Homer: Iliad

Paperback – 26 sep 2024

Rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler, the Iliad remains one of the world's most read classics of all time. This edition is NOT a "mass market printing" but a high-quality edition printed on white paper. Set in the time of the last weeks of the ten-year Trojan War between the city of Troy and the Achaean armies made up of soldiers from many Greek kingdoms under the overall command of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. The gods have different plans to mankind, and force the Achaeans into conflict with one another, with a particular hatred developing between their hero Achilles, and Agamemnon . . . Meanwhile, the Trojan King Priam meets the Achaean army on the plain before the city walls. But before the armies join battle, the Trojan Prince Paris and the Spartan King Menelaus-the two protagonists who started the war in an argument over the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen-agree to a man-to-man duel . . . The war continues, with the gods picking sides and attempting to influence the outcome. Finally, Zeus intervened and prohibits the gods from further intervention. . . .

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Notă biografică

Homer is the name ascribed by the Ancient Greeks to the semi-legendary author of the two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the central works of Greek literature. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity, the most widespread being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. The modern scholarly consensus is that these traditions do not have any historical value.The importance of Homer to the ancient Greeks is described in Plato's Republic, where he is referred to as the protos didaskalos, "first teacher", of tragedy, the hegemon paideias, "leader of learning" and the one who ten Hellada pepaideuken, "has taught Greece". Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds in Egypt.