The Iliad

No Western text boasts a life as long as the Iliad, and few can match its energy and glory. This introduction to Homer's poem sees it as rooted in a particular culture with its own narrative and thematic conventions, but opposes the trends of much recent scholarship which place it in a straitjacket of oral poetry and heroic design. Instead, Martin Mueller follows Plato and Aristotle in seeing the plot of the Iliad as a distinctly Homeric 'invention' which shaped Attic tragedy and the concept of dramatic action in Western literature. The text has been completely overhauled for this new edition, taking account of scholarship over the two decades since it was first published and making the text more accessible to those studying the Iliad in translation.

Martin Mueller is Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of Children of Oedipus and other essays on the imitation of Greek tragedy 1500-1800 and of several other works on Homer and Shakespeare.