Iliad & Odyssey

What is this book about?

The Iliad tells of the wrath of Achilles in the Trojan War; the Odyssey follows Odysseus through ten years of wandering at sea as he tries to get home. Interweaving gods and mortals, the two epics turn war, fate, honour, and homecoming into the beginning of Western literature and its mythological universe — and the common source of countless works since. They are also, at this distance, still startlingly direct about grief, rage, and tenderness.

Why read it?

They are the fountainhead of Western literature and myth, and among the earliest works to treat human beings as complicated individuals: heroes rage, humiliate their enemies, and weep for their sons. Much of what we still argue about honour, violence, wandering, and homecoming is conducted in the vocabulary these poems established. Their scale is large and their gaze unflinching.

Core Ideas

• Heroism: a person's worth is bound to courage, honour, and the recognition of others.
• Humans both resist fate and submit to it, and the tension between the two runs through both poems.
• The pursuit of lasting fame and of a final home runs through both epics from beginning to end.
• Fate is cruel, yet the courage and human radiance heroes show in the face of death shaped the genes of Western civilisation.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• How can a person achieve something noble in the face of inescapable fate and death?
• How does one live between resisting fate and submitting to it?
• After ten years of wandering, can a person still come home to the house he left?

Who should read it?

For lovers of classical literature, Greek myth, and epic — and for anyone who wants to fill in where Western literature begins. You must accept frequent divine intervention and a slow narrative pace; no background in classics is needed.

How to Read It

Neither epic has a modern "first edition"; both are thought to have circulated orally for a long time before being written down around the eighth to seventh century BC. Chinese readers can use the Luo Niansheng and Wang Huansheng translation or Chen Zhongmei's, both annotated. Read the more story-driven Odyssey first, then the Iliad, and keep a character list at hand. The originals are in Greek hexameter; a good Chinese edition is enough.