek warriors.
The poem’s concentrated force relies on an audience that already knows most of
the basic details about the struggle, an audience that has probably encountered
many other versions of the tale of Troy, from tellers whose names we will never
discover.
Greeks and Romans in ancient times had little doubt that there once existed a
mighty city of Troy a few miles from the sea near the Hellespont, the narrow
entrance to the Propontis, which leads in turn to the Black Sea and its resource-
rich hinterlands. By the seventh century BC, a town was established by settlers of
Greek ancestry on the ruins of an earlier site. It was called Ilion—a name used
already in the epic for Troy, and the word from which the Iliad gets its name. In
later ages, celebrities like Xerxes the king of Persia, Alexander the Great, and
Julius Caesar visited the place, confident that they were gazing on the very soil
where Hektor and Achilleus clashed and the towers of Troy were toppled. On his
way to punish the mainland Greeks, in the spring of 480 BC, Xerxes dedicated a
sacrifice of one thousand oxen to Athene of Ilion, while his sage-priests, the
magi, poured offerings to “the heroes.” The historian Herodotus (7.43) does not
speculate on the royal motives, or whether the dead warriors thus honored were
Greek or Trojans. What counts is that generations of military leaders associated
their own deeds with those from the gloried past through their ostentatious
tourism at the spot. The Romans had further reasons for venerating Troy, since it
was claimed that they were direct descendants of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who
escaped the city’s destruction and traveled with his kin to Italy to start afresh.
Augustus, the first Roman emperor, visited Troy in 20 BC. Both Julius Caesar,
before him, and the emperor Constantine, three centuries later, contemplated
building a new Roman capital on the site.
Ilion survived after the Roman empire in the West had fallen to barbarian
tribes in the fifth century AD. But after 1200 AD, when the site seems finally to
have been abandoned, Troy evaporated into the mists of myth. Even as the Iliad
itself was being preserved through the efforts of scholars and scribes in
Byzantium (the inheritor of the eastern Roman empire), the landscape associated
with it was gradually forgotten. The eighteenth century, which saw an increase
in travel to the eastern Mediterranean, brought aristocratic memoirists like Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu and amateur antiquarians like her compatriot Robert
Wood (1716–1771) to the broader region of the Troad. They found—or
imagined they found—topographical details that matched those in the texts of
the Iliad. Lady Montagu remarks on the pleasure she took “in seeing the valley
where I imagined the famous duel of Menelaos and Paris had been fought, and
where the greatest city in the world was situated.” She professes admiration for
“the exact geography of Homer, whom I had in my hand. Almost every epithet
he gives to a mountain or plain is still just for it.”1 Wood’s tour resulted in the
posthumously published, widely read Essay upon the Original Genius and
Writings of Homer: With a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State
of the Troade (1775). Insisting on the exactness of Homeric descriptions,
whether of wind directions or landscape, Wood concluded that “stript of all
poetical embellishments” the Iliad contained “in general a consistent narrative of
military events, connected and supported by that due coincidence of the
circumstances of time and place which History requires.”2
Despite such on-site observations, most scholars in the early nineteenth
century remained skeptical about whether real historical events lay behind the
stories of the Greek heroic age. The British historian George Grote (1794–1871)
in his influential twelve-volume History of Greece chose 776 BC—the traditional
date for the founding of the Olympic games—as the beginning of reliably
recorded history. Within thirty years of the publication of his first two volumes
(1846), Grote was proved mistaken: the Homeric epics, which he had spurned as
evidence, emerged as more trustworthy guides to the past than had been
imagined. Civilizations with features described by Homeric poetry, going back
to seven centuries before Grote’s starting date for Greek history, were now laid
bare.
It was the labor of amateurs, rather than academics, that paved the way to a
new understanding of the Iliad’s historicity. The first, Frank Calvert (1828–
1908), worked as a businessman and representative of British and American
interests in Ottoman-ruled Asia Minor during the middle decades of the
nineteenth century. A passionate, self-taught antiquarian, he had concluded from
intimate acquaintance with the landscape that the mound (tell) of Hisarlik, a few
miles from the sea, was the most likely location of Homer’s Troy. He managed
to buy a portion of the area, but officials of the British Museum turned down his
requests for the necessary further funding, and Calvert abandoned the project
after a few trial digs in 1865. Always at the service of interested travelers,
Calvert in August 1868 explained his theories to a visiting German explorer,
Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890). Another self-educated amateur, Schliemann
was a visionary and wealthy entrepreneur who had forged his own way, starting
out as a poor office boy (among his other profitable endeavors, he had sold
provisions to miners during the California gold rush and war supplies to armies
in the Crimea). He was also a tireless, if not downright mendacious, self-
promoter, prone to manipulate facts to his own advantage. Whatever the truth or
fantasy in Schliemann’s autobiographical “recollections”—that he had been
inspired to rediscover Troy as a boy, upon seeing a picture book of the saga, or
hearing a drunken miller recite Homeric verses in Greek—there is no doubt that
it was his resources and persistence that finally uncovered the remains of a great
city at Hisarlik.
Starting in October 1871 and for the next two years, Schliemann excavated
the mound of Hisarlik, digging relentlessly to the lowest level. As he was more
or less inventing archaeological practice—an art still in its infancy—he did not
take care to record the layout of higher strata on the site, destroying valuable
clues in the process. Calvert correctly deduced from the presence of stone rather
than bronze artifacts that Schliemann’s widely heralded discovery of the “city of
Priam” in fact revealed a much older phase of habitation. Subsequent
investigations by Schliemann, up to his death in 1890, then for a season (1893–
1894) by his successor Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and from 1932 to 1938 by the
American archaeologist Carl Blegen, exposed a total of nine layers and nearly
fifty sublayers. The earliest layer, “Troy I,” was occupied in the Early Bronze
Age, around 3000 BC. “Troy II,” which Schliemann had thought to be
contemporaneous with the Iliad’s events, is in fact a thousand years older than
the estimated period of the Trojan War. If the city underwent siege and
destruction, as described by Homeric poetry, the likeliest stages for it are the
levels designated “Troy VI” (1800–1275 BC) and “Troy VII” (1275–1100 BC).
Archaeologists believe that during the latter period, in particular, many more
people took refuge inside the defensive walls of the upper town, having for some
reason abandoned the lower. There are no inscriptions to pinpoint this site as the
place that the Greeks destroyed. But the era would match ancient calculations for
the period of the war, and the physical remains are suggestively reminiscent of
details in the Iliad. Moreover, excavations led by Manfred Korfmann of
Tübingen University from 1995 until his death in 2005, have now shown that the
upper city on the site (which critics had long dismissed as being too small for the
Homeric Troy) was merely a fraction of a much more extensive settlement,
capable of sustaining a population of nearly ten thousand.
If the mound at Hisarlik can now be recognized as having concealed a series
of fortified citadels that resemble those known from the ancient Near East,
complete with surrounding lower town, there is also further evidence that might
explain why a war could have been fought over this place. The major political
force in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) in the second millennium BC was the
Hittite empire, centered on Hattusa (now Bögasköy, near modern Ankara).
Continuing archaeological work, combined with increasing knowledge of the
ancient Hittite language (from texts first deciphered in the early twentieth
century) have produced a picture of a wide-reaching, highly organized imperial
power with connections extending as far as the Levant and Egypt.
Troy, it appears, was a vassal state. Hittite official documents mention
Taruwisa and Wilusa, which closely match the Greek words used, apparently as
synonyms, for the besieged city in the Iliad: Troiê and (w) Ilios (traces of an
original initial “w” sound can be detected in the Iliad’s verses). Even more
intriguing, a royal treaty of King Muwattalli II (circa 1290–1272 BC) pledges
support for one Alaksandu of Wilusa—possibly a Hittite form of the Greek name
Alexander (another name for the Trojan warrior Paris), although the document
was written a century before the putative date of the war that this son of Priam
caused by abducting the Greek queen Helen. The Hittite texts also refer to
Ahhiyawa. This term was probably borrowed from one of the words early
Greeks used to describe themselves: Achaioi. Unfortunately, it remains unclear
where the Hittites located the people thus named, whether further down the coast
of Asia Minor (near ancient Miletus), on off shore islands like Lesbos, or on the
other side of the Aegean (mainland Greece). Nor is the precise relationship of
Ahhiyawa to Trojans specified: were they considered enemies, neighbors, or a
distant power?
Troy must have been an important ally, given its strategic location in ancient
times on the seacoast, before accumulated silt pushed the shoreline farther from
the city. An attack could well have provoked a defensive response from a
number of cities in the Hittite sphere of influence throughout western Asia
Minor. The Iliad, in fact, represents the number of far-flung Trojan allies as far
outnumbering fighters from the city itself and, since they speak many languages,
harder to control than the unified Greek forces (2.803–4).
Several scenarios have been suggested to explain why and by whom Troy
might have been destroyed in the twelfth century BC. At this time, a general
disruption and movement of populations occurred around the Aegean, with
numbers of settlements falling into disuse. Natural disasters, crop failures, or
pressure from groups in the hinterland may have been the root causes. Egyptian
inscriptions of the era refer to problems with marauding “Sea Peoples,” possibly
coming from the east. Perhaps these mysterious bands carried out attacks that
were later attributed to Greeks who ended up settling the coast near Troy. On the
other hand, it is not unlikely that Greek warriors themselves were involved in
widespread raids during this time of general collapse. What has become clear
only in the last century is the extent to which Greek civilization, in the form of a
highly bureaucratized, palace-centered culture, had already spread its influence
by the era of Troy’s fall. Once again, Schliemann can be credited with a major
role in bringing this early Greek culture to light. Temporarily blocked by
Ottoman authorities after his first season at Hisarlik, he turned to other sites. In
August 1876, Schliemann began excavations at the ancient citadel of Mykenai,
discovering in a short time shaft graves rich in ancient artifacts, including gold
burial masks. His dating of the tombs, which he believed were the resting places
of Agamemnon and Klytaimestra, was again too early by several centuries. But
this find, together with subsequent discoveries, proved that a network of palace
centers existed from around 1600 BC until around 1100 BC, when the Bronze Age
in the Mediterranean came to an end. The civilization shared by these sites was
given the name “Mykenaian.”
Scholars soon recognized that the centers of this newly emerging archaic
culture matched, to a remarkable extent, the fabled sites celebrated in Greek
myths, some of which had no longer been inhabited in historical times. Thebes,
Athens, Orchomenos, Tiryns, Sparta, and Pylos arose as Mykenaian powers;
they also were the subject of rich storytelling traditions about the age of heroes
from a generation or two before the Trojan War. The circumstantial evidence
that the Mykenaians were, in fact, Greeks, took longer to verify. Arthur Evans, a
British archaeologist, in 1900 uncovered a vast palace complex at Knossos,
Crete, predating Mykenaian remains on the mainland, and characterized by signs
of high civilization—masterpieces of wall painting, elaborately carved
gemstones, precious vessels, imports from Egypt, statuettes, and ritual artifacts.
He dubbed this newly found culture “Minoan,” after the mythical King Minos,
who was said to have ruled the vicinity at the time of the hero Theseus. Evans
also found thousands of clay tablets bearing inscriptions in an unknown, picture-
based writing system. Carl Blegen, who had moved on from Troy to excavate
the western Greek site of Pylos in 1939, discovered a similar trove of six
hundred tablets there—at a Mykenaian palace site. Yet more emerged from
Thebes and western Crete. Whether by sudden invasion or gradual infiltration
(perhaps after the weakening effects of earthquakes and tsunamis), Mykenaians,
it became clear, had taken over former Minoan palaces in Crete. In 1952, their
so-called Linear B tablets, dating from 1300 to 1200 BC, were deciphered by the
English architect and self-taught cryptologist Michael Ventris (1922–1956). The
language proved to be Greek; the texts were official accounts concerning
personnel and supplies in the palace economy.
In short, the discoveries of a few generations showed that something like the
war depicted in the Iliad could well have taken place, at the site of Hisarlik, with
allies of the Hittite empire unsuccessfully sustaining a siege by Mykenaian
Greeks. The relative time frame remains unclear, especially when it comes to
causes and effects. Were the conquerors of Troy refugees from a catastrophic
collapse of the Mykenaian palace system in mainland Greece, desperate to get
the riches of the city that guarded the route to the Black Sea? Or did an extended
siege like that in the epic bring about the downfall of major Mykenaian centers
by draining resources and sapping manpower? Further enigmas await the
discovery of new evidence. Were a series of small-scale attacks over decades
compressed by later popular imagination into a “Trojan War”? What is the
relation between the attacks on the coast of Asia Minor and later Greek
colonization of the area? And how does the fall of the Hittite empire based at
Hattusa—also around the pivotal year 1200 BC—fit into the entire puzzle? It is
possible that the next several decades will bring clarification of at least some of
these mysteries.
THE SAGA OF TROY
Whatever its connections to actual historical events, the Iliad as we have it is far
from containing the whole story of the Trojan War. The poem sometimes alludes
to episodes from the beginning of the conflict, but in a brief and indirect fashion,
often within the speeches by individual characters, like the recollections of
Odysseus in 2.299–332. There are no extended flashbacks in the poet’s own
voice. In order to reconstruct the entire series of relevant events, we must go
back to the origins of the world, according to Greek myth. We can piece together
the story from such sources as the Theogony of Hesiod (roughly contemporary
with the rise of Homeric poetry in the eighth century BC) and the so-called
Cyclic epics of the seventh and sixth centuries BC (filling out the Trojan War
narrative “cycle”) of which only random citations and a few plot summaries
from later sources now survive. As an audience for Homeric epic most likely had
these details in mind, it is worthwhile reviewing them.
Gaia, the Earth, was one of the first creatures. She saw to it that her abusive
husband, Ouranos (“sky”) was overthrown by their son Kronos, who was in turn
displaced by her favorite grandson, Zeus. With the aid and advice of his
grandmother, the young god Zeus gained the kingship, overcoming the older
divinities in pitched battles, and by swallowing a dangerous wife, Mêtis
(“cunning intelligence”), came to ensure that his own reign would never be
overthrown. Instead of producing a son stronger than her spouse, as had been
predicted, Mêtis (now inside her husband) bore Athene, who sprang full-grown
from the Zeus’ head. Since Zeus owed Gaia a debt for her support, when she
eventually complained of the increasingly heavy burden of human life on her
land surface, he allowed a massive war to decrease world population. Thus the
conditions for the Trojan War were put in place by political maneuverings early
in cosmic history.
The more immediate cause arose from another unusual marriage involving
divinity. The ever-amorous Zeus desired a sea nymph Thetis, but the same fear
—that the off spring of a powerful goddess might oust him from his rule—led
him instead to marry her off to an unsuspecting mortal, Peleus, allegedly to
reward the hero’s pious behavior in resisting the adulterous advances of a mortal
queen. It was at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis that Discord (Eris), who had
not been invited, tossed the famous apple inscribed kallistêi—“to the fairest.”
Three goddesses—Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite—each claimed to match that
description. Zeus chose a Trojan youth named Paris to decide the contest. He
favored Aphrodite’s promise of pleasure (after rejecting the lure of wisdom or
power offered by the others) and received, as his reward, the ability to seduce the
world’s fairest woman, Helen—inconveniently married at that time to Menelaos,
a powerful king in Greece. The Iliad refers to this scenario only once (24.25–
30). As with so many other background details, this tale was undoubtedly known
already to the hearers of the epic. It was told in one of the many poems or sagas
now lost.
Helen’s unusual birth foretold a remarkable career. Her father was Zeus, who
