The Iliad of Homer

by Alexander Pope (Translator), Theodore A Buckley, Homer

Overview

The Iliad is a Classical Attic; sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium, and is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781540793676
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	12/03/2016
Pages:	508
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 - 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day. In the Western classical tradition, Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of Greek epic poets. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature. Whether and when he lived is unknown. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BC, while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BC. Most modern researchers place Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. The formative influence of the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of 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.