Apollo helps him break through the protective wall the Achaeans built around their camp. Realizing that he has Zeus’s approval and Apollo and Ares’s assistance, Hector, Troy’s prince and mightiest warrior, grows increasingly confident. He announces that he will only return if the Trojans directly threaten his ships. If he returns to battle, he will die, according to a prophecy told him by Thetis. Achilles refuses, saying that no amount of treasure can compensate for the loss of his life. As the situation grows increasingly desperate, Agamemnon sends an embassy to Achilles with the promise of many gifts, including the return of Briseis, to entreat him to return to battle. The tide of battle turns in favor of the Trojans, despite the meddling of Athena, Poseidon, and Hera on behalf of the Achaeans. He promises Thetis that he will make the Achaeans feel the loss of their best warrior. Zeus cannot refuse her offer, though he knows it will cause strife with his wife Hera, who supports the Achaeans. In retaliation, Agamemnon confiscates Achilles’s prize, Briseis, on the grounds that she will replace Chryseis, who Agamemnon grudgingly returns to her father.Įnraged, Achilles withdraws himself and his troops from battle and entreats to his mother, the sea goddess Thetis who once saved Zeus during an Olympian rebellion, to appeal to Zeus on behalf of his honor. Apollo devastates the Achaeans with a plague, prompting Achilles to call a council in which he questions Agamemnon’s leadership. He rudely rejects her father’s substantial ransom for her return, despite his fellow leaders’ opposition. Its events explore themes around impermanence of human life and creations, poetry as a medium of immortalization, and the hero’s journey.įollowing a raid on a nearby community, Agamemnon takes Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, priest of Apollo, as his prize. The poem’s inciting event is a quarrel between Agamemnon and his best warrior Achilles. The war was spurred when Paris of Troy fell in love with and abducted Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, who is the younger brother of the Achaean commander Agamemnon. The Achaeans and Trojans have been fighting the Trojan War for 10 years. Chapter divisions exist in the source text, but the chapter titles are Fagles’s invention. His is not a line-by-line translation but what he calls a “modern English Homer” (x). Fagles explains in his translator’s note that he sought a middle ground between the oral performance features that characterize Homer (e.g., repetition and formulae) and the modern English reader’s expectations for variety. The Academy of American Poets awarded Fagles the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for this work in 1991. This study guide refers to the 1990 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition translated by Robert Fagles.

The Iliad by Homer