This is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way, and to explain its relationship to the epic's narrative structure and audience reception. Rachel H. Lesser offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters' desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters' desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, including sexual passion, longing for a lost loved one, yearning for lamentation, and aggressive desires for vengeance and status, and they are signified with terms such as eros, himeros, pothe, menos, thumos, boule, and eeldor, as well as through the epic's thematic emotions of grief and anger. Desire in the Iliad shows how the mortals' and gods' triangular desires together drive and shape two Iliadic plots, the main plot of Achilleus' withdrawal from the fighting and then return to battle, and the "superplot" of the larger Trojan War story. The author also argues that these plots and their motivating desires arouse the listener's-or reader's-own corresponding desires: narrative desire to know and understand the Iliad's full story, sympathetic desire for characters' welfare, and empathetic passions, longings, and wishes. Our desires invest us in the epic narrative and their resolution brings us satisfaction.

Wilson examines the nature of compensation--ransom and revenge--in the liad, offering a fundamentally new reading of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. She presents a detailed anthropology of compensation in Homer, located in the wider context of agonistic exchange, to demonstrate how the struggle over definitions is a central feature of elite competition for status in the zero-sum and fluid ranking system of Homeric society. The study thus asserts the integral role of compensation in the traditional, cultural and poetic matrix of this foundational epic.

Back in print for the first time in decades, Auden’s National Book Award–winning poetry collection, in a critical edition that introduces it to a new generation of readers The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden’s most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry. In addition to its famous title poem, which reimagines Achilles’s shield for the modern age, when war and heroism have changed beyond recognition, the book also includes two sequences—“Bucolics” and “Horae Canonicae”—that Auden believed to be among his most significant work. Featuring an authoritative text and an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs, this volume brings Auden’s collection back into print for the first time in decades and offers the only critical edition of the work. As Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden’s collection “is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.” Describing the book’s formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why The Shield of Achilles should be seen as one of Auden’s most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.

Explores the moral choices and values Homer offers in his Iliad

The Iliad: Join Achilles at the Gates of Troy as he slays Hector to Avenge the death of Patroclus. Here is a story of love and war, hope and despair, and honor and glory. The recent major motion picture Helen of Troy staring Brad Pitt proves that this epic is as relevant today as it was twenty five hundred years ago when it was first written. So journey back to the Trojan War with Homer and relive the grandest adventure of all times. The Odyssey: Journey with Ulysses as he battles to bring his victorious, but decimated, troops home from the Trojan War, dogged by the wrath of the god Poseidon at every turn. Having been away for twenty years, little does he know what awaits him when he finally makes his way home. These two books are some of the most import books in the literary cannon, having influenced virtually every adventure tale ever told. And yet they are still accessible and immediate and now you can have both in one binding.

As a didactic explanation of pagan ancient Greek culture to Orthodox Christians, John Tzetzes's Allegories of the Iliad is deeply rooted in the mid-twelfth-century circumstances of the cosmopolitan Comnenian court. As a critical reworking of the Iliad, it is part of the millennia-long global tradition of Homeric adaptation.

This text contains the first three volumes of Christopher Logue's recomposition of Homer's Iliad - Kings, The Husbands and War Music.