Companion Books to the Iliad

I am re-reading The Iliad in the Lattimore Translation (per Feicht recommendation) along with Willcock's A Companion to the Iliad. I also recently started the new book by Caroline Alexander The War that Killed Achilles, which I highly recommend. Any other recommendations while I'm in the Iliad phase?

Nothing immediately comes to mind...though if someone can chime in with a good Bronze Age Aegean book, that might be a good companion. I guess too you could check out The Western Way of War by Hanson* though it focuses more on the Classical period, there are some references about Homeric warfare.

*I feel compelled to mention btw that I simply cannot stand Hanson the man, but Hanson the writer is amazing. Think Kagan, except Hanson is probably crazier, AND a better writer.

Of course I should point out that I have already read Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore by Hughes; & "The Trojan War" by Barry Strauss; and "Troy and Homer" by Latasz; & Troy: Myth and Reality Behind the Epic Legend; by McCarty & most of the inordinately dull In Search of the Trojan War by Wood; & "The War at Troy" by Quintus of Smyrna; so I may just have covered most of what I really need to cover re The Iliad

Haha... yeah you're probably good! I do recommend checking out a book about the warfare aspect itself though too, if you haven't delved much into that yet. It's really a fascinating dichotomy with Homer writing about (well, IF he wrote at all... that's another topic) what was essentially a synthesis of the warfare around him contemporaneously, and the traditional ideals of Bronze Age war, which may not have existed for hundreds of years by the time when Homer recorded his tales. To me, the obviously anachronistic stuff is some of the best parts!

EDIT: I don't know how much you've done with Romans yet, but there's some stuff akin to what Vergil did in The Aeneid, where he's writing about the fall of Troy, but describes it like a classical Roman seige of a town, complete with testudo formations!

Re warfare -- I like how in The Iliad they esentially use the chariot as a taxi since how it was used in battle appears to be lost by Homer's time.

Exactly :-) It's like they preserved the memory of it, but not the "nuts and bolts" as it were. It doesn't stop there, though. Homer essentially has them dressed up like the hoplite warriors that had begun to appear in his time, while engaging in old fashion hero-on-hero tribal combat. Fascinating!

I thought 'Troy c.1700-1250BC' by Nic Fields in the Osprey Fortress series to be excellent (especiallythe illustrations by Donato Spedaliere) and much better than the usual Osprey offerings. At a recent bookfair I picked up 'Greeks and Trojans' by Rex Warner, for a few pence! It is probably long out of print tho! It brings together the main elements of the story before and after the Illiad, as told in other myths and legends.

Robert Graves' The Anger of Achilles has been on my to do list for a while. He's a great writer, but I just haven't gotten to it yet. Any comments on it?

i like Graves too, despite his controversial ideas about 'history'. i've been slogging through White Goddess for years now, and i damn well ain't dyin' until i finsh it!

Anger of Achilles is best described as a novel based on The Iliad (not unlike his Cladius books on Suetonius), and as such i liked it. however i wouldn't put it on my top 10.

Graves also did The Siege and Fall of Troy in his 'Books for Young People' series.

Hi all,

Do you know of any books that take a "close reading" sort of approach to the Homeric epics? Ie. peeling through textual layers and contextualizing things in cultural, linguistic or archeological terms?

I'm just reading The art and culture of early Greece, 1100-480 B.C. and, though its focus is mostly elsewhere, I was struck by a chapter tracing the origin of epic hexameter with a tantalizing discussion of the apparent Mycenaean Greek origin for the Homeric epithet phasganon argyroelon. If only there was a book dedicated entirely to this sort of thing...