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Tron
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Tron
Tron poster.jpg
Theatrical release poster

Directed by
Steven Lisberger
Produced by
Donald Kushner
Screenplay by
Steven Lisberger
Story by
Steven Lisberger
Bonnie MacBird
Starring
Jeff Bridges
Bruce Boxleitner
David Warner
Cindy Morgan
Barnard Hughes
Music by
Wendy Carlos
Cinematography
Bruce Logan
Edited by
Jeff Gourson

Production
 company

Walt Disney Productions

Distributed by
Buena Vista Distribution

Release dates

July 9, 1982


Running time
 95 minutes
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$17 million
Box office
$33 million
Tron is a 1982 American science fiction film written and directed by Steven Lisberger, based on a story by Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird, and produced by Walt Disney Productions. The film stars Jeff Bridges as a computer programmer who is transported inside the software world of a mainframe computer, where he interacts with various programs in his attempt to get back out. Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, and Barnard Hughes star in supporting roles.
Development of Tron began in 1976 when Lisberger became fascinated with the early video game Pong. He and producer Donald Kushner set up an animation studio to develop Tron with the intention of making it an animated film. Indeed, to promote the studio itself, Lisberger and his team created a 30-second animation featuring the first appearance of the eponymous character. Eventually, Lisberger decided to include live-action elements with both backlit and computer animation for the actual feature-length film. Various film studios had rejected the storyboards for the film before the Walt Disney Studios agreed to finance and distribute Tron. There, backlit animation was finally combined with the computer animation and live action.
Tron was released on July 9, 1982 in 1,091 theaters in the United States. The film was a moderate success at the box office, but received positive reviews from critics who praised the visuals and acting, but criticized the storyline. Tron received nominations for Best Costume Design and Best Sound at the 55th Academy Awards, and received the Academy Award for Technical Achievement fourteen years later. Over time, Tron developed into a cult film and eventually spawned a franchise, which consists of multiple video games, comic books and an animated television series.[1] A sequel titled Tron: Legacy directed by Joseph Kosinski was released on December 17, 2010, with Bridges and Boxleitner reprising their roles, and Lisberger acting as producer.


Contents  [hide]
1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Production 3.1 Origins
3.2 Pre-production
3.3 Music
4 Reception 4.1 Box office
4.2 Critical response
4.3 Cultural effect
5 Books
6 Home media
7 Sequel 7.1 Tron: Legacy
7.2 Tron 3
8 See also
9 References
10 External links

Plot[edit]
Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is a software engineer that runs an arcade bar called Flynn's, and was formerly employed by ENCOM. He wrote several video games, but another ENCOM engineer, Ed Dillinger (David Warner) stole them and passed them off as his own, earning himself a series of promotions. Having left the company, Flynn attempts to obtain evidence of Dillinger's actions by hacking the ENCOM mainframe, but is repeatedly stopped by the Master Control Program (MCP), an artificial intelligence written by Dillinger. When the MCP reveals its plan to take control of outside mainframes including the Pentagon and Kremlin, Dillinger attempts to stop it, only to have the MCP threaten to expose his plagiarism of Flynn's hugely successful games.
Flynn's ex-girlfriend, Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan), and fellow ENCOM engineer, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), warn Flynn that Dillinger knows about his hacking attempts and has tightened security. Flynn persuades them to sneak him inside ENCOM, where he forges a higher security clearance for Alan's recently developed security program called "Tron". In response, the MCP uses an experimental laser to digitize Flynn into the ENCOM mainframe, called the Grid, where programs appear in the likeness of the human "users" who created them.
Flynn quickly learns that the MCP and its second-in-command, Sark (Warner), rule over Programs and coerce them to renounce their belief in the Users. Those who resist the MCP's tyrannical power over the Grid are forced to play in martial games in which the losers are destroyed. Flynn is forced to fight other Programs and meets Tron (Boxleitner) and Ram (Dan Shor) between matches. The three escape into the mainframe during a Light Cycle match. When Ram is mortally wounded and dies, Flynn learns that, as a User, he can manipulate the reality of the digital world.
At an input/output junction, Tron communicates with Alan and receives instructions about how to destroy the MCP. Tron, Flynn and Yori (Morgan) board a "solar sailer simulation" to reach the MCP's core but Sark's command ship destroys the sailer, capturing Flynn and Yori. Sark leaves the command ship and orders its destruction, but Flynn keeps it intact while Sark reaches the MCP's core on a shuttle, carrying captured Programs and recruiting them.
While the MCP attempts to consume the captive Programs, Tron confronts Sark and critically damages him, prompting the MCP to transfer all of its powers to him. Tron attempts to break through the shield protecting the MCP's core, while Flynn leaps into the MCP, distracting it long enough to reveal a gap in its shield. Tron throws his disc through the gap and destroys the MCP and Sark, ending MCP's tyrannical rule and destroying him.
As Programs all over the system begin to communicate with their users, Flynn is sent back to the real world, quickly reconstructed at his terminal. A nearby printer produces the evidence that Dillinger had plagiarized his creations. The next morning, Dillinger enters his office and finds the MCP deactivated and the proof of his theft displayed on the screen and he is sacked. Later, Flynn takes his rightful place as ENCOM's new CEO and is greeted by Alan and Lora on his first day.
Cast[edit]
See also: List of Tron characters
Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, a former employee at ENCOM who is beamed into the ENCOM mainframe. Jeff Bridges also plays Clu (Codified Likeness Utility), a hacking program intended to find evidence of Dillinger's theft in the mainframe.
Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley, a friend of Kevin Flynn and employee of ENCOM. Bruce Boxleitner also plays Tron, a security program developed by Bradley.
David Warner as Edward "Ed" Dillinger, a senior executive of ENCOM. He was formerly a co-worker of Flynn who stole his work and passed it off as his own, earning him a series of promotions. David Warner also plays Sark, a command program and the MCP's second-in-command.
David Warner likewise provides the uncredited voice of the Master Control Program, a rogue computer program vastly improved by Dillinger.
Cindy Morgan as Dr. Laura Baines Ph.D., Bradley's co-worker and girlfriend as well as assistant to Dr. Walter Gibbs Ph.D. Cindy Morgan also plays Yori, a program created by Dr. Baines and a confidante of Tron.
Barnard Hughes as Dr. Walter Gibbs, a founder and employee of ENCOM. Barnard Hughes also plays Dumont, a "guardian" program protecting input/output junctions.
Barnard Hughes also plays the original state of the Master Control Program.
Dan Shor as Ram, an actuarial program for an unnamed insurance company and close friend of Tron and Flynn in the mainframe. Dan Shor also plays an unnamed ENCOM employee who asks Bradley if he can have some of his popcorn.
Peter Jurasik as Crom, an accounting program who fights against Flynn on the Game Grid.
Tony Stephano as Peter, Dillinger's assistant. Tony Stephano also plays Sark's Lieutenant.

Production[edit]
Origins[edit]
The inspiration for Tron occurred in 1976 when Steven Lisberger, then an animator of drawings with his own studio, looked at a sample reel from a computer firm called MAGI and saw Pong for the first time.[2] He was immediately fascinated by video games and wanted to do a film incorporating them. According to Lisberger, "I realized that there were these techniques that would be very suitable for bringing video games and computer visuals to the screen. And that was the moment that the whole concept flashed across my mind".[3]
Lisberger had already created an early version of the character 'Tron' for a 30 second long animation which was used to promote both Lisberger Studios and a series of various rock radio stations. This backlit cell animation depicted Tron as a character who glowed yellow; the same shade that Lisberger had originally intended for all the heroic characters developed for the feature-length Tron. This was later changed to blue for the finished film (see Pre-production below). The prototype Tron was bearded, and resembled the Cylon Centurions from the original 1978 TV series, Battlestar Galactica. Also, Tron was armed with two "exploding discs", as Lisberger described them on the 2-Disc DVD edition of Tron. Although its possible they may have represented vinyl records, it is interesting to note that in the 2010 film Tron: Legacy, Tron once again appeared using two discs (see Rinzler).
Lisberger elaborates: "Everybody was doing backlit animation in the 70s, you know. It was that disco look. And we thought, what if we had this character that was a neon line, and that was our Tron warrior – Tron for electronic. And what happened was, I saw Pong, and I said, well, that's the arena for him. And at the same time I was interested in the early phases of computer generated animation, which I got into at MIT in Boston, and when I got into that I met a bunch of programmers who were into all that. And they really inspired me, by how much they believed in this new realm."[4]
He was frustrated by the clique-like nature of computers and video games and wanted to create a film that would open this world up to everyone. Lisberger and his business partner Donald Kushner moved to the West Coast in 1977 and set up an animation studio to develop Tron.[3] They borrowed against the anticipated profits of their 90-minute animated television special Animalympics to develop storyboards for Tron with the notion of making an animated film.[2]
The film was conceived as an animated film bracketed with live-action sequences.[3] The rest would involve a combination of computer-generated visuals and back-lit animation. Lisberger planned to finance the movie independently by approaching several computer companies but had little success. However, one company, Information International Inc., was receptive.[3] He met with Richard Taylor, a representative, and they began talking about using live-action photography with back-lit animation in such a way that it could be integrated with computer graphics. At this point, Lisberger already had a script written and the film entirely storyboarded with some computer animation tests completed.[3] He had spent approximately $300,000 developing Tron and had also secured $4–5 million in private backing before reaching a standstill. Lisberger and Kushner took their storyboards and samples of computer-generated films to Warner Bros., MGM, and Columbia Pictures – all of which turned them down.[2]
In 1980, they decided to take the idea to the Walt Disney Studios, which was interested in producing more daring productions at the time.[3] However, Disney executives were uncertain about giving $10–12 million to a first-time producer and director using techniques which, in most cases, had never been attempted. The studio agreed to finance a test reel which involved a flying disc champion throwing a rough prototype of the discs used in the film.[3] It was a chance to mix live-action footage with back-lit animation and computer-generated visuals. It impressed the executives at Disney and they agreed to back the film. The script was subsequently re-written and re-storyboarded with the studio's input.[3] At the time, Disney rarely hired outsiders to make films for them and Kushner found that he and his group were given a less than warm welcome because they "tackled the nerve center – the animation department. They saw us as the germ from outside. We tried to enlist several Disney animators but none came. Disney is a closed group."[5]
Pre-production[edit]
Because of the many special effects, Disney decided in 1981 to film Tron completely in 65-mm Super Panavision (except for the computer-generated layers, which were shot in VistaVision and both anamorphic 35mm and Super 35 which were used for some scenes in the "real" world and subsequently "blown up" to 65mm[6]). Three designers were brought in to create the look of the computer world.[3] French comic book artist Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) was the main set and costume designer for the movie. Most of the vehicle designs (including Sark's aircraft carrier, the light cycles, the tank, and the solar sailer) were created by industrial designer Syd Mead, of Blade Runner fame. Peter Lloyd, a high-tech commercial artist, designed the environments.[3] Nevertheless, these jobs often overlapped, leaving Giraud working on the solar sailer and Mead designing terrain, sets and the film's logo. The original 'Program' character design was inspired by Lisberger Studios' logo of a glowing bodybuilder hurling two discs.[3]
To create the computer animation sequences of Tron, Disney turned to the four leading computer graphics firms of the day: Information International, Inc. of Culver City, California, who owned the Super Foonly F-1 (the fastest PDP-10 ever made and the only one of its kind); MAGI of Elmsford, New York; Robert Abel and Associates of California; and Digital Effects of New York City.[3] Bill Kovacs worked on this movie while working for Robert Abel before going on to found Wavefront Technologies. The work was not a collaboration, resulting in very different styles used by the firms.
Tron was one of the first movies to make extensive use of any form of computer animation, and is celebrated as a milestone in the industry though only fifteen to twenty minutes of such animation were used,[7] mostly scenes that show digital "terrain" or patterns or include vehicles such as light-cycles, tanks and ships. Because the technology to combine computer animation and live action did not exist at the time, these sequences were interspersed with the filmed characters. The computer used had only 2MB of memory, with a disc that had no more than 330MB of storage. This put a limit on detail of background; and at a certain distance, they had a procedure of mixing in black to fade things out, a process called "depth cueing". The movie's Computer Effects Supervisor Richard Taylor told them "When in doubt, black it out!", which became their motto.[8]
Most of the scenes, backgrounds, and visual effects in the film were created using more traditional techniques and a unique process known as "backlit animation".[3] In this process, live-action scenes inside the computer world were filmed in black-and-white on an entirely black set, printed on large format Kodalith high-contrast film, then colored with photographic and rotoscopic techniques to give them a "technological" appearance.[5] With multiple layers of high-contrast, large format positives and negatives, this process required truckloads of sheet film and a workload even greater than that of a conventional cel-animated feature. The Kodalith was specially produced as large sheets by Kodak for the film and came in numbered boxes so that each batch of the film could be used in order of manufacture for a consistent image. However, this was not understood by the filmmakers, and as a result glowing outlines and circuit traces occasionally flicker as the film speed varied between batches. After the reason was discovered, this was no longer a problem as the batches were used in order and "zinger" sounds were used during the flickering parts to represent the computer world malfunctioning as Lisberger described it.[9] Lisberger later had these flickers and sounds digitally corrected for the 2011 restored Blu-ray release as they were not included in his original vision of the film. Due to its difficulty and cost, this process of back-lit animation was not repeated for another feature film.
Sound design and creation for the film was assigned to Frank Serafine, who was responsible for the sound design on Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Tron was a 1983 Academy Awards nominee for Best Sound.
At one point in the film, a small entity called "Bit" advises Flynn with only the words "yes" and "no" created by a Votrax speech synthesizer.
BYTE wrote "Although this film is very much the personal expression of Steven Lisberger's vision, nevertheless [it] has certainly been a group effort".[10] More than 569 people were involved in the post-production work, including 200 inkers and hand-painters, 85 of them from Taiwan's Cuckoo's Nest Studio (unusually, for an English-language production, in the end credits the personnel were listed with their frames written in Chinese characters).[5]
This film features parts of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the multi-story ENCOM laser bay was the target area for the SHIVA solid-state multi-beamed laser. Also, the stairway that Alan, Lora, and Flynn use to reach Alan's office is the stairway in Building 451 near the entrance to the main machine room. The cubicle scenes were shot in another room of the lab. At the time, Tron was the only movie to have scenes filmed inside this lab.[11]
The original script called for "good" programs to be colored yellow and "evil" programs (those loyal to Sark and the MCP) to be colored blue. Partway into production, this coloring scheme was changed to blue for good and red for evil, but some scenes were produced using the original coloring scheme: Clu, who drives a tank, has yellow circuit lines, and all of Sark's tank commanders are blue (but appear green in some presentations). Also, the light-cycle sequence shows the heroes driving yellow (Flynn), orange (Tron), and red (Ram) cycles, while Sark's troops drive blue cycles; similarly, Clu's tank is red, while tanks driven by crews loyal to Sark are blue.
Budgeting the production was difficult by reason of breaking new ground in response to additional challenges, including an impending Directors Guild of America strike and a fixed release date.[3] Disney predicted at least $400 million in domestic sales of merchandise, including an arcade game by Bally Midway and three Mattel Intellivision home video games.[5]
The producers also added Easter eggs: during the scene where Tron and Ram escape from the Light Cycle arena into the system, Pac-Man can be seen behind Sark (with the corresponding sounds from the Pac-Man arcade game being heard in the background), while a "Hidden Mickey" outline (located at time 01:12:29 on the re-release Blu-ray) can be seen below the solar sailer during the protagonists' journey.
Music[edit]
Main article: Tron (soundtrack)
The soundtrack for Tron was written by pioneer electronic musician Wendy Carlos, who is best known for her album Switched-On Bach and for the soundtracks to many films, including A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. The music, which was the first collaboration between Carlos and her partner Annemarie Franklin,[12] featured a mix of an analog Moog synthesizer and Crumar's GDS digital synthesizer (complex additive and phase modulation synthesis), along with non-electronic pieces performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (hired at the insistence of Disney, which was concerned that Carlos might not be able to complete her score on time). Two additional musical tracks ("1990's Theme" and "Only Solutions") were provided by the American band Journey after British band Supertramp pulled out of the project. An album featuring dialogue, music and sound effects from the film was also released on LP by Disneyland Records in 1982.
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
Tron was released on July 9, 1982, in 1,091 theaters grossing USD $4 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $33 million in North America,[13] which Disney saw as a disappointment, and led to the studio writing off a good chunk of its $17 million budget.[14]
Critical response[edit]
The film was well received by critics. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and described the film as "a dazzling movie from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves romantic and glamorous. Here's a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun".[15] However, near the end of his review, he noted (in a positive tone), "This is an almost wholly technological movie. Although it's populated by actors who are engaging (Bridges, Cindy Morgan) or sinister (Warner), it is not really a movie about human nature. Like [the last two Star Wars films], but much more so, this movie is a machine to dazzle and delight us".[15] Ebert was so convinced that this film had not been given its due credit by both critics and audiences that he decided to close his first annual Overlooked Film Festival with a showing of Tron.[16] Tron was also featured in Siskel and Ebert's video pick of the week in 1993.[17]
InfoWorld's Deborah Wise was impressed, writing that "it is hard to believe the characters acted out the scenes on a darkened soundstage... We see characters throwing illuminated Frisbees, driving 'lightcycles' on a video-game grid, playing a dangerous version of jai alai and zapping numerous fluorescent tanks in arcade-game-type mazes. It's exciting, it's fun, and it's just what video-game fans and anyone with a spirit of adventure will love—despite plot weaknesses."[18]
On the other hand, Variety disliked the film and said in its review, "Tron is loaded with visual delights but falls way short of the mark in story and viewer involvement. Screenwriter-director Steven Lisberger has adequately marshalled a huge force of technicians to deliver the dazzle, but even kids (and specifically computer game geeks) will have a difficult time getting hooked on the situations".[19] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin criticized the film's visual effects: "They're loud, bright and empty, and they're all this movie has to offer".[20] The Washington Post's Gary Arnold wrote, "Fascinating as they are as discrete sequences, the computer-animated episodes don't build dramatically. They remain a miscellaneous form of abstract spectacle".[21] In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, "It's got momentum and it's got marvels, but it's without heart; it's a visionary technological achievement without vision".[22]
As of July 2013, the movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes rated the film at 71% on its Tomatometer, based on the reviews of 48 critics. A consensus statement for the movie said, "Though perhaps not as strong dramatically as it is technologically, TRON is an original and visually stunning piece of science fiction that represents a landmark work in the history of computer animation."[23]
In the year it was released, the Motion Picture Academy refused to nominate Tron for a special-effects award because, according to director Steven Lisberger, "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers".[24] The film did, however, earn Oscar nominations in the categories of Best Costume Design and Best Sound (Michael Minkler, Bob Minkler, Lee Minkler, and James LaRue).[25]
Cultural effect[edit]
In 1997, Ken Perlin of the Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his invention of Perlin noise for Tron.[26] In 2008, Tron was nominated for AFI's Top 10 Science Fiction Films list.[27]
The film, considered groundbreaking, has inspired several individuals in numerous ways. John Lasseter, head of Pixar and Disney's animation group, described how the film helped him see the potential of computer-generated imagery in the production of animated films stating "without Tron there would be no Toy Story."[28][29]
The music video of the song "Abiura di me" of the Italian rapper Caparezza is based on Tron.[citation needed] The two members of the French house music group Daft Punk, who scored the sequel, have held a joint, lifelong fascination with the film.[30]
Tron developed into a cult film and was ranked as 13th in a 2010 list of the top 20 cult films published by The Boston Globe.[31]
Books[edit]
A novelization of Tron was released in 1982, written by American science fiction novelist Brian Daley. It included eight pages of color photographs from the movie.[32] Also that year, Disney Senior Staff Publicist Michael Bonifer authored a book entitled The Art of Tron which covered aspects of the pre-production and post-production aspects of Tron.[33][34] A nonfiction book about the making of the original film, The Making of Tron: How Tron Changed Visual Effects and Disney Forever, was written by William Kallay and published in 2011.
Home media[edit]
Tron was originally released on VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, and CED Videodisc in 1983. As with most video releases from the 1980s, the film was cropped to the 4:3 pan & scan format. The film saw multiple re-releases throughout the 1990s, most notably an "Archive Collection" LaserDisc box set,[35] which featured the first release of the film in its original widescreen 2.20:1 format.
Tron saw its first DVD release on May 19, 1998. This bare-bones release utilized the same non-anamorphic video transfer used in the Archive Collection LaserDisc set, and did not include any of the LD's special features. On January 15, 2002, the film received a 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition release in the form of a special 2-Disc DVD set. This set featured a new THX mastered anamorphic video transfer, and included all of the special features from the LD Archive Collection, plus an all-new 90 minute "Making of Tron" documentary.
To tie in with the home video release Tron: Legacy, the movie was finally re-released by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment on Special Edition DVD and for the first time on Blu-ray Disc on April 5, 2011, with the subtitle "The Original Classic" to distinguish it from its sequel. Tron was also featured in a 5-Disc Blu-ray Combo with the 3D copy of Tron: Legacy. The film was re-released on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK on June 27, 2011.
Sequel[edit]
Tron: Legacy[edit]
Main article: Tron: Legacy
On January 12, 2005, Disney announced it had hired screenwriters Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal to write a sequel to Tron.[36] In 2008, director Joseph Kosinski negotiated to develop and direct "TRON", described as "the next chapter" of the 1982 film and based on a preliminary teaser trailer shown at that year's San Diego Comic-Con, with Lisberger co-producing.[37] Filming began in Vancouver, British Columbia in April 2009.[38] During the 2009 Comic-Con, the title of the sequel was revealed to be changed to Tron: Legacy.[39][40] The second trailer (also with the ["Tron: Legacy"] logo) was released in 3D with Alice In Wonderland. A third trailer premiered at Comic-Con 2010 on July 22. At Disney's D23 Expo September 10–13, 2009 they also debuted teaser trailers for Tron: Legacy as well as having light cycle and other props from the movie there. The film was released on December 17, 2010, with Daft Punk composing the score.[41]
Tron 3[edit]
A third is in the works with Garrett Hedlund and Boxleitner reprising their roles.
See also[edit]

Portal icon Disney portal
Portal icon Film portal
Tron (franchise)
TRON command in BASIC (though Lisberger has stated that this is a coincidence and has nothing to do with the film title)[citation needed]
Simulated reality
Demoscene
Automan, a 1983 TV series inspired by Tron.
References[edit]
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3.^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Patterson, Richard (August 1982). "The Making of Tron". American Cinematographer.
4.Jump up ^ "Interview: Justin Springer and Steven Lisberger, co-producers of Tron: Legacy". Archived from the original on 2012-09-15.
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9.Jump up ^ The Making of Tron (DVD Feature)
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11.Jump up ^ "The People of NIF: Rod Saunders: Each Day is an Adventure". Archived from the original on 2012-08-05.
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17.Jump up ^ "Super Mario Bros. / What’s Love Got To Do With It / 1993". siskelandebert.org. Retrieved 2012-11-16.
18.Jump up ^ Deborah Wise, "Unabashed fan and critics' critic talk about Disney's Tron," InfoWorld Vol. 4, No. 30 (Aug 2, 1982): 70-71.
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21.Jump up ^ Arnold, Gary (July 10, 1982). "Duel of Two Disneys". Washington Post. pp. C1.
22.Jump up ^ Scott, Jay (July 10, 1982). "Tron Beautiful but Heartless". Globe and Mail.
23.Jump up ^ Tron at Rotten Tomatoes
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25.Jump up ^ "The 55th Academy Awards (1983) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Archived from the original on 2012-09-05. Retrieved 2011-10-09.
26.Jump up ^ Kerman, Phillip. Macromedia Flash 8 @work: Projects and Techniques to Get the Job Done. Sams Publishing. 2006.
27.Jump up ^ "AFI's 10 Top 10 Ballot". Retrieved 5 October 2014.
28.Jump up ^ Thompson, Anne (December 9, 2010). "What Will Tron: Legacy’s 3D VFX Look Like in 30 Years?". Tron Legacy VFX – Special Effects in Tron Legacy. Popular Mechanics. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 24 December 2010.
29.Jump up ^ Lyons, Mike (November 1998). "Toon Story: John Lasseter's Animated Life". Animation World Magazine. Archived from the original on 2012-06-29. Retrieved 13 October 2010.
30.Jump up ^ IGN Staff (12 October 2010). "Listen to Daft Punk in TRON: Legacy". IGN. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 13 October 2010. "Having grown up with admiration of Disney's original 1982 film Tron..."
31.Jump up ^ Boston.com Staff (August 17, 2006). "Top 20 cult films, according to our readers". boston.com (The Boston Globe). Archived from the original on 2012-07-30. Retrieved December 27, 2010.
32.Jump up ^ Daley, Brian (1 October 1982). Tron. New English Library Ltd. ISBN 0-450-05550-7.
33.Jump up ^ Bonifer, Michael (November 1982). The Art of Tron. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-45575-3.
34.Jump up ^ "Tron Sector Biography of Mike Bonifer". Archived from the original on 2008-06-09.
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36.Jump up ^ Fleming, Michael (January 12, 2005). "Mouse uploads Tron redo". Variety. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2008-07-09.
37.Jump up ^ Kit, Borys (September 11, 2007). "New Tron races on". Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on 2008-06-15. Retrieved 2008-07-09.
38.Jump up ^ "Feature films currently filming in BC". Archived from the original on 2012-05-26.
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40.Jump up ^ Roush, George (23 July 2009). "Comic-Con 2009: Disney Panel TRON Legacy & Alice In Wonderland!". Latino Review. Retrieved 2009-07-23.
41.Jump up ^ Anderson, Kyle. "'Tron: Legacy' Soundtrack: Get Ready For The Game With Daft Punk". MTV. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 30 December 2010.
External links[edit]
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Tron
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other uses, see Tron (disambiguation).

Tron
Tron poster.jpg
Theatrical release poster

Directed by
Steven Lisberger
Produced by
Donald Kushner
Screenplay by
Steven Lisberger
Story by
Steven Lisberger
Bonnie MacBird
Starring
Jeff Bridges
Bruce Boxleitner
David Warner
Cindy Morgan
Barnard Hughes
Music by
Wendy Carlos
Cinematography
Bruce Logan
Edited by
Jeff Gourson

Production
 company

Walt Disney Productions

Distributed by
Buena Vista Distribution

Release dates

July 9, 1982


Running time
 95 minutes
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$17 million
Box office
$33 million
Tron is a 1982 American science fiction film written and directed by Steven Lisberger, based on a story by Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird, and produced by Walt Disney Productions. The film stars Jeff Bridges as a computer programmer who is transported inside the software world of a mainframe computer, where he interacts with various programs in his attempt to get back out. Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, and Barnard Hughes star in supporting roles.
Development of Tron began in 1976 when Lisberger became fascinated with the early video game Pong. He and producer Donald Kushner set up an animation studio to develop Tron with the intention of making it an animated film. Indeed, to promote the studio itself, Lisberger and his team created a 30-second animation featuring the first appearance of the eponymous character. Eventually, Lisberger decided to include live-action elements with both backlit and computer animation for the actual feature-length film. Various film studios had rejected the storyboards for the film before the Walt Disney Studios agreed to finance and distribute Tron. There, backlit animation was finally combined with the computer animation and live action.
Tron was released on July 9, 1982 in 1,091 theaters in the United States. The film was a moderate success at the box office, but received positive reviews from critics who praised the visuals and acting, but criticized the storyline. Tron received nominations for Best Costume Design and Best Sound at the 55th Academy Awards, and received the Academy Award for Technical Achievement fourteen years later. Over time, Tron developed into a cult film and eventually spawned a franchise, which consists of multiple video games, comic books and an animated television series.[1] A sequel titled Tron: Legacy directed by Joseph Kosinski was released on December 17, 2010, with Bridges and Boxleitner reprising their roles, and Lisberger acting as producer.


Contents  [hide]
1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Production 3.1 Origins
3.2 Pre-production
3.3 Music
4 Reception 4.1 Box office
4.2 Critical response
4.3 Cultural effect
5 Books
6 Home media
7 Sequel 7.1 Tron: Legacy
7.2 Tron 3
8 See also
9 References
10 External links

Plot[edit]
Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is a software engineer that runs an arcade bar called Flynn's, and was formerly employed by ENCOM. He wrote several video games, but another ENCOM engineer, Ed Dillinger (David Warner) stole them and passed them off as his own, earning himself a series of promotions. Having left the company, Flynn attempts to obtain evidence of Dillinger's actions by hacking the ENCOM mainframe, but is repeatedly stopped by the Master Control Program (MCP), an artificial intelligence written by Dillinger. When the MCP reveals its plan to take control of outside mainframes including the Pentagon and Kremlin, Dillinger attempts to stop it, only to have the MCP threaten to expose his plagiarism of Flynn's hugely successful games.
Flynn's ex-girlfriend, Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan), and fellow ENCOM engineer, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), warn Flynn that Dillinger knows about his hacking attempts and has tightened security. Flynn persuades them to sneak him inside ENCOM, where he forges a higher security clearance for Alan's recently developed security program called "Tron". In response, the MCP uses an experimental laser to digitize Flynn into the ENCOM mainframe, called the Grid, where programs appear in the likeness of the human "users" who created them.
Flynn quickly learns that the MCP and its second-in-command, Sark (Warner), rule over Programs and coerce them to renounce their belief in the Users. Those who resist the MCP's tyrannical power over the Grid are forced to play in martial games in which the losers are destroyed. Flynn is forced to fight other Programs and meets Tron (Boxleitner) and Ram (Dan Shor) between matches. The three escape into the mainframe during a Light Cycle match. When Ram is mortally wounded and dies, Flynn learns that, as a User, he can manipulate the reality of the digital world.
At an input/output junction, Tron communicates with Alan and receives instructions about how to destroy the MCP. Tron, Flynn and Yori (Morgan) board a "solar sailer simulation" to reach the MCP's core but Sark's command ship destroys the sailer, capturing Flynn and Yori. Sark leaves the command ship and orders its destruction, but Flynn keeps it intact while Sark reaches the MCP's core on a shuttle, carrying captured Programs and recruiting them.
While the MCP attempts to consume the captive Programs, Tron confronts Sark and critically damages him, prompting the MCP to transfer all of its powers to him. Tron attempts to break through the shield protecting the MCP's core, while Flynn leaps into the MCP, distracting it long enough to reveal a gap in its shield. Tron throws his disc through the gap and destroys the MCP and Sark, ending MCP's tyrannical rule and destroying him.
As Programs all over the system begin to communicate with their users, Flynn is sent back to the real world, quickly reconstructed at his terminal. A nearby printer produces the evidence that Dillinger had plagiarized his creations. The next morning, Dillinger enters his office and finds the MCP deactivated and the proof of his theft displayed on the screen and he is sacked. Later, Flynn takes his rightful place as ENCOM's new CEO and is greeted by Alan and Lora on his first day.
Cast[edit]
See also: List of Tron characters
Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, a former employee at ENCOM who is beamed into the ENCOM mainframe. Jeff Bridges also plays Clu (Codified Likeness Utility), a hacking program intended to find evidence of Dillinger's theft in the mainframe.
Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley, a friend of Kevin Flynn and employee of ENCOM. Bruce Boxleitner also plays Tron, a security program developed by Bradley.
David Warner as Edward "Ed" Dillinger, a senior executive of ENCOM. He was formerly a co-worker of Flynn who stole his work and passed it off as his own, earning him a series of promotions. David Warner also plays Sark, a command program and the MCP's second-in-command.
David Warner likewise provides the uncredited voice of the Master Control Program, a rogue computer program vastly improved by Dillinger.
Cindy Morgan as Dr. Laura Baines Ph.D., Bradley's co-worker and girlfriend as well as assistant to Dr. Walter Gibbs Ph.D. Cindy Morgan also plays Yori, a program created by Dr. Baines and a confidante of Tron.
Barnard Hughes as Dr. Walter Gibbs, a founder and employee of ENCOM. Barnard Hughes also plays Dumont, a "guardian" program protecting input/output junctions.
Barnard Hughes also plays the original state of the Master Control Program.
Dan Shor as Ram, an actuarial program for an unnamed insurance company and close friend of Tron and Flynn in the mainframe. Dan Shor also plays an unnamed ENCOM employee who asks Bradley if he can have some of his popcorn.
Peter Jurasik as Crom, an accounting program who fights against Flynn on the Game Grid.
Tony Stephano as Peter, Dillinger's assistant. Tony Stephano also plays Sark's Lieutenant.

Production[edit]
Origins[edit]
The inspiration for Tron occurred in 1976 when Steven Lisberger, then an animator of drawings with his own studio, looked at a sample reel from a computer firm called MAGI and saw Pong for the first time.[2] He was immediately fascinated by video games and wanted to do a film incorporating them. According to Lisberger, "I realized that there were these techniques that would be very suitable for bringing video games and computer visuals to the screen. And that was the moment that the whole concept flashed across my mind".[3]
Lisberger had already created an early version of the character 'Tron' for a 30 second long animation which was used to promote both Lisberger Studios and a series of various rock radio stations. This backlit cell animation depicted Tron as a character who glowed yellow; the same shade that Lisberger had originally intended for all the heroic characters developed for the feature-length Tron. This was later changed to blue for the finished film (see Pre-production below). The prototype Tron was bearded, and resembled the Cylon Centurions from the original 1978 TV series, Battlestar Galactica. Also, Tron was armed with two "exploding discs", as Lisberger described them on the 2-Disc DVD edition of Tron. Although its possible they may have represented vinyl records, it is interesting to note that in the 2010 film Tron: Legacy, Tron once again appeared using two discs (see Rinzler).
Lisberger elaborates: "Everybody was doing backlit animation in the 70s, you know. It was that disco look. And we thought, what if we had this character that was a neon line, and that was our Tron warrior – Tron for electronic. And what happened was, I saw Pong, and I said, well, that's the arena for him. And at the same time I was interested in the early phases of computer generated animation, which I got into at MIT in Boston, and when I got into that I met a bunch of programmers who were into all that. And they really inspired me, by how much they believed in this new realm."[4]
He was frustrated by the clique-like nature of computers and video games and wanted to create a film that would open this world up to everyone. Lisberger and his business partner Donald Kushner moved to the West Coast in 1977 and set up an animation studio to develop Tron.[3] They borrowed against the anticipated profits of their 90-minute animated television special Animalympics to develop storyboards for Tron with the notion of making an animated film.[2]
The film was conceived as an animated film bracketed with live-action sequences.[3] The rest would involve a combination of computer-generated visuals and back-lit animation. Lisberger planned to finance the movie independently by approaching several computer companies but had little success. However, one company, Information International Inc., was receptive.[3] He met with Richard Taylor, a representative, and they began talking about using live-action photography with back-lit animation in such a way that it could be integrated with computer graphics. At this point, Lisberger already had a script written and the film entirely storyboarded with some computer animation tests completed.[3] He had spent approximately $300,000 developing Tron and had also secured $4–5 million in private backing before reaching a standstill. Lisberger and Kushner took their storyboards and samples of computer-generated films to Warner Bros., MGM, and Columbia Pictures – all of which turned them down.[2]
In 1980, they decided to take the idea to the Walt Disney Studios, which was interested in producing more daring productions at the time.[3] However, Disney executives were uncertain about giving $10–12 million to a first-time producer and director using techniques which, in most cases, had never been attempted. The studio agreed to finance a test reel which involved a flying disc champion throwing a rough prototype of the discs used in the film.[3] It was a chance to mix live-action footage with back-lit animation and computer-generated visuals. It impressed the executives at Disney and they agreed to back the film. The script was subsequently re-written and re-storyboarded with the studio's input.[3] At the time, Disney rarely hired outsiders to make films for them and Kushner found that he and his group were given a less than warm welcome because they "tackled the nerve center – the animation department. They saw us as the germ from outside. We tried to enlist several Disney animators but none came. Disney is a closed group."[5]
Pre-production[edit]
Because of the many special effects, Disney decided in 1981 to film Tron completely in 65-mm Super Panavision (except for the computer-generated layers, which were shot in VistaVision and both anamorphic 35mm and Super 35 which were used for some scenes in the "real" world and subsequently "blown up" to 65mm[6]). Three designers were brought in to create the look of the computer world.[3] French comic book artist Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) was the main set and costume designer for the movie. Most of the vehicle designs (including Sark's aircraft carrier, the light cycles, the tank, and the solar sailer) were created by industrial designer Syd Mead, of Blade Runner fame. Peter Lloyd, a high-tech commercial artist, designed the environments.[3] Nevertheless, these jobs often overlapped, leaving Giraud working on the solar sailer and Mead designing terrain, sets and the film's logo. The original 'Program' character design was inspired by Lisberger Studios' logo of a glowing bodybuilder hurling two discs.[3]
To create the computer animation sequences of Tron, Disney turned to the four leading computer graphics firms of the day: Information International, Inc. of Culver City, California, who owned the Super Foonly F-1 (the fastest PDP-10 ever made and the only one of its kind); MAGI of Elmsford, New York; Robert Abel and Associates of California; and Digital Effects of New York City.[3] Bill Kovacs worked on this movie while working for Robert Abel before going on to found Wavefront Technologies. The work was not a collaboration, resulting in very different styles used by the firms.
Tron was one of the first movies to make extensive use of any form of computer animation, and is celebrated as a milestone in the industry though only fifteen to twenty minutes of such animation were used,[7] mostly scenes that show digital "terrain" or patterns or include vehicles such as light-cycles, tanks and ships. Because the technology to combine computer animation and live action did not exist at the time, these sequences were interspersed with the filmed characters. The computer used had only 2MB of memory, with a disc that had no more than 330MB of storage. This put a limit on detail of background; and at a certain distance, they had a procedure of mixing in black to fade things out, a process called "depth cueing". The movie's Computer Effects Supervisor Richard Taylor told them "When in doubt, black it out!", which became their motto.[8]
Most of the scenes, backgrounds, and visual effects in the film were created using more traditional techniques and a unique process known as "backlit animation".[3] In this process, live-action scenes inside the computer world were filmed in black-and-white on an entirely black set, printed on large format Kodalith high-contrast film, then colored with photographic and rotoscopic techniques to give them a "technological" appearance.[5] With multiple layers of high-contrast, large format positives and negatives, this process required truckloads of sheet film and a workload even greater than that of a conventional cel-animated feature. The Kodalith was specially produced as large sheets by Kodak for the film and came in numbered boxes so that each batch of the film could be used in order of manufacture for a consistent image. However, this was not understood by the filmmakers, and as a result glowing outlines and circuit traces occasionally flicker as the film speed varied between batches. After the reason was discovered, this was no longer a problem as the batches were used in order and "zinger" sounds were used during the flickering parts to represent the computer world malfunctioning as Lisberger described it.[9] Lisberger later had these flickers and sounds digitally corrected for the 2011 restored Blu-ray release as they were not included in his original vision of the film. Due to its difficulty and cost, this process of back-lit animation was not repeated for another feature film.
Sound design and creation for the film was assigned to Frank Serafine, who was responsible for the sound design on Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Tron was a 1983 Academy Awards nominee for Best Sound.
At one point in the film, a small entity called "Bit" advises Flynn with only the words "yes" and "no" created by a Votrax speech synthesizer.
BYTE wrote "Although this film is very much the personal expression of Steven Lisberger's vision, nevertheless [it] has certainly been a group effort".[10] More than 569 people were involved in the post-production work, including 200 inkers and hand-painters, 85 of them from Taiwan's Cuckoo's Nest Studio (unusually, for an English-language production, in the end credits the personnel were listed with their frames written in Chinese characters).[5]
This film features parts of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the multi-story ENCOM laser bay was the target area for the SHIVA solid-state multi-beamed laser. Also, the stairway that Alan, Lora, and Flynn use to reach Alan's office is the stairway in Building 451 near the entrance to the main machine room. The cubicle scenes were shot in another room of the lab. At the time, Tron was the only movie to have scenes filmed inside this lab.[11]
The original script called for "good" programs to be colored yellow and "evil" programs (those loyal to Sark and the MCP) to be colored blue. Partway into production, this coloring scheme was changed to blue for good and red for evil, but some scenes were produced using the original coloring scheme: Clu, who drives a tank, has yellow circuit lines, and all of Sark's tank commanders are blue (but appear green in some presentations). Also, the light-cycle sequence shows the heroes driving yellow (Flynn), orange (Tron), and red (Ram) cycles, while Sark's troops drive blue cycles; similarly, Clu's tank is red, while tanks driven by crews loyal to Sark are blue.
Budgeting the production was difficult by reason of breaking new ground in response to additional challenges, including an impending Directors Guild of America strike and a fixed release date.[3] Disney predicted at least $400 million in domestic sales of merchandise, including an arcade game by Bally Midway and three Mattel Intellivision home video games.[5]
The producers also added Easter eggs: during the scene where Tron and Ram escape from the Light Cycle arena into the system, Pac-Man can be seen behind Sark (with the corresponding sounds from the Pac-Man arcade game being heard in the background), while a "Hidden Mickey" outline (located at time 01:12:29 on the re-release Blu-ray) can be seen below the solar sailer during the protagonists' journey.
Music[edit]
Main article: Tron (soundtrack)
The soundtrack for Tron was written by pioneer electronic musician Wendy Carlos, who is best known for her album Switched-On Bach and for the soundtracks to many films, including A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. The music, which was the first collaboration between Carlos and her partner Annemarie Franklin,[12] featured a mix of an analog Moog synthesizer and Crumar's GDS digital synthesizer (complex additive and phase modulation synthesis), along with non-electronic pieces performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (hired at the insistence of Disney, which was concerned that Carlos might not be able to complete her score on time). Two additional musical tracks ("1990's Theme" and "Only Solutions") were provided by the American band Journey after British band Supertramp pulled out of the project. An album featuring dialogue, music and sound effects from the film was also released on LP by Disneyland Records in 1982.
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
Tron was released on July 9, 1982, in 1,091 theaters grossing USD $4 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $33 million in North America,[13] which Disney saw as a disappointment, and led to the studio writing off a good chunk of its $17 million budget.[14]
Critical response[edit]
The film was well received by critics. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and described the film as "a dazzling movie from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves romantic and glamorous. Here's a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun".[15] However, near the end of his review, he noted (in a positive tone), "This is an almost wholly technological movie. Although it's populated by actors who are engaging (Bridges, Cindy Morgan) or sinister (Warner), it is not really a movie about human nature. Like [the last two Star Wars films], but much more so, this movie is a machine to dazzle and delight us".[15] Ebert was so convinced that this film had not been given its due credit by both critics and audiences that he decided to close his first annual Overlooked Film Festival with a showing of Tron.[16] Tron was also featured in Siskel and Ebert's video pick of the week in 1993.[17]
InfoWorld's Deborah Wise was impressed, writing that "it is hard to believe the characters acted out the scenes on a darkened soundstage... We see characters throwing illuminated Frisbees, driving 'lightcycles' on a video-game grid, playing a dangerous version of jai alai and zapping numerous fluorescent tanks in arcade-game-type mazes. It's exciting, it's fun, and it's just what video-game fans and anyone with a spirit of adventure will love—despite plot weaknesses."[18]
On the other hand, Variety disliked the film and said in its review, "Tron is loaded with visual delights but falls way short of the mark in story and viewer involvement. Screenwriter-director Steven Lisberger has adequately marshalled a huge force of technicians to deliver the dazzle, but even kids (and specifically computer game geeks) will have a difficult time getting hooked on the situations".[19] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin criticized the film's visual effects: "They're loud, bright and empty, and they're all this movie has to offer".[20] The Washington Post's Gary Arnold wrote, "Fascinating as they are as discrete sequences, the computer-animated episodes don't build dramatically. They remain a miscellaneous form of abstract spectacle".[21] In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, "It's got momentum and it's got marvels, but it's without heart; it's a visionary technological achievement without vision".[22]
As of July 2013, the movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes rated the film at 71% on its Tomatometer, based on the reviews of 48 critics. A consensus statement for the movie said, "Though perhaps not as strong dramatically as it is technologically, TRON is an original and visually stunning piece of science fiction that represents a landmark work in the history of computer animation."[23]
In the year it was released, the Motion Picture Academy refused to nominate Tron for a special-effects award because, according to director Steven Lisberger, "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers".[24] The film did, however, earn Oscar nominations in the categories of Best Costume Design and Best Sound (Michael Minkler, Bob Minkler, Lee Minkler, and James LaRue).[25]
Cultural effect[edit]
In 1997, Ken Perlin of the Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his invention of Perlin noise for Tron.[26] In 2008, Tron was nominated for AFI's Top 10 Science Fiction Films list.[27]
The film, considered groundbreaking, has inspired several individuals in numerous ways. John Lasseter, head of Pixar and Disney's animation group, described how the film helped him see the potential of computer-generated imagery in the production of animated films stating "without Tron there would be no Toy Story."[28][29]
The music video of the song "Abiura di me" of the Italian rapper Caparezza is based on Tron.[citation needed] The two members of the French house music group Daft Punk, who scored the sequel, have held a joint, lifelong fascination with the film.[30]
Tron developed into a cult film and was ranked as 13th in a 2010 list of the top 20 cult films published by The Boston Globe.[31]
Books[edit]
A novelization of Tron was released in 1982, written by American science fiction novelist Brian Daley. It included eight pages of color photographs from the movie.[32] Also that year, Disney Senior Staff Publicist Michael Bonifer authored a book entitled The Art of Tron which covered aspects of the pre-production and post-production aspects of Tron.[33][34] A nonfiction book about the making of the original film, The Making of Tron: How Tron Changed Visual Effects and Disney Forever, was written by William Kallay and published in 2011.
Home media[edit]
Tron was originally released on VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, and CED Videodisc in 1983. As with most video releases from the 1980s, the film was cropped to the 4:3 pan & scan format. The film saw multiple re-releases throughout the 1990s, most notably an "Archive Collection" LaserDisc box set,[35] which featured the first release of the film in its original widescreen 2.20:1 format.
Tron saw its first DVD release on May 19, 1998. This bare-bones release utilized the same non-anamorphic video transfer used in the Archive Collection LaserDisc set, and did not include any of the LD's special features. On January 15, 2002, the film received a 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition release in the form of a special 2-Disc DVD set. This set featured a new THX mastered anamorphic video transfer, and included all of the special features from the LD Archive Collection, plus an all-new 90 minute "Making of Tron" documentary.
To tie in with the home video release Tron: Legacy, the movie was finally re-released by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment on Special Edition DVD and for the first time on Blu-ray Disc on April 5, 2011, with the subtitle "The Original Classic" to distinguish it from its sequel. Tron was also featured in a 5-Disc Blu-ray Combo with the 3D copy of Tron: Legacy. The film was re-released on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK on June 27, 2011.
Sequel[edit]
Tron: Legacy[edit]
Main article: Tron: Legacy
On January 12, 2005, Disney announced it had hired screenwriters Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal to write a sequel to Tron.[36] In 2008, director Joseph Kosinski negotiated to develop and direct "TRON", described as "the next chapter" of the 1982 film and based on a preliminary teaser trailer shown at that year's San Diego Comic-Con, with Lisberger co-producing.[37] Filming began in Vancouver, British Columbia in April 2009.[38] During the 2009 Comic-Con, the title of the sequel was revealed to be changed to Tron: Legacy.[39][40] The second trailer (also with the ["Tron: Legacy"] logo) was released in 3D with Alice In Wonderland. A third trailer premiered at Comic-Con 2010 on July 22. At Disney's D23 Expo September 10–13, 2009 they also debuted teaser trailers for Tron: Legacy as well as having light cycle and other props from the movie there. The film was released on December 17, 2010, with Daft Punk composing the score.[41]
Tron 3[edit]
A third is in the works with Garrett Hedlund and Boxleitner reprising their roles.
See also[edit]

Portal icon Disney portal
Portal icon Film portal
Tron (franchise)
TRON command in BASIC (though Lisberger has stated that this is a coincidence and has nothing to do with the film title)[citation needed]
Simulated reality
Demoscene
Automan, a 1983 TV series inspired by Tron.
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Schneider, Michael (4 November 2010). "Disney XD orders 'Tron: Legacy' toon". Variety. Archived from the original on 2012-06-30. Retrieved 9 November 2010.
2.^ Jump up to: a b c Culhane, John (July 4, 1982). "Special Effects are Revolutionizing Film". New York Times. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2009-01-28.
3.^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Patterson, Richard (August 1982). "The Making of Tron". American Cinematographer.
4.Jump up ^ "Interview: Justin Springer and Steven Lisberger, co-producers of Tron: Legacy". Archived from the original on 2012-09-15.
5.^ Jump up to: a b c d Ansen, David (July 5, 1982). "When You Wish Upon a Tron". Newsweek.
6.Jump up ^ "In70mm.com". Archived from the original on 2012-09-15.
7.Jump up ^ Interview with Harrison Ellenshaw, supplemental material on Tron DVD
8.Jump up ^ "The influence of Disney's Tron in filmmaking Tron and CG moviemaking". Archived from the original on 2012-07-07.
9.Jump up ^ The Making of Tron (DVD Feature)
10.Jump up ^ Sorensen, Peter (November 1982). "Tronic Imagery". BYTE. p. 48. Retrieved 19 October 2013.
11.Jump up ^ "The People of NIF: Rod Saunders: Each Day is an Adventure". Archived from the original on 2012-08-05.
12.Jump up ^ Moog, Robert (November 1982). "The Soundtrack of TRON". Keyboard Magazine: 53–57. Retrieved 2009-07-16.
13.Jump up ^ "Tron". Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on 2012-07-22. Retrieved 2008-07-09.
14.Jump up ^ Stewart, James B. (2005). DisneyWar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom (p. 45). New York: Simon & Schuster
15.^ Jump up to: a b Ebert, Roger (January 1, 1982). "Tron". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2008-07-09.
16.Jump up ^ "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival #1 Schedule". Archived from the original on 2012-07-10. Retrieved December 18, 2009.
17.Jump up ^ "Super Mario Bros. / What’s Love Got To Do With It / 1993". siskelandebert.org. Retrieved 2012-11-16.
18.Jump up ^ Deborah Wise, "Unabashed fan and critics' critic talk about Disney's Tron," InfoWorld Vol. 4, No. 30 (Aug 2, 1982): 70-71.
19.Jump up ^ "Tron". Variety. January 1, 1982. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2008-07-09.
20.Jump up ^ Maslin, Janet (July 9, 1982). "Tron". New York Times. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2008-07-09.
21.Jump up ^ Arnold, Gary (July 10, 1982). "Duel of Two Disneys". Washington Post. pp. C1.
22.Jump up ^ Scott, Jay (July 10, 1982). "Tron Beautiful but Heartless". Globe and Mail.
23.Jump up ^ Tron at Rotten Tomatoes
24.Jump up ^ Helfand, Glen (January 9, 2002). "Tron 20th Anniversary". San Francisco Gate.
25.Jump up ^ "The 55th Academy Awards (1983) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Archived from the original on 2012-09-05. Retrieved 2011-10-09.
26.Jump up ^ Kerman, Phillip. Macromedia Flash 8 @work: Projects and Techniques to Get the Job Done. Sams Publishing. 2006.
27.Jump up ^ "AFI's 10 Top 10 Ballot". Retrieved 5 October 2014.
28.Jump up ^ Thompson, Anne (December 9, 2010). "What Will Tron: Legacy’s 3D VFX Look Like in 30 Years?". Tron Legacy VFX – Special Effects in Tron Legacy. Popular Mechanics. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 24 December 2010.
29.Jump up ^ Lyons, Mike (November 1998). "Toon Story: John Lasseter's Animated Life". Animation World Magazine. Archived from the original on 2012-06-29. Retrieved 13 October 2010.
30.Jump up ^ IGN Staff (12 October 2010). "Listen to Daft Punk in TRON: Legacy". IGN. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 13 October 2010. "Having grown up with admiration of Disney's original 1982 film Tron..."
31.Jump up ^ Boston.com Staff (August 17, 2006). "Top 20 cult films, according to our readers". boston.com (The Boston Globe). Archived from the original on 2012-07-30. Retrieved December 27, 2010.
32.Jump up ^ Daley, Brian (1 October 1982). Tron. New English Library Ltd. ISBN 0-450-05550-7.
33.Jump up ^ Bonifer, Michael (November 1982). The Art of Tron. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-45575-3.
34.Jump up ^ "Tron Sector Biography of Mike Bonifer". Archived from the original on 2008-06-09.
35.Jump up ^ "Tron — Archived Edition LaserDisc Box Set". LaserDisc Database. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2012-02-13.
36.Jump up ^ Fleming, Michael (January 12, 2005). "Mouse uploads Tron redo". Variety. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2008-07-09.
37.Jump up ^ Kit, Borys (September 11, 2007). "New Tron races on". Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on 2008-06-15. Retrieved 2008-07-09.
38.Jump up ^ "Feature films currently filming in BC". Archived from the original on 2012-05-26.
39.Jump up ^ "Comic Con: Disney Panel, Tron 2 Revealed Live From Hall H!". Cinemablend.com. Archived from the original on 2012-09-04. Retrieved 2009-07-25.
40.Jump up ^ Roush, George (23 July 2009). "Comic-Con 2009: Disney Panel TRON Legacy & Alice In Wonderland!". Latino Review. Retrieved 2009-07-23.
41.Jump up ^ Anderson, Kyle. "'Tron: Legacy' Soundtrack: Get Ready For The Game With Daft Punk". MTV. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 30 December 2010.
External links[edit]
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tron (film).
 Wikiquote has quotations related to: Tron
Official website
Tron at the Internet Movie Database
Tron at the TCM Movie Database
Tron at AllMovie
Tron at Rotten Tomatoes
Tron at Box Office Mojo
Article about the CGI in Tron
Tron 30th Anniversary Retrospective Retrieved January 2013


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Something Wicked This Way Comes (film)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search



 This article's lead section may not adequately summarize key points of its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. (January 2015)

Something Wicked This Way Comes
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983 movie poster).jpg
Theatrical release poster by David Grove

Directed by
Jack Clayton
Produced by
Peter Douglas
Written by
Ray Bradbury
John Mortimer
Based on
Something Wicked This Way Comes
 by Ray Bradbury
Starring
Jason Robards
Jonathan Pryce
Diane Ladd
Pam Grier
Narrated by
Arthur Hill
Music by
James Horner
Cinematography
Stephen H. Burum
Edited by
Barry Mark Gordon
 Art J. Nelson

Production
 company

Walt Disney Productions
Bryna Productions

Distributed by
Buena Vista Distribution

Release dates
 April 29, 1983

Running time
 95 min.
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$19 million (estimated)
Box office
$8.4 million
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a 1983 American horror fantasy film directed by Jack Clayton and produced by Walt Disney Productions from a screenplay written by Ray Bradbury based on his novel of the same name. The film stars Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, Diane Ladd, and Pam Grier. It was shot in Vermont and at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California.


Contents  [hide]
1 Synopsis
2 Cast
3 Production
4 Reception 4.1 Box office
4.2 Critical response
4.3 Accolades
5 Remake
6 References
7 External links

Synopsis[edit]


 This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (January 2015)
[icon] This section requires expansion. (January 2015)
In Greentown, Illinois, a small town enjoying the innocence of an upcoming autumn as the days grow shorter, two young boys—reserved Will Halloway and somewhat rebellious Jim Nightshade—leave from an after-school detention for "whispering in class" and hurry off for home. When the boys hear about a strange traveling carnival, Mr. Dark's Pandemonium Carnival, from a lightning-rod salesman, they decide to see what it is all about, but Will is fearful, as most carnivals end their tours after Labor Day. When the ominous Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, rides into town on a dark midnight, setting up his massive carnival in a matter of seconds, the boys are both thrilled and terrified. It seems to be just another carnival at first, but it is not long before the forces of darkness begin to manifest from the haunting melodies of the carousel—which can change your age depending on which way you ride it—and from the glaring Mirror Maze. With his collection of freaks and oddities, Dark intends to take control of the town and seize more innocent souls to damn. It will take all the wit and hope of the two boys to save their families and friends, with aid from an unlikely ally, Will's father, the town librarian, who understands more than anyone else that "something wicked this way comes."
Cast[edit]
Jason Robards as Charles Halloway
Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark
Vidal Peterson as Will Halloway
Shawn Carson as Jim Nightshade
Ellen Geer as Mrs. Halloway
Diane Ladd as Mrs. Nightshade
Royal Dano as Tom Fury
Pam Grier as the Dust Witch
Mary Grace Canfield as Miss Foley
Bruce M. Fischer as Mr. Cooger
Arthur Hill as The Narrator
Production[edit]
In 1977, Bradbury sold the film rights to Something Wicked This Way Comes to Paramount. He and director Jack Clayton, whom Bradbury had previously worked with on Moby Dick, produced a completed script. However, production never began and the film was eventually put into turnaround.
At this time Walt Disney Pictures was concentrating on films with more mature themes in an attempt to break free from their stereotype as an animation and family film studio. After the success of family-oriented fantasy pictures by competing studios, such as Time Bandits and The Dark Crystal, Disney decided to purchase the adaptation's rights and hired Bradbury to produce a new script from scratch.[1]
The studio sought Bradbury's input on selecting a cast and director, and he suggested Clayton feeling they had worked well together at Paramount. In a 1981 issue of Cinefantastique, Bradbury stated that his top choices to play Mr. Dark were Peter O'Toole and Christopher Lee. However, Disney decided to go with a relatively unknown actor instead in order to keep the budget down, and Jonathan Pryce was eventually cast. As the film progressed, two differing visions emerged for the film, with Bradbury wishing to stay as faithful to the novel as possible, and Clayton wanting to make a more accessible and family friendly film. The two became estranged when Clayton hired writer John Mortimer to do an uncredited revision of Bradbury's screenplay at the studio's insistence.[2]
At a Q&A session following a 2012 screening of the film, actor Shawn Carson explained that he had originally read some 10 times for the part of Will, but after a request from Bradbury, he read for and was cast in the part of Jim Nightshade instead. Although he had blonde hair at the time, and co-star Vidal Petersen had dark hair, Carson's hair was dyed jet black and Petersen's was dyed blonde to fit the new casting.[3]
For the original score, Clayton picked Georges Delerue who had scored his films The Pumpkin Eater and Our Mother's House, but his score (considered "too dark" by Disney) was later removed and replaced.
Barry Gordon (who had started as assistant to editor Argyle Nelson Jr.) recalled in 2012 that after Clayton submitted his original cut, Disney expressed concerns about the film's length, pacing and commercial appeal, so the studio took it out of Clayton's hands and undertook the expensive six-month reshoot and re-edit that followed. As a result of the studio politics, Clayton was sidelined, and Nelson was let go for budgetary reasons. Gordon said that although he was originally prepared to follow Nelson and leave the production, Nelson encouraged him to stay, and Gordon edited the final cut (resulting in the film's dual editor credits).
The original themes of Bradbury's novel, the suggestion of menace, the autumn atmosphere of an American Midwest township and the human relationships between characters that attracted Clayton escaped preview audiences completely with Clayton heavily criticized. New special effects sequences were shot and a new score by composer James Horner replaced Delerue's original music.[4] Initial test screenings did not fare well with audiences, and Disney re-commissioned Bradbury to write an opening narration sequence and new ending. Disney spent an additional US$5 million on refilming, re-editing, and rescoring the picture; they also jettisoned Clayton's original opening scene, an expensive and groundbreaking computer-generated sequence (the first of its kind in a Hollywood feature) which depicted the Carnival train arriving in the town and magically unfolding itself into place. In the final cut, only one brief CGI shot (when the boys first approach the carnival after following the train) was retained.
Bradbury referred to the film's final cut as "not a great film, no, but a decently nice one."[5]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
The film made $8.4 million at the domestic box office against its $19 million budget, grossing a little less than half of its costs.
Critical response[edit]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film three-and-a-half stars and said

It's one of the few literary adaptations I've seen in which the film not only captures the mood and tone of the novel, but also the novel's style. Bradbury's prose is a strange hybrid of craftsmanship and lyricism. He builds his stories and novels in a straightforward way, with strong plotting, but his sentences owe more to Thomas Wolfe than to the pulp tradition, and the lyricism isn't missed in this movie. In its descriptions of autumn days, in its heartfelt conversations between a father and a son, in the unabashed romanticism of its evil carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with elegance.[6]
Janet Maslin said the film "begins on such an overworked Norman Rockwell note that there seems little chance that anything exciting or unexpected will happen. So it's a happy surprise when the film... turns into a lively, entertaining tale combining boyishness and grown-up horror in equal measure;" according to Maslin, "The gee-whiz quality to this adventure is far more excessive in Mr. Bradbury's novel than it is here, as directed by Jack Clayton. Mr. Clayton, who directed a widely admired version of The Turn of the Screw some years ago, gives the film a tension that transcends even its purplest prose."[7]
The film currently holds a 60% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 25 reviews.
Accolades[edit]
It won the 1984 Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and Saturn Award for Best Writing; it was nominated for five others including best music for James Horner and best supporting actor for Jonathan Pryce. The film was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and Grand Jury Prize at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival.
Remake[edit]
According to Deadline, Disney are making a remake of Something Wicked This Way Comes with Seth Grahame-Smith making his directorial debut and produced with David Katzenberg from their producing banner KatzSmith Productions, also, Grahame-Smith wants to focus mostly on Ray Bradbury's source material from the book.[8]
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086336/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
2.Jump up ^ Weller, Sam (2005). The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. New York: William Morrow. pp. 306–309. ISBN 0-06-054581-X.
3.Jump up ^ [1]
4.Jump up ^ Lerouge, Stephanie Georges Delerue Unused Scores 2011 CD liner notes
5.Jump up ^ Bradbury, Ray (2005). Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars. New York: William Morrow. p. 10. ISBN 0-06-058568-4.
6.Jump up ^ Ebert, Roger (April 29, 1983). "Something Wicked This Way Comes". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
7.Jump up ^ Maslin, Janet (April 29, 1983). "Disney's Bradbury". The New York Times. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
8.Jump up ^ Fleming, Mike. "Disney, Seth Grahame- Smith Making New Film Of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’". Deadline. Retrieved 2014-03-12.
External links[edit]
 Wikiquote has quotations related to: Something Wicked This Way Comes (film)
Official website
Something Wicked This Way Comes at the Internet Movie Database
Something Wicked This Way Comes at the TCM Movie Database
Something Wicked This Way Comes at AllMovie
Something Wicked This Way Comes at Rotten Tomatoes
Something Wicked This Way Comes at Box Office Mojo


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Wikiquote page




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v ·
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Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film





















































  


Categories: English-language films
1983 films
1983 horror films
1980s fantasy films
1980s horror films
1980s thriller films
American fantasy films
American horror films
American thriller films
Circus films
Adaptations of works by Ray Bradbury
Films based on fantasy novels
Films directed by Jack Clayton
Films set in the 1920s
Films shot in Los Angeles, California
Films shot in Vermont
Film scores by James Horner
Dark fantasy films
Supernatural horror films
Supernatural thriller films
Walt Disney Pictures films
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Films based on American novels













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Something Wicked This Way Comes (film)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search



 This article's lead section may not adequately summarize key points of its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. (January 2015)

Something Wicked This Way Comes
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983 movie poster).jpg
Theatrical release poster by David Grove

Directed by
Jack Clayton
Produced by
Peter Douglas
Written by
Ray Bradbury
John Mortimer
Based on
Something Wicked This Way Comes
 by Ray Bradbury
Starring
Jason Robards
Jonathan Pryce
Diane Ladd
Pam Grier
Narrated by
Arthur Hill
Music by
James Horner
Cinematography
Stephen H. Burum
Edited by
Barry Mark Gordon
 Art J. Nelson

Production
 company

Walt Disney Productions
Bryna Productions

Distributed by
Buena Vista Distribution

Release dates
 April 29, 1983

Running time
 95 min.
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$19 million (estimated)
Box office
$8.4 million
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a 1983 American horror fantasy film directed by Jack Clayton and produced by Walt Disney Productions from a screenplay written by Ray Bradbury based on his novel of the same name. The film stars Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, Diane Ladd, and Pam Grier. It was shot in Vermont and at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California.


Contents  [hide]
1 Synopsis
2 Cast
3 Production
4 Reception 4.1 Box office
4.2 Critical response
4.3 Accolades
5 Remake
6 References
7 External links

Synopsis[edit]


 This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (January 2015)
[icon] This section requires expansion. (January 2015)
In Greentown, Illinois, a small town enjoying the innocence of an upcoming autumn as the days grow shorter, two young boys—reserved Will Halloway and somewhat rebellious Jim Nightshade—leave from an after-school detention for "whispering in class" and hurry off for home. When the boys hear about a strange traveling carnival, Mr. Dark's Pandemonium Carnival, from a lightning-rod salesman, they decide to see what it is all about, but Will is fearful, as most carnivals end their tours after Labor Day. When the ominous Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, rides into town on a dark midnight, setting up his massive carnival in a matter of seconds, the boys are both thrilled and terrified. It seems to be just another carnival at first, but it is not long before the forces of darkness begin to manifest from the haunting melodies of the carousel—which can change your age depending on which way you ride it—and from the glaring Mirror Maze. With his collection of freaks and oddities, Dark intends to take control of the town and seize more innocent souls to damn. It will take all the wit and hope of the two boys to save their families and friends, with aid from an unlikely ally, Will's father, the town librarian, who understands more than anyone else that "something wicked this way comes."
Cast[edit]
Jason Robards as Charles Halloway
Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark
Vidal Peterson as Will Halloway
Shawn Carson as Jim Nightshade
Ellen Geer as Mrs. Halloway
Diane Ladd as Mrs. Nightshade
Royal Dano as Tom Fury
Pam Grier as the Dust Witch
Mary Grace Canfield as Miss Foley
Bruce M. Fischer as Mr. Cooger
Arthur Hill as The Narrator
Production[edit]
In 1977, Bradbury sold the film rights to Something Wicked This Way Comes to Paramount. He and director Jack Clayton, whom Bradbury had previously worked with on Moby Dick, produced a completed script. However, production never began and the film was eventually put into turnaround.
At this time Walt Disney Pictures was concentrating on films with more mature themes in an attempt to break free from their stereotype as an animation and family film studio. After the success of family-oriented fantasy pictures by competing studios, such as Time Bandits and The Dark Crystal, Disney decided to purchase the adaptation's rights and hired Bradbury to produce a new script from scratch.[1]
The studio sought Bradbury's input on selecting a cast and director, and he suggested Clayton feeling they had worked well together at Paramount. In a 1981 issue of Cinefantastique, Bradbury stated that his top choices to play Mr. Dark were Peter O'Toole and Christopher Lee. However, Disney decided to go with a relatively unknown actor instead in order to keep the budget down, and Jonathan Pryce was eventually cast. As the film progressed, two differing visions emerged for the film, with Bradbury wishing to stay as faithful to the novel as possible, and Clayton wanting to make a more accessible and family friendly film. The two became estranged when Clayton hired writer John Mortimer to do an uncredited revision of Bradbury's screenplay at the studio's insistence.[2]
At a Q&A session following a 2012 screening of the film, actor Shawn Carson explained that he had originally read some 10 times for the part of Will, but after a request from Bradbury, he read for and was cast in the part of Jim Nightshade instead. Although he had blonde hair at the time, and co-star Vidal Petersen had dark hair, Carson's hair was dyed jet black and Petersen's was dyed blonde to fit the new casting.[3]
For the original score, Clayton picked Georges Delerue who had scored his films The Pumpkin Eater and Our Mother's House, but his score (considered "too dark" by Disney) was later removed and replaced.
Barry Gordon (who had started as assistant to editor Argyle Nelson Jr.) recalled in 2012 that after Clayton submitted his original cut, Disney expressed concerns about the film's length, pacing and commercial appeal, so the studio took it out of Clayton's hands and undertook the expensive six-month reshoot and re-edit that followed. As a result of the studio politics, Clayton was sidelined, and Nelson was let go for budgetary reasons. Gordon said that although he was originally prepared to follow Nelson and leave the production, Nelson encouraged him to stay, and Gordon edited the final cut (resulting in the film's dual editor credits).
The original themes of Bradbury's novel, the suggestion of menace, the autumn atmosphere of an American Midwest township and the human relationships between characters that attracted Clayton escaped preview audiences completely with Clayton heavily criticized. New special effects sequences were shot and a new score by composer James Horner replaced Delerue's original music.[4] Initial test screenings did not fare well with audiences, and Disney re-commissioned Bradbury to write an opening narration sequence and new ending. Disney spent an additional US$5 million on refilming, re-editing, and rescoring the picture; they also jettisoned Clayton's original opening scene, an expensive and groundbreaking computer-generated sequence (the first of its kind in a Hollywood feature) which depicted the Carnival train arriving in the town and magically unfolding itself into place. In the final cut, only one brief CGI shot (when the boys first approach the carnival after following the train) was retained.
Bradbury referred to the film's final cut as "not a great film, no, but a decently nice one."[5]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
The film made $8.4 million at the domestic box office against its $19 million budget, grossing a little less than half of its costs.
Critical response[edit]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film three-and-a-half stars and said

It's one of the few literary adaptations I've seen in which the film not only captures the mood and tone of the novel, but also the novel's style. Bradbury's prose is a strange hybrid of craftsmanship and lyricism. He builds his stories and novels in a straightforward way, with strong plotting, but his sentences owe more to Thomas Wolfe than to the pulp tradition, and the lyricism isn't missed in this movie. In its descriptions of autumn days, in its heartfelt conversations between a father and a son, in the unabashed romanticism of its evil carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with elegance.[6]
Janet Maslin said the film "begins on such an overworked Norman Rockwell note that there seems little chance that anything exciting or unexpected will happen. So it's a happy surprise when the film... turns into a lively, entertaining tale combining boyishness and grown-up horror in equal measure;" according to Maslin, "The gee-whiz quality to this adventure is far more excessive in Mr. Bradbury's novel than it is here, as directed by Jack Clayton. Mr. Clayton, who directed a widely admired version of The Turn of the Screw some years ago, gives the film a tension that transcends even its purplest prose."[7]
The film currently holds a 60% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 25 reviews.
Accolades[edit]
It won the 1984 Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and Saturn Award for Best Writing; it was nominated for five others including best music for James Horner and best supporting actor for Jonathan Pryce. The film was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and Grand Jury Prize at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival.
Remake[edit]
According to Deadline, Disney are making a remake of Something Wicked This Way Comes with Seth Grahame-Smith making his directorial debut and produced with David Katzenberg from their producing banner KatzSmith Productions, also, Grahame-Smith wants to focus mostly on Ray Bradbury's source material from the book.[8]
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086336/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
2.Jump up ^ Weller, Sam (2005). The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. New York: William Morrow. pp. 306–309. ISBN 0-06-054581-X.
3.Jump up ^ [1]
4.Jump up ^ Lerouge, Stephanie Georges Delerue Unused Scores 2011 CD liner notes
5.Jump up ^ Bradbury, Ray (2005). Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars. New York: William Morrow. p. 10. ISBN 0-06-058568-4.
6.Jump up ^ Ebert, Roger (April 29, 1983). "Something Wicked This Way Comes". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
7.Jump up ^ Maslin, Janet (April 29, 1983). "Disney's Bradbury". The New York Times. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
8.Jump up ^ Fleming, Mike. "Disney, Seth Grahame- Smith Making New Film Of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’". Deadline. Retrieved 2014-03-12.
External links[edit]
 Wikiquote has quotations related to: Something Wicked This Way Comes (film)
Official website
Something Wicked This Way Comes at the Internet Movie Database
Something Wicked This Way Comes at the TCM Movie Database
Something Wicked This Way Comes at AllMovie
Something Wicked This Way Comes at Rotten Tomatoes
Something Wicked This Way Comes at Box Office Mojo


[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Films directed by Jack Clayton














[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Works of Ray Bradbury





































































































































Commons page
Wikiquote page




[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film





















































  


Categories: English-language films
1983 films
1983 horror films
1980s fantasy films
1980s horror films
1980s thriller films
American fantasy films
American horror films
American thriller films
Circus films
Adaptations of works by Ray Bradbury
Films based on fantasy novels
Films directed by Jack Clayton
Films set in the 1920s
Films shot in Los Angeles, California
Films shot in Vermont
Film scores by James Horner
Dark fantasy films
Supernatural horror films
Supernatural thriller films
Walt Disney Pictures films
Witchcraft in film
Films based on American novels













Navigation menu



Create account
Log in



Article

Talk









Read

Edit

View history

















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Contents
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Donate to Wikipedia
Wikimedia Shop

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Tools
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
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Page information
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Cite this page

Print/export
Create a book
Download as PDF
Printable version

Languages
العربية
Cymraeg
Français
Italiano
Português
Русский
Edit links
This page was last modified on 25 January 2015, at 17:20.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
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Odyssey
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This article is about Homer's epic poem. For other uses, see Odyssey (disambiguation).
"Homer's Odyssey" redirects here. For The Simpsons episode, see Homer's Odyssey (The Simpsons).



 Greek text of the Odyssey's opening passage
The Odyssey (/ˈɒdəsi/;[1] Greek: Ὀδύσσεια, Odýsseia) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second oldest extant work of Western literature, the Iliad being the oldest. Scholars believe it was composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.[2]
The poem mainly centers on the Greek hero Odysseus (known as Ulysses in Roman myths) and his journey home after the fall of Troy. It takes Odysseus ten years to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War.[3] In his absence, it is assumed he has died, and his wife Penelope and son Telemachus must deal with a group of unruly suitors, the Mnesteres (Greek: Μνηστῆρες) or Proci, who compete for Penelope's hand in marriage.
It continues to be read in the Homeric Greek and translated into modern languages around the world. Many scholars believe that the original poem was composed in an oral tradition by an aoidos (epic poet/singer), perhaps a rhapsode (professional performer), and was more likely intended to be heard than read.[2] The details of the ancient oral performance, and the story's conversion to a written work inspire continual debate among scholars. The Odyssey was written in a poetic dialect of Greek—a literary amalgam of Aeolic Greek, Ionic Greek, and other Ancient Greek dialects—and comprises 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter.[4][5] Among the most noteworthy elements of the text are its non-linear plot, and the influence on events of choices made by women and serfs, besides the actions of fighting men. In the English language as well as many others, the word odyssey has come to refer to an epic voyage.
The Odyssey has a lost sequel, the Telegony, which was not written by Homer. It was usually attributed in antiquity to Cinaethon of Sparta, but in one source was said to have been stolen from Musaeus by Eugamon or Eugammon of Cyrene (see Cyclic poets).


Contents  [hide]
1 Synopsis 1.1 Exposition
1.2 Escape to the Phaeacians
1.3 Odysseus' account of his adventures
1.4 Return to Ithaca
1.5 Slaying of the Suitors
2 Character of Odysseus
3 Structure
4 Geography of the Odyssey
5 Dating the Odyssey
6 Influences on the Odyssey
7 Text history
8 Cultural impact
9 Notable English translations
10 See also
11 References
12 External links

Synopsis[edit]
Exposition[edit]
The Odyssey began ten years after the end of the ten-year Trojan War (the subject of the Iliad), and Odysseus has still not returned home from the war. Odysseus' son Telemachus is about 20 years old and is sharing his absent father's house on the island of Ithaca with his mother Penelope and a crowd of 108 boisterous young men, "the Suitors", whose aim is to persuade Penelope to marry one of them, all the while enjoying the hospitality of Odysseus' household and eating up his wealth.
Odysseus' protectress, the goddess Athena, discusses his fate with Zeus, king of the gods, at a moment when Odysseus' enemy, the god of the sea Poseidon, is absent from Mount Olympus. Then, disguised as a Taphian chieftain named Mentes, she visits Telemachus to urge him to search for news of his father. He offers her hospitality; they observe the suitors dining rowdily while the bard Phemius performs a narrative poem for them. Penelope objects to Phemius' theme, the "Return from Troy",[6] because it reminds her of her missing husband, but Telemachus rebuts her objections.
That night Athena, disguised as Telemachus, finds a ship and crew for the true Telemachus. The next morning, Telemachus calls an assembly of citizens of Ithaca to discuss what should be done with the suitors. Accompanied by Athena (now disguised as Mentor), he departs for the Greek mainland and the household of Nestor, most venerable of the Greek warriors at Troy, now at home in Pylos. From there, Telemachus rides overland, accompanied by Nestor's son, Peisistratus, to Sparta, where he finds Menelaus and Helen who are now reconciled. He is told that they returned to Sparta after a long voyage by way of Egypt. There, on the island of Pharos, Menelaus encountered the old sea-god Proteus, who told him that Odysseus was a captive of the nymph Calypso. Incidentally, Telemachus learns the fate of Menelaus' brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Greeks at Troy: he was murdered on his return home by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus.



Charles Gleyre, Odysseus and Nausicaä
Escape to the Phaeacians[edit]
The second part tells the story of Odysseus. After having spent seven years in captivity on Calypso's island, Ogygia, Calypso falls deeply in love with him but he has consistently spurned her advances. She is persuaded to release him by Odysseus' great-grandfather, the messenger god Hermes, who has been sent by Zeus in response to Athena's plea. Odysseus builds a raft and is given clothing, food and drink by Calypso. When Poseidon finds out that Odysseus has escaped, he wrecks the raft but, helped by a veil given by the sea nymph Ino, Odysseus swims ashore on Scherie, the island of the Phaeacians. Naked and exhausted, he hides in a pile of leaves and falls asleep. The next morning, awakened by the laughter of girls, he sees the young Nausicaa, who has gone to the seashore with her maids to wash clothes after Athena told her in a dream to do so. He appeals to her for help. She encourages him to seek the hospitality of her parents, Arete and Alcinous, or Alkinous. Odysseus is welcomed and is not at first asked for his name. He remains for several days, takes part in a pentathlon, and hears the blind singer Demodocus perform two narrative poems. The first is an otherwise obscure incident of the Trojan War, the "Quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles"; the second is the amusing tale of a love affair between two Olympian gods, Ares and Aphrodite. Finally, Odysseus asks Demodocus to return to the Trojan War theme and tell of the Trojan Horse, a stratagem in which Odysseus had played a leading role. Unable to hide his emotion as he relives this episode, Odysseus at last reveals his identity. He then begins to tell the story of his return from Troy.



Odysseus Overcome by Demodocus' Song, by Francesco Hayez, 1813–15
Odysseus' account of his adventures[edit]
After a piratical raid on Ismaros in the land of the Cicones, he and his twelve ships were driven off course by storms. They visited the lethargic Lotus-Eaters who gave two of his men their fruit which caused them to forget their homecoming, and then were captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus, escaping by blinding him with a wooden stake. While they were escaping, however, Odysseus foolishly told Polyphemus his identity, and Polyphemus told his father, Poseidon, that Odysseus had blinded him. Poseidon then curses Odysseus to wander the sea for ten years, during which he would lose all his crew and return home through the aid of others. After their escape, they stayed with Aeolus, the master of the winds and he gave Odysseus a leather bag containing all the winds, except the west wind, a gift that should have ensured a safe return home. However, the greedy sailors foolishly opened the bag while Odysseus slept, thinking it contained gold. All of the winds flew out and the resulting storm drove the ships back the way they had come, just as Ithaca came into sight.
After unsuccessfully pleading with Aeolus to help them again, they re-embarked and encountered the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. All of Odysseus's ships except his own entered the harbor of the Laestrygonians' Island and were immediately destroyed. He sailed on and visited the witch-goddess Circe. She turned half of his men into swine after feeding them cheese and wine. Hermes warned Odysseus about Circe and gave Odysseus a drug called moly which gave him resistance to Circe's magic. Circe, surprised by Odysseus' resistance, agreed to change his men back to their human form in exchange for Odysseus' love. They remained with her on the island for one year, while they feasted and drank. Finally, guided by Circe's instructions, Odysseus and his crew crossed the ocean and reached a harbor at the western edge of the world, where Odysseus sacrificed to the dead. He first encountered the spirit of crewmember Elpenor, who had gotten drunk and fallen from a roof to his death, which had gone unnoticed by others, before Odysseus and the rest of his crew had left Circe. Elpenor's ghost told Odysseus to bury his body, which Odysseus promised to do. Odysseus then summoned the spirit of the old prophet Tiresias for advice on how to appease the gods upon his return home. Next Odysseus met the spirit of his own mother, who had died of grief during his long absence. From her, he got his first news of his own household, threatened by the greed of the Suitors. Finally, he met the spirits of famous men and women. Notably he encountered the spirit of Agamemnon, of whose murder he now learned, and Achilles, who told him about the woes of the land of the dead (for Odysseus' encounter with the dead, see also Nekuia).



 Odysseus and the Sirens, eponymous vase of the Siren Painter, ca. 480-470 BC, (British Museum)
Returning to Circe's island, they were advised by her on the remaining stages of the journey. They skirted the land of the Sirens, who sang an enchanting song that normally caused passing sailors to steer toward the rocks, only to hit them and sink. All of the sailors except for Odysseus, who was tied to the mast as he wanted to hear the song, had their ears plugged up with beeswax. They then passed between the six-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, Odysseus losing six men to Scylla, and landed on the island of Thrinacia. Zeus caused a storm which prevented them leaving. While Odysseus was away praying, his men ignored the warnings of Tiresias and Circe and hunted down the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios as their food had run short. The Sun God insisted that Zeus punish the men for this sacrilege. They suffered a shipwreck as they were driven towards Charybdis. All but Odysseus were drowned; he clung to a fig tree above Charybdis. Washed ashore on the island of Ogygia, he was compelled to remain there as Calypso's lover until she was ordered by Zeus, via Hermes, to release Odysseus.
Return to Ithaca[edit]
Having listened with rapt attention to his story, the Phaeacians, who are skilled mariners, agree to help Odysseus get home. They deliver him at night, while he is fast asleep, to a hidden harbour on Ithaca. He finds his way to the hut of one of his own slaves, the swineherd Eumaeus. Athena disguises Odysseus as a wandering beggar so he can see how things stand in his household. When Odysseus's dog (who was a puppy before he left) saw him, he was so excited that he died.[7] After dinner, he tells the farm laborers a fictitious tale of himself: He was born in Crete, had led a party of Cretans to fight alongside other Greeks in the Trojan War, and had then spent seven years at the court of the king of Egypt; finally he had been shipwrecked in Thesprotia and crossed from there to Ithaca.
Meanwhile, Telemachus sails home from Sparta, evading an ambush set by the Suitors. He disembarks on the coast of Ithaca and makes for Eumaeus's hut. Father and son meet; Odysseus identifies himself to Telemachus (but still not to Eumaeus), and they decide that the Suitors must be killed. Telemachus goes home first. Accompanied by Eumaeus, Odysseus returns to his own house, still pretending to be a beggar. He is ridiculed by the Suitors in his own home, especially by one extremely impertinent man named Antinous. Odysseus meets Penelope and tests her intentions by saying he once met Odysseus in Crete. Closely questioned, he adds that he had recently been in Thesprotia and had learned something there of Odysseus's recent wanderings.
Odysseus's identity is discovered by the housekeeper, Eurycleia, when she recognizes an old scar as she is washing his feet. Eurycleia tries to tell Penelope about the beggar's true identity, but Athena makes sure that Penelope cannot hear her. Odysseus then swears Eurycleia to secrecy.
Slaying of the Suitors[edit]
The next day, at Athena's prompting, Penelope maneuvers the Suitors into competing for her hand with an archery competition using Odysseus' bow. The man who can string the bow and shoot it through a dozen axe heads would win. Odysseus takes part in the competition himself: he alone is strong enough to string the bow and shoot it through the dozen axe heads, making him the winner. He then turns his arrows on the Suitors and with the help of Athena, Telemachus, Eumaeus and Philoteus the cowherd, he kills all the Suitors. Odysseus and Telemachus hang twelve of their household maids, who had betrayed Penelope or had sex with the Suitors, or both; they mutilate and kill the goatherd Melanthius, who had mocked and abused Odysseus. Now at last, Odysseus identifies himself to Penelope. She is hesitant, but accepts him when he mentions that their bed was made from an olive tree still rooted to the ground. Many modern and ancient scholars take this to be the original ending of the Odyssey, and the rest to be an interpolation.
The next day he and Telemachus visit the country farm of his old father Laertes, who likewise accepts his identity only when Odysseus correctly describes the orchard that Laertes had previously given him.
The citizens of Ithaca have followed Odysseus on the road, planning to avenge the killing of the Suitors, their sons. Their leader points out that Odysseus has now caused the deaths of two generations of the men of Ithaca: his sailors, not one of whom survived; and the Suitors, whom he has now executed. The goddess Athena intervenes and persuades both sides to give up the vendetta, a deus ex machina. After this, Ithaca is at peace once more, concluding the Odyssey.
Character of Odysseus[edit]
Main article: Odysseus
Odysseus' name means "trouble" in Greek, referring to both the giving and receiving of trouble—as is often the case in his wanderings. An early example of this is the boar hunt that gave Odysseus the scar by which Eurycleia recognizes him; Odysseus is injured by the boar and responds by killing it. Odysseus' heroic trait is his mētis, or "cunning intelligence": he is often described as the "Peer of Zeus in Counsel." This intelligence is most often manifested by his use of disguise and deceptive speech. His disguises take forms both physical (altering his appearance) and verbal, such as telling the Cyclops Polyphemus that his name is Οὖτις, "Nobody", then escaping after blinding Polyphemus. When asked by other Cyclopes why he is screaming, Polyphemus replies that "Nobody" is hurting him, so the others assume that, "If alone as you are [Polyphemus] none uses violence on you, why, there is no avoiding the sickness sent by great Zeus; so you had better pray to your father, the lord Poseidon".[8] The most evident flaw that Odysseus sports is that of his arrogance and his pride, or hubris. As he sails away from the island of the Cyclopes, he shouts his name and boasts that nobody can defeat the "Great Odysseus". The Cyclops then throws the top half of a mountain at him and prays to his father, Poseidon, saying that Odysseus has blinded him. This enrages Poseidon, causing the god to thwart Odysseus' homecoming for a very long time.
Structure[edit]
The Odyssey was written in dactylic hexameter. The Odyssey opens in medias res, in the middle of the overall story, with prior events described through flashbacks or storytelling. This device is also used by later authors of literary epics, such as Virgil in the Aeneid, Luís de Camões in Os Lusíadas[9] and Alexander Pope in The Rape of the Lock.
In the first episodes, we trace Telemachus' efforts to assert control of the household, and then, at Athena's advice, to search for news of his long-lost father. Then the scene shifts: Odysseus has been a captive of the beautiful nymph Calypso, with whom he has spent seven of his ten lost years. Released by the intercession of his patroness Athena, through the aid of Hermes, he departs, but his raft is destroyed by his divine enemy Poseidon, who is angry because Odysseus blinded his son, Polyphemus. When Odysseus washes up on Scherie, home to the Phaeacians, he is assisted by the young Nausicaa and is treated hospitably. In return, he satisfies the Phaeacians' curiosity, telling them, and the reader, of all his adventures since departing from Troy. The shipbuilding Phaeacians then loan him a ship to return to Ithaca, where he is aided by the swineherd Eumaeus, meets Telemachus, regains his household, kills the Suitors, and is reunited with his faithful wife, Penelope.
All ancient and nearly all modern editions and translations of the Odyssey are divided into 24 books. This division is convenient but it may not be original. Many scholars believe it was developed by Alexandrian editors of the 3rd century BC. In the Classical period, moreover, several of the books (individually and in groups) were given their own titles: the first four books, focusing on Telemachus, are commonly known as the Telemachy. Odysseus' narrative, Book 9, featuring his encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, is traditionally called the Cyclopeia. Book 11, the section describing his meeting with the spirits of the dead is known as the Nekuia. Books 9 through 12, wherein Odysseus recalls his adventures for his Phaeacian hosts, are collectively referred to as the Apologoi: Odysseus' "stories". Book 22, wherein Odysseus kills all the Suitors, has been given the title Mnesterophonia: "slaughter of the Suitors". This concludes the Greek Epic Cycle, though fragments remain of the "alternative ending" of sorts known as the Telegony.
This Telegony aside, the last 548 lines of the Odyssey, corresponding to Book 24, are believed by many scholars to have been added by a slightly later poet. Several passages in earlier books seem to be setting up the events of Book 24, so if it were indeed a later addition, the offending editor would seem to have changed earlier text as well. For more about varying views on the origin, authorship and unity of the poem see Homeric scholarship.
Geography of the Odyssey[edit]
Main articles: Homer's Ithaca and Geography of the Odyssey
The events in the main sequence of the Odyssey (excluding Odysseus' embedded narrative of his wanderings) take place in the Peloponnese and in what are now called the Ionian Islands.[citation needed] There are difficulties in the apparently simple identification of Ithaca, the homeland of Odysseus, which may or may not be the same island that is now called Ithake. The wanderings of Odysseus as told to the Phaeacians, and the location of the Phaeacians' own island of Scheria, pose more fundamental problems, if geography is to be applied: scholars, both ancient and modern, are divided as to whether or not any of the places visited by Odysseus (after Ismaros and before his return to Ithaca) are real.[citation needed]
Dating the Odyssey[edit]
In 2008, scientists Marcelo O. Magnasco and Constantino Baikouzis at Rockefeller University used clues in the text and astronomical data to attempt to pinpoint the time of Odysseus's return from his journey after the Trojan War.[10]
The first clue is Odysseus' sighting of Venus just before dawn as he arrives on Ithaca. The second is a new moon on the night before the massacre of the Suitors. The final clue is a total eclipse, falling over Ithaca around noon, when Penelope's Suitors sit down for their noon meal. The seer Theoclymenus approaches the Suitors and foretells their death, saying, "The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world." The problem with this is that the 'eclipse' is only seen by Theoclymenus, and the Suitors toss him out, calling him mad. No one else sees the sky darken, and it is therefore not actually described as an eclipse within the story, merely a vision by Theoclymenus.
Doctors Baikouzis and Magnasco state that "[t]he odds that purely fictional references to these phenomena (so hard to satisfy simultaneously) would coincide by accident with the only eclipse of the century are minute." They conclude that these three astronomical references "'cohere', in the sense that the astronomical phenomena pinpoint the date of 16 April 1178 BCE" as the most likely date of Odysseus' return.
This dating places the destruction of Troy, ten years before, to 1188 BC, which is close to the archaeologically dated destruction of Troy VIIa circa 1190 BC.
Influences on the Odyssey[edit]
Scholars have seen strong influences from Near Eastern mythology and literature in the Odyssey. Martin West has noted substantial parallels between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey.[11] Both Odysseus and Gilgamesh are known for traveling to the ends of the earth, and on their journeys go to the land of the dead. On his voyage to the underworld, Odysseus follows instructions given to him by Circe, a goddess who is the daughter of the sun-god Helios. Her island, Aeaea, is located at the edges of the world, and seems to have close associations with the sun. Like Odysseus, Gilgamesh gets directions on how to reach the land of the dead from a divine helper: in this case, the goddess Siduri, who, like Circe, dwells by the sea at the ends of the earth. Her home is also associated with the sun: Gilgamesh reaches Siduri's house by passing through a tunnel underneath Mt. Mashu, the high mountain from which the sun comes into the sky. West argues that the similarity of Odysseus' and Gilgamesh's journeys to the edges of the earth are the result of the influence of the Gilgamesh epic upon the Odyssey.
The Cyclops' origins have also been surmised to be the results of Ancient Greeks finding an elephant skull, by paleontologist Othenio Abel in 1914. The enormous nasal passage in the middle of the forehead could have looked like the eye socket of a giant, to those who had never seen a living elephant.[12]
Text history[edit]
The Athenian tyrant Peisistratos, who ruled between 546 and 527 BC, is believed to have established a Commission of Editors of Homer to edit the text of the poems and remove any errors and interpolations, thus establishing a canonical text.[13]
The earliest papyrus fragments date back to the 3rd century BC.[13]
The oldest complete manuscript is the Laurentianus from the 10th or 11th century.[13]
The editio princeps of both the Iliad and the Odyssey is by Demetrius Chalcondyles in Florence, most likely from 1488.
Cultural impact[edit]
Cyclops by Euripides, the only extant satyr play, retells the respective episode with a humorous twist.
True Story, written by Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century AD, is a satire on the Odyssey and on ancient travel tales, describing a journey sailing westward, beyond the Pillars of Hercules and to the Moon, the first known text that could be called science fiction.[14]
Merugud Uilix maicc Leirtis ("On the Wandering of Ulysses, son of Laertes") is an eccentric Old Irish version of the material; the work exists in a 12th-century AD manuscript that linguists believe is based on an 8th-century original.[15][16]
Dante Alighieri has Odysseus append a new ending to the Odyssey in canto XXVI of the Inferno.
Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, first performed in 1640, is an opera by Claudio Monteverdi based on the second half of Homer's Odyssey.
Every episode of James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses (1922) has an assigned theme, technique and correspondences between its characters and those of Homer's Odyssey.
The first canto of Ezra Pound's The Cantos (1922) is both a translation and a retelling of Odysseus' journey to the underworld.
Nikos Kazantzakis aspires to continue the poem and explore more modern concerns in The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938).
Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves is a novel imagining how the version we have might have been invented out of older tales.
The Japanese-French anime Ulysses 31 (1981) updates the ancient setting into a 31st-century space opera.
Omeros (1991), an epic poem by Derek Walcott, is in part a retelling of the Odyssey, set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia.
The Odyssey (1997), a made-for-TV movie directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, is a slightly abbreviated version of the epic.
Similarly, Daniel Wallace's Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998) adapts the epic to the American South, while also incorporating tall tales into its first-person narrative much as Odysseus does in the Apologoi (Books 9-12).
The Coen Brothers' 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? is loosely based on Homer's poem.
Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007) is a series of short stories that rework Homer's original plot in a contemporary style reminiscent of Italo Calvino.
The film Ulysses' Gaze (1995) directed by Theo Angelopoulos has many of the elements of the Odyssey set against the backdrop of the most recent and previous Balkan Wars.
The poem "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is narrated by an aged Ulysses who is determined to continue to live life to the fullest.
Between 1978 and 1979, German director Tony Munzlinger made a documentary series called Unterwegs mit Odysseus (roughly translated: "Journeying with Odysseus"), in which a film team sails across the Mediterranean Sea trying to find traces of Odysseus in the modern-day settings of the Odyssey.
Notable English translations[edit]
Further information: English translations of Homer
This is a partial list of translations into English of Homer's Odyssey.
George Chapman, 1616 (couplets)
Alexander Pope, 1725–1726 (iambic pentameter couplets); Project Gutenberg edition; Gutenberg.org
William Cowper, 1791 (blank verse) An audio CD recording abridged by Perry Keenlyside and read by Anton Lesser is available (ISBN 9626345314), 1995.
Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang, 1879 (prose); Project Gutenberg edition
William Cullen Bryant, 1871 (blank verse)
Mordaunt Roger Barnard, 1876 (blank verse)
William Morris, 1887
Samuel Butler, 1898 (prose); Gutenberg.org Project Gutenberg edition or Perseus Project Od.1.1
Padraic Colum, 1918 (prose), Bartleby.com
A. T. Murray (revised by George E. Dimock), 1919; Loeb Classical Library (ISBN 0-674-99561-9). Available online here.
George Herbert Palmer, 1921, prose. An audio CD recording read by Norman Deitz is available (ISBN 1-4025-2325-4), 1989.
T. E. Shaw (T. E. Lawrence), 1932
W. H. D. Rouse, 1937, prose
E. V. Rieu, 1945, prose (later revised in 1991 by D.C.H. Rieu for increased literal accuracy)
Robert Fitzgerald, 1963, unrhymed poetry with varied-length lines (ISBN 0-679-72813-9) An audio CD recording read by John Lee is available (ISBN 1-4159-3605-6) 2006
Richmond Lattimore, 1965, poetry (ISBN 0-06-093195-7)
Albert Cook, 1967 (Norton Critical Edition), poetry, very accurate line by line version[citation needed]
Walter Shewring, 1980 (ISBN 0-19-283375-8), Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), prose
Allen Mandelbaum, 1990
Robert Fagles, poetry, 1996 (ISBN 0-14-026886-3); an unabridged audio recording by Ian McKellen is also available (ISBN 0-14-086430-X).
Stanley Lombardo, Hackett Publishing Company, 2000 (ISBN 0-87220-484-7). An audio CD recording read by the translator is also available (ISBN 1-930972-06-7).
Martin Hammond, 2000, prose
Rodney Merrill, 2002, unrhymed dactylic hexameter, accurate line by line version, University of Michigan Press
Edward McCrorie, 2004 (ISBN 0-8018-8267-2), Johns Hopkins University Press.
Barry B. Powell, 2014 ISBN 978-0199360314, Oxford University Press
See also[edit]
Portal icon Hellenismos portal
Odyssean gods
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "Odyssey". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
2.^ Jump up to: a b D.C.H. Rieu's introduction to The Odyssey (Penguin, 2003), p. xi.
3.Jump up ^ The dog Argos dies autik' idont' Odusea eeikosto eniauto ("seeing Odysseus again in the twentieth year"), Odyssey 17.327; cf. also 2.174-6, 23.102, 23.170.
4.Jump up ^ Homer (1996). The Odyssey. Trans. by Robert Fagles. Introduction by Bernard Knox. United States of America: Penguin Books. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-14-026886-7.
5.Jump up ^ Fox, Robin Lane (2006). The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian. United States of America: Basic Books. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-465-02496-4.
6.Jump up ^ This theme once existed in the form of another epic, Nostoi, of which only fragments remain.
7.Jump up ^ Homer. The Odyssey. p. Scroll 17 Line 8-8. Retrieved 16 January 2015.
8.Jump up ^ From the Odyssey of Homer translated by Richmond Lattimore [Book 9, page 147/8, lines 410 - 412].
9.Jump up ^ "The Lusiads". World Digital Library. 1800–1882. Retrieved 2013-08-31.
10.Jump up ^ Baikouzis, Constantino; Magnasco, Marcelo O. (June 24, 2008), "Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) 105 (26): 8823, doi:10.1073/pnas.0803317105, PMC 2440358, PMID 18577587, retrieved 2008-06-27.
11.Jump up ^ West, Martin. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. (Oxford 1997) 402-417.
12.Jump up ^ Abel's surmise is noted by Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton University Press) 2000.
13.^ Jump up to: a b c Odyssey Criticism.
14.Jump up ^ Swanson, Roy Arthur:
Lucian of Samosata, the Greco-Syrian satirist of the second century, appears today as an exemplar of the science-fiction artist. There is little, if any, need to argue that his mythopoeic Milesian Tales and his literary fantastic voyages and utopistic hyperbole comport with the genre of science fiction; ...
15.Jump up ^ Merugud Uilix maicc Leirtis. Kuno Meyer (ed), First edition [v + 36 pp.; v–xii Introduction; 1–15 Critical edition of Text; 16–29 Translation; 30–36 Index Verborum.] David Nutt270 Strand, London (1886)
16.Jump up ^ https://archive.org/details/meruguduilixmai00homegoog
External links[edit]
 Look up odyssey in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
The Odyssey

 Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Ὀδύσσεια

 Wikimedia Commons has media related to Odyssey.
Odyssey on Perseus Project: Ancient Greek
English translation by Samuel Butler
1919 English translation
Homer's Odyssey: A Commentary by Denton Jaques Snider on Project Gutenberg
BBC audio file. In our time BBC Radio 4 discussion programme. 45 minutes.
The Meaning of Tradition in Homer's Odyssey in English
The Odyssey Comix A detailed retelling and explanation of Homer's Odyssey in comic-strip format by Greek Myth Comix


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Odyssey
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This article is about Homer's epic poem. For other uses, see Odyssey (disambiguation).
"Homer's Odyssey" redirects here. For The Simpsons episode, see Homer's Odyssey (The Simpsons).



 Greek text of the Odyssey's opening passage
The Odyssey (/ˈɒdəsi/;[1] Greek: Ὀδύσσεια, Odýsseia) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second oldest extant work of Western literature, the Iliad being the oldest. Scholars believe it was composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.[2]
The poem mainly centers on the Greek hero Odysseus (known as Ulysses in Roman myths) and his journey home after the fall of Troy. It takes Odysseus ten years to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War.[3] In his absence, it is assumed he has died, and his wife Penelope and son Telemachus must deal with a group of unruly suitors, the Mnesteres (Greek: Μνηστῆρες) or Proci, who compete for Penelope's hand in marriage.
It continues to be read in the Homeric Greek and translated into modern languages around the world. Many scholars believe that the original poem was composed in an oral tradition by an aoidos (epic poet/singer), perhaps a rhapsode (professional performer), and was more likely intended to be heard than read.[2] The details of the ancient oral performance, and the story's conversion to a written work inspire continual debate among scholars. The Odyssey was written in a poetic dialect of Greek—a literary amalgam of Aeolic Greek, Ionic Greek, and other Ancient Greek dialects—and comprises 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter.[4][5] Among the most noteworthy elements of the text are its non-linear plot, and the influence on events of choices made by women and serfs, besides the actions of fighting men. In the English language as well as many others, the word odyssey has come to refer to an epic voyage.
The Odyssey has a lost sequel, the Telegony, which was not written by Homer. It was usually attributed in antiquity to Cinaethon of Sparta, but in one source was said to have been stolen from Musaeus by Eugamon or Eugammon of Cyrene (see Cyclic poets).


Contents  [hide]
1 Synopsis 1.1 Exposition
1.2 Escape to the Phaeacians
1.3 Odysseus' account of his adventures
1.4 Return to Ithaca
1.5 Slaying of the Suitors
2 Character of Odysseus
3 Structure
4 Geography of the Odyssey
5 Dating the Odyssey
6 Influences on the Odyssey
7 Text history
8 Cultural impact
9 Notable English translations
10 See also
11 References
12 External links

Synopsis[edit]
Exposition[edit]
The Odyssey began ten years after the end of the ten-year Trojan War (the subject of the Iliad), and Odysseus has still not returned home from the war. Odysseus' son Telemachus is about 20 years old and is sharing his absent father's house on the island of Ithaca with his mother Penelope and a crowd of 108 boisterous young men, "the Suitors", whose aim is to persuade Penelope to marry one of them, all the while enjoying the hospitality of Odysseus' household and eating up his wealth.
Odysseus' protectress, the goddess Athena, discusses his fate with Zeus, king of the gods, at a moment when Odysseus' enemy, the god of the sea Poseidon, is absent from Mount Olympus. Then, disguised as a Taphian chieftain named Mentes, she visits Telemachus to urge him to search for news of his father. He offers her hospitality; they observe the suitors dining rowdily while the bard Phemius performs a narrative poem for them. Penelope objects to Phemius' theme, the "Return from Troy",[6] because it reminds her of her missing husband, but Telemachus rebuts her objections.
That night Athena, disguised as Telemachus, finds a ship and crew for the true Telemachus. The next morning, Telemachus calls an assembly of citizens of Ithaca to discuss what should be done with the suitors. Accompanied by Athena (now disguised as Mentor), he departs for the Greek mainland and the household of Nestor, most venerable of the Greek warriors at Troy, now at home in Pylos. From there, Telemachus rides overland, accompanied by Nestor's son, Peisistratus, to Sparta, where he finds Menelaus and Helen who are now reconciled. He is told that they returned to Sparta after a long voyage by way of Egypt. There, on the island of Pharos, Menelaus encountered the old sea-god Proteus, who told him that Odysseus was a captive of the nymph Calypso. Incidentally, Telemachus learns the fate of Menelaus' brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Greeks at Troy: he was murdered on his return home by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus.



Charles Gleyre, Odysseus and Nausicaä
Escape to the Phaeacians[edit]
The second part tells the story of Odysseus. After having spent seven years in captivity on Calypso's island, Ogygia, Calypso falls deeply in love with him but he has consistently spurned her advances. She is persuaded to release him by Odysseus' great-grandfather, the messenger god Hermes, who has been sent by Zeus in response to Athena's plea. Odysseus builds a raft and is given clothing, food and drink by Calypso. When Poseidon finds out that Odysseus has escaped, he wrecks the raft but, helped by a veil given by the sea nymph Ino, Odysseus swims ashore on Scherie, the island of the Phaeacians. Naked and exhausted, he hides in a pile of leaves and falls asleep. The next morning, awakened by the laughter of girls, he sees the young Nausicaa, who has gone to the seashore with her maids to wash clothes after Athena told her in a dream to do so. He appeals to her for help. She encourages him to seek the hospitality of her parents, Arete and Alcinous, or Alkinous. Odysseus is welcomed and is not at first asked for his name. He remains for several days, takes part in a pentathlon, and hears the blind singer Demodocus perform two narrative poems. The first is an otherwise obscure incident of the Trojan War, the "Quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles"; the second is the amusing tale of a love affair between two Olympian gods, Ares and Aphrodite. Finally, Odysseus asks Demodocus to return to the Trojan War theme and tell of the Trojan Horse, a stratagem in which Odysseus had played a leading role. Unable to hide his emotion as he relives this episode, Odysseus at last reveals his identity. He then begins to tell the story of his return from Troy.



Odysseus Overcome by Demodocus' Song, by Francesco Hayez, 1813–15
Odysseus' account of his adventures[edit]
After a piratical raid on Ismaros in the land of the Cicones, he and his twelve ships were driven off course by storms. They visited the lethargic Lotus-Eaters who gave two of his men their fruit which caused them to forget their homecoming, and then were captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus, escaping by blinding him with a wooden stake. While they were escaping, however, Odysseus foolishly told Polyphemus his identity, and Polyphemus told his father, Poseidon, that Odysseus had blinded him. Poseidon then curses Odysseus to wander the sea for ten years, during which he would lose all his crew and return home through the aid of others. After their escape, they stayed with Aeolus, the master of the winds and he gave Odysseus a leather bag containing all the winds, except the west wind, a gift that should have ensured a safe return home. However, the greedy sailors foolishly opened the bag while Odysseus slept, thinking it contained gold. All of the winds flew out and the resulting storm drove the ships back the way they had come, just as Ithaca came into sight.
After unsuccessfully pleading with Aeolus to help them again, they re-embarked and encountered the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. All of Odysseus's ships except his own entered the harbor of the Laestrygonians' Island and were immediately destroyed. He sailed on and visited the witch-goddess Circe. She turned half of his men into swine after feeding them cheese and wine. Hermes warned Odysseus about Circe and gave Odysseus a drug called moly which gave him resistance to Circe's magic. Circe, surprised by Odysseus' resistance, agreed to change his men back to their human form in exchange for Odysseus' love. They remained with her on the island for one year, while they feasted and drank. Finally, guided by Circe's instructions, Odysseus and his crew crossed the ocean and reached a harbor at the western edge of the world, where Odysseus sacrificed to the dead. He first encountered the spirit of crewmember Elpenor, who had gotten drunk and fallen from a roof to his death, which had gone unnoticed by others, before Odysseus and the rest of his crew had left Circe. Elpenor's ghost told Odysseus to bury his body, which Odysseus promised to do. Odysseus then summoned the spirit of the old prophet Tiresias for advice on how to appease the gods upon his return home. Next Odysseus met the spirit of his own mother, who had died of grief during his long absence. From her, he got his first news of his own household, threatened by the greed of the Suitors. Finally, he met the spirits of famous men and women. Notably he encountered the spirit of Agamemnon, of whose murder he now learned, and Achilles, who told him about the woes of the land of the dead (for Odysseus' encounter with the dead, see also Nekuia).



 Odysseus and the Sirens, eponymous vase of the Siren Painter, ca. 480-470 BC, (British Museum)
Returning to Circe's island, they were advised by her on the remaining stages of the journey. They skirted the land of the Sirens, who sang an enchanting song that normally caused passing sailors to steer toward the rocks, only to hit them and sink. All of the sailors except for Odysseus, who was tied to the mast as he wanted to hear the song, had their ears plugged up with beeswax. They then passed between the six-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, Odysseus losing six men to Scylla, and landed on the island of Thrinacia. Zeus caused a storm which prevented them leaving. While Odysseus was away praying, his men ignored the warnings of Tiresias and Circe and hunted down the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios as their food had run short. The Sun God insisted that Zeus punish the men for this sacrilege. They suffered a shipwreck as they were driven towards Charybdis. All but Odysseus were drowned; he clung to a fig tree above Charybdis. Washed ashore on the island of Ogygia, he was compelled to remain there as Calypso's lover until she was ordered by Zeus, via Hermes, to release Odysseus.
Return to Ithaca[edit]
Having listened with rapt attention to his story, the Phaeacians, who are skilled mariners, agree to help Odysseus get home. They deliver him at night, while he is fast asleep, to a hidden harbour on Ithaca. He finds his way to the hut of one of his own slaves, the swineherd Eumaeus. Athena disguises Odysseus as a wandering beggar so he can see how things stand in his household. When Odysseus's dog (who was a puppy before he left) saw him, he was so excited that he died.[7] After dinner, he tells the farm laborers a fictitious tale of himself: He was born in Crete, had led a party of Cretans to fight alongside other Greeks in the Trojan War, and had then spent seven years at the court of the king of Egypt; finally he had been shipwrecked in Thesprotia and crossed from there to Ithaca.
Meanwhile, Telemachus sails home from Sparta, evading an ambush set by the Suitors. He disembarks on the coast of Ithaca and makes for Eumaeus's hut. Father and son meet; Odysseus identifies himself to Telemachus (but still not to Eumaeus), and they decide that the Suitors must be killed. Telemachus goes home first. Accompanied by Eumaeus, Odysseus returns to his own house, still pretending to be a beggar. He is ridiculed by the Suitors in his own home, especially by one extremely impertinent man named Antinous. Odysseus meets Penelope and tests her intentions by saying he once met Odysseus in Crete. Closely questioned, he adds that he had recently been in Thesprotia and had learned something there of Odysseus's recent wanderings.
Odysseus's identity is discovered by the housekeeper, Eurycleia, when she recognizes an old scar as she is washing his feet. Eurycleia tries to tell Penelope about the beggar's true identity, but Athena makes sure that Penelope cannot hear her. Odysseus then swears Eurycleia to secrecy.
Slaying of the Suitors[edit]
The next day, at Athena's prompting, Penelope maneuvers the Suitors into competing for her hand with an archery competition using Odysseus' bow. The man who can string the bow and shoot it through a dozen axe heads would win. Odysseus takes part in the competition himself: he alone is strong enough to string the bow and shoot it through the dozen axe heads, making him the winner. He then turns his arrows on the Suitors and with the help of Athena, Telemachus, Eumaeus and Philoteus the cowherd, he kills all the Suitors. Odysseus and Telemachus hang twelve of their household maids, who had betrayed Penelope or had sex with the Suitors, or both; they mutilate and kill the goatherd Melanthius, who had mocked and abused Odysseus. Now at last, Odysseus identifies himself to Penelope. She is hesitant, but accepts him when he mentions that their bed was made from an olive tree still rooted to the ground. Many modern and ancient scholars take this to be the original ending of the Odyssey, and the rest to be an interpolation.
The next day he and Telemachus visit the country farm of his old father Laertes, who likewise accepts his identity only when Odysseus correctly describes the orchard that Laertes had previously given him.
The citizens of Ithaca have followed Odysseus on the road, planning to avenge the killing of the Suitors, their sons. Their leader points out that Odysseus has now caused the deaths of two generations of the men of Ithaca: his sailors, not one of whom survived; and the Suitors, whom he has now executed. The goddess Athena intervenes and persuades both sides to give up the vendetta, a deus ex machina. After this, Ithaca is at peace once more, concluding the Odyssey.
Character of Odysseus[edit]
Main article: Odysseus
Odysseus' name means "trouble" in Greek, referring to both the giving and receiving of trouble—as is often the case in his wanderings. An early example of this is the boar hunt that gave Odysseus the scar by which Eurycleia recognizes him; Odysseus is injured by the boar and responds by killing it. Odysseus' heroic trait is his mētis, or "cunning intelligence": he is often described as the "Peer of Zeus in Counsel." This intelligence is most often manifested by his use of disguise and deceptive speech. His disguises take forms both physical (altering his appearance) and verbal, such as telling the Cyclops Polyphemus that his name is Οὖτις, "Nobody", then escaping after blinding Polyphemus. When asked by other Cyclopes why he is screaming, Polyphemus replies that "Nobody" is hurting him, so the others assume that, "If alone as you are [Polyphemus] none uses violence on you, why, there is no avoiding the sickness sent by great Zeus; so you had better pray to your father, the lord Poseidon".[8] The most evident flaw that Odysseus sports is that of his arrogance and his pride, or hubris. As he sails away from the island of the Cyclopes, he shouts his name and boasts that nobody can defeat the "Great Odysseus". The Cyclops then throws the top half of a mountain at him and prays to his father, Poseidon, saying that Odysseus has blinded him. This enrages Poseidon, causing the god to thwart Odysseus' homecoming for a very long time.
Structure[edit]
The Odyssey was written in dactylic hexameter. The Odyssey opens in medias res, in the middle of the overall story, with prior events described through flashbacks or storytelling. This device is also used by later authors of literary epics, such as Virgil in the Aeneid, Luís de Camões in Os Lusíadas[9] and Alexander Pope in The Rape of the Lock.
In the first episodes, we trace Telemachus' efforts to assert control of the household, and then, at Athena's advice, to search for news of his long-lost father. Then the scene shifts: Odysseus has been a captive of the beautiful nymph Calypso, with whom he has spent seven of his ten lost years. Released by the intercession of his patroness Athena, through the aid of Hermes, he departs, but his raft is destroyed by his divine enemy Poseidon, who is angry because Odysseus blinded his son, Polyphemus. When Odysseus washes up on Scherie, home to the Phaeacians, he is assisted by the young Nausicaa and is treated hospitably. In return, he satisfies the Phaeacians' curiosity, telling them, and the reader, of all his adventures since departing from Troy. The shipbuilding Phaeacians then loan him a ship to return to Ithaca, where he is aided by the swineherd Eumaeus, meets Telemachus, regains his household, kills the Suitors, and is reunited with his faithful wife, Penelope.
All ancient and nearly all modern editions and translations of the Odyssey are divided into 24 books. This division is convenient but it may not be original. Many scholars believe it was developed by Alexandrian editors of the 3rd century BC. In the Classical period, moreover, several of the books (individually and in groups) were given their own titles: the first four books, focusing on Telemachus, are commonly known as the Telemachy. Odysseus' narrative, Book 9, featuring his encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, is traditionally called the Cyclopeia. Book 11, the section describing his meeting with the spirits of the dead is known as the Nekuia. Books 9 through 12, wherein Odysseus recalls his adventures for his Phaeacian hosts, are collectively referred to as the Apologoi: Odysseus' "stories". Book 22, wherein Odysseus kills all the Suitors, has been given the title Mnesterophonia: "slaughter of the Suitors". This concludes the Greek Epic Cycle, though fragments remain of the "alternative ending" of sorts known as the Telegony.
This Telegony aside, the last 548 lines of the Odyssey, corresponding to Book 24, are believed by many scholars to have been added by a slightly later poet. Several passages in earlier books seem to be setting up the events of Book 24, so if it were indeed a later addition, the offending editor would seem to have changed earlier text as well. For more about varying views on the origin, authorship and unity of the poem see Homeric scholarship.
Geography of the Odyssey[edit]
Main articles: Homer's Ithaca and Geography of the Odyssey
The events in the main sequence of the Odyssey (excluding Odysseus' embedded narrative of his wanderings) take place in the Peloponnese and in what are now called the Ionian Islands.[citation needed] There are difficulties in the apparently simple identification of Ithaca, the homeland of Odysseus, which may or may not be the same island that is now called Ithake. The wanderings of Odysseus as told to the Phaeacians, and the location of the Phaeacians' own island of Scheria, pose more fundamental problems, if geography is to be applied: scholars, both ancient and modern, are divided as to whether or not any of the places visited by Odysseus (after Ismaros and before his return to Ithaca) are real.[citation needed]
Dating the Odyssey[edit]
In 2008, scientists Marcelo O. Magnasco and Constantino Baikouzis at Rockefeller University used clues in the text and astronomical data to attempt to pinpoint the time of Odysseus's return from his journey after the Trojan War.[10]
The first clue is Odysseus' sighting of Venus just before dawn as he arrives on Ithaca. The second is a new moon on the night before the massacre of the Suitors. The final clue is a total eclipse, falling over Ithaca around noon, when Penelope's Suitors sit down for their noon meal. The seer Theoclymenus approaches the Suitors and foretells their death, saying, "The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world." The problem with this is that the 'eclipse' is only seen by Theoclymenus, and the Suitors toss him out, calling him mad. No one else sees the sky darken, and it is therefore not actually described as an eclipse within the story, merely a vision by Theoclymenus.
Doctors Baikouzis and Magnasco state that "[t]he odds that purely fictional references to these phenomena (so hard to satisfy simultaneously) would coincide by accident with the only eclipse of the century are minute." They conclude that these three astronomical references "'cohere', in the sense that the astronomical phenomena pinpoint the date of 16 April 1178 BCE" as the most likely date of Odysseus' return.
This dating places the destruction of Troy, ten years before, to 1188 BC, which is close to the archaeologically dated destruction of Troy VIIa circa 1190 BC.
Influences on the Odyssey[edit]
Scholars have seen strong influences from Near Eastern mythology and literature in the Odyssey. Martin West has noted substantial parallels between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey.[11] Both Odysseus and Gilgamesh are known for traveling to the ends of the earth, and on their journeys go to the land of the dead. On his voyage to the underworld, Odysseus follows instructions given to him by Circe, a goddess who is the daughter of the sun-god Helios. Her island, Aeaea, is located at the edges of the world, and seems to have close associations with the sun. Like Odysseus, Gilgamesh gets directions on how to reach the land of the dead from a divine helper: in this case, the goddess Siduri, who, like Circe, dwells by the sea at the ends of the earth. Her home is also associated with the sun: Gilgamesh reaches Siduri's house by passing through a tunnel underneath Mt. Mashu, the high mountain from which the sun comes into the sky. West argues that the similarity of Odysseus' and Gilgamesh's journeys to the edges of the earth are the result of the influence of the Gilgamesh epic upon the Odyssey.
The Cyclops' origins have also been surmised to be the results of Ancient Greeks finding an elephant skull, by paleontologist Othenio Abel in 1914. The enormous nasal passage in the middle of the forehead could have looked like the eye socket of a giant, to those who had never seen a living elephant.[12]
Text history[edit]
The Athenian tyrant Peisistratos, who ruled between 546 and 527 BC, is believed to have established a Commission of Editors of Homer to edit the text of the poems and remove any errors and interpolations, thus establishing a canonical text.[13]
The earliest papyrus fragments date back to the 3rd century BC.[13]
The oldest complete manuscript is the Laurentianus from the 10th or 11th century.[13]
The editio princeps of both the Iliad and the Odyssey is by Demetrius Chalcondyles in Florence, most likely from 1488.
Cultural impact[edit]
Cyclops by Euripides, the only extant satyr play, retells the respective episode with a humorous twist.
True Story, written by Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century AD, is a satire on the Odyssey and on ancient travel tales, describing a journey sailing westward, beyond the Pillars of Hercules and to the Moon, the first known text that could be called science fiction.[14]
Merugud Uilix maicc Leirtis ("On the Wandering of Ulysses, son of Laertes") is an eccentric Old Irish version of the material; the work exists in a 12th-century AD manuscript that linguists believe is based on an 8th-century original.[15][16]
Dante Alighieri has Odysseus append a new ending to the Odyssey in canto XXVI of the Inferno.
Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, first performed in 1640, is an opera by Claudio Monteverdi based on the second half of Homer's Odyssey.
Every episode of James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses (1922) has an assigned theme, technique and correspondences between its characters and those of Homer's Odyssey.
The first canto of Ezra Pound's The Cantos (1922) is both a translation and a retelling of Odysseus' journey to the underworld.
Nikos Kazantzakis aspires to continue the poem and explore more modern concerns in The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938).
Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves is a novel imagining how the version we have might have been invented out of older tales.
The Japanese-French anime Ulysses 31 (1981) updates the ancient setting into a 31st-century space opera.
Omeros (1991), an epic poem by Derek Walcott, is in part a retelling of the Odyssey, set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia.
The Odyssey (1997), a made-for-TV movie directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, is a slightly abbreviated version of the epic.
Similarly, Daniel Wallace's Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998) adapts the epic to the American South, while also incorporating tall tales into its first-person narrative much as Odysseus does in the Apologoi (Books 9-12).
The Coen Brothers' 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? is loosely based on Homer's poem.
Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007) is a series of short stories that rework Homer's original plot in a contemporary style reminiscent of Italo Calvino.
The film Ulysses' Gaze (1995) directed by Theo Angelopoulos has many of the elements of the Odyssey set against the backdrop of the most recent and previous Balkan Wars.
The poem "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is narrated by an aged Ulysses who is determined to continue to live life to the fullest.
Between 1978 and 1979, German director Tony Munzlinger made a documentary series called Unterwegs mit Odysseus (roughly translated: "Journeying with Odysseus"), in which a film team sails across the Mediterranean Sea trying to find traces of Odysseus in the modern-day settings of the Odyssey.
Notable English translations[edit]
Further information: English translations of Homer
This is a partial list of translations into English of Homer's Odyssey.
George Chapman, 1616 (couplets)
Alexander Pope, 1725–1726 (iambic pentameter couplets); Project Gutenberg edition; Gutenberg.org
William Cowper, 1791 (blank verse) An audio CD recording abridged by Perry Keenlyside and read by Anton Lesser is available (ISBN 9626345314), 1995.
Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang, 1879 (prose); Project Gutenberg edition
William Cullen Bryant, 1871 (blank verse)
Mordaunt Roger Barnard, 1876 (blank verse)
William Morris, 1887
Samuel Butler, 1898 (prose); Gutenberg.org Project Gutenberg edition or Perseus Project Od.1.1
Padraic Colum, 1918 (prose), Bartleby.com
A. T. Murray (revised by George E. Dimock), 1919; Loeb Classical Library (ISBN 0-674-99561-9). Available online here.
George Herbert Palmer, 1921, prose. An audio CD recording read by Norman Deitz is available (ISBN 1-4025-2325-4), 1989.
T. E. Shaw (T. E. Lawrence), 1932
W. H. D. Rouse, 1937, prose
E. V. Rieu, 1945, prose (later revised in 1991 by D.C.H. Rieu for increased literal accuracy)
Robert Fitzgerald, 1963, unrhymed poetry with varied-length lines (ISBN 0-679-72813-9) An audio CD recording read by John Lee is available (ISBN 1-4159-3605-6) 2006
Richmond Lattimore, 1965, poetry (ISBN 0-06-093195-7)
Albert Cook, 1967 (Norton Critical Edition), poetry, very accurate line by line version[citation needed]
Walter Shewring, 1980 (ISBN 0-19-283375-8), Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), prose
Allen Mandelbaum, 1990
Robert Fagles, poetry, 1996 (ISBN 0-14-026886-3); an unabridged audio recording by Ian McKellen is also available (ISBN 0-14-086430-X).
Stanley Lombardo, Hackett Publishing Company, 2000 (ISBN 0-87220-484-7). An audio CD recording read by the translator is also available (ISBN 1-930972-06-7).
Martin Hammond, 2000, prose
Rodney Merrill, 2002, unrhymed dactylic hexameter, accurate line by line version, University of Michigan Press
Edward McCrorie, 2004 (ISBN 0-8018-8267-2), Johns Hopkins University Press.
Barry B. Powell, 2014 ISBN 978-0199360314, Oxford University Press
See also[edit]
Portal icon Hellenismos portal
Odyssean gods
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "Odyssey". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
2.^ Jump up to: a b D.C.H. Rieu's introduction to The Odyssey (Penguin, 2003), p. xi.
3.Jump up ^ The dog Argos dies autik' idont' Odusea eeikosto eniauto ("seeing Odysseus again in the twentieth year"), Odyssey 17.327; cf. also 2.174-6, 23.102, 23.170.
4.Jump up ^ Homer (1996). The Odyssey. Trans. by Robert Fagles. Introduction by Bernard Knox. United States of America: Penguin Books. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-14-026886-7.
5.Jump up ^ Fox, Robin Lane (2006). The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian. United States of America: Basic Books. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-465-02496-4.
6.Jump up ^ This theme once existed in the form of another epic, Nostoi, of which only fragments remain.
7.Jump up ^ Homer. The Odyssey. p. Scroll 17 Line 8-8. Retrieved 16 January 2015.
8.Jump up ^ From the Odyssey of Homer translated by Richmond Lattimore [Book 9, page 147/8, lines 410 - 412].
9.Jump up ^ "The Lusiads". World Digital Library. 1800–1882. Retrieved 2013-08-31.
10.Jump up ^ Baikouzis, Constantino; Magnasco, Marcelo O. (June 24, 2008), "Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) 105 (26): 8823, doi:10.1073/pnas.0803317105, PMC 2440358, PMID 18577587, retrieved 2008-06-27.
11.Jump up ^ West, Martin. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. (Oxford 1997) 402-417.
12.Jump up ^ Abel's surmise is noted by Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton University Press) 2000.
13.^ Jump up to: a b c Odyssey Criticism.
14.Jump up ^ Swanson, Roy Arthur:
Lucian of Samosata, the Greco-Syrian satirist of the second century, appears today as an exemplar of the science-fiction artist. There is little, if any, need to argue that his mythopoeic Milesian Tales and his literary fantastic voyages and utopistic hyperbole comport with the genre of science fiction; ...
15.Jump up ^ Merugud Uilix maicc Leirtis. Kuno Meyer (ed), First edition [v + 36 pp.; v–xii Introduction; 1–15 Critical edition of Text; 16–29 Translation; 30–36 Index Verborum.] David Nutt270 Strand, London (1886)
16.Jump up ^ https://archive.org/details/meruguduilixmai00homegoog
External links[edit]
 Look up odyssey in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
The Odyssey

 Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Ὀδύσσεια

 Wikimedia Commons has media related to Odyssey.
Odyssey on Perseus Project: Ancient Greek
English translation by Samuel Butler
1919 English translation
Homer's Odyssey: A Commentary by Denton Jaques Snider on Project Gutenberg
BBC audio file. In our time BBC Radio 4 discussion programme. 45 minutes.
The Meaning of Tradition in Homer's Odyssey in English
The Odyssey Comix A detailed retelling and explanation of Homer's Odyssey in comic-strip format by Greek Myth Comix


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Iliad
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This article is about the epic poem. For other uses, see Iliad (disambiguation).

Trojan War

Akhilleus Patroklos Antikensammlung Berlin F2278.jpg
Achilles tending the wounded Patroclus
 (Attic red-figure kylix, c. 500 BC)

The war
Setting: Troy (modern Hisarlik, Turkey)
Period: Bronze Age
Traditional dating: c. 1194–1184 BC
 Modern dating: between 1260 and 1240 BC
Outcome: Greek victory, destruction of Troy
See also: Historicity of the Iliad

Literary sources
Iliad · Epic Cycle · Aeneid, Book 2 ·
Iphigenia in Aulis · Philoctetes ·
Ajax · The Trojan Women · Posthomerica
See also: Trojan War in popular culture

Episodes
Judgement of Paris · Seduction of Helen ·
Trojan Horse · Sack of Troy · The Returns ·
Wanderings of Odysseus ·
Aeneas and the Founding of Rome

Greeks and allies
Agamemnon · Achilles · Helen · Menelaus · Nestor · Odysseus · Ajax · Diomedes · Patroclus · Thersites · Achaeans · Myrmidons
See also: Catalogue of Ships

Trojans and allies
Priam · Hecuba · Hector · Paris · Cassandra · Andromache · Aeneas · Memnon  · Troilus · Penthesilea and the Amazons · Sarpedon
See also: Trojan Battle Order

Related topics
Homeric question · Archaeology of Troy · Mycenae · Bronze Age warfare
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The Iliad (/ˈɪliəd/;[1] sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) 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 (Ilium) 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.
Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege; the earlier events, such as the gathering of warriors for the siege, the cause of the war, and related concerns tend to appear near the beginning. Then the epic narrative takes up events prophesied for the future, such as Achilles' looming death and the sack of Troy, prefigured and alluded to more and more vividly, so that when it reaches an end, the poem has told a more or less complete tale of the Trojan War.
The Iliad is paired with something of a sequel, the Odyssey, also attributed to Homer. Along with the Odyssey, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, and its written version is usually dated to around the eighth century BC.[2] Recent statistical modelling based on language evolution has found it to date to 760–710 BC.[3] In the modern vulgate (accepted version), the Iliad contains 15,693 lines; it is written in Homeric Greek, a literary amalgam of Ionic Greek and other dialects.


Contents  [hide]
1 Synopsis
2 Major characters 2.1 Achaeans 2.1.1 Achilles and Patroclus
2.2 Trojans
2.3 Gods
3 Themes 3.1 Nostos
3.2 Kleos
3.3 Timê
3.4 Wrath
3.5 Fate
4 Date and textual history 4.1 The Iliad as oral tradition
5 Warfare in the Iliad 5.1 Depiction of infantry combat
5.2 Influence on classical Greek warfare
6 Influence on the arts and literature 6.1 20th century
6.2 Contemporary popular culture
7 English translations
8 Manuscripts
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links

Synopsis[edit]
Note: Book numbers are in parentheses and come before the synopsis of the book.
(1) After an invocation to the Muses, the story launches in medias res (in the middle of things) towards the end of the Trojan War between the Trojans and the besieging Greeks. Chryses, a Trojan priest of Apollo, offers the Greeks wealth for the return of his daughter Chryseis, a captive of Agamemnon, the Greek leader. Although most of the Greek army is in favour of the offer, Agamemnon refuses. Chryses prays for Apollo's help, and Apollo causes a plague throughout the Greek army.
After nine days of plague, Achilles, the leader of the Myrmidon contingent, calls an assembly to solve the plague problem. Under pressure, Agamemnon agrees to return Chryseis to her father, but also decides to take Achilles's captive, Briseis, as compensation. Angered, Achilles declares that he and his men will no longer fight for Agamemnon, but will go home. Odysseus takes a ship and brings Chryseis to her father, whereupon Apollo ends the plague.



 The first verses of the Iliad
In the meantime, Agamemnon's messengers take Briseis away. Achilles then asks his mother, Thetis, to ask Zeus that the Greeks be brought to breaking point by the Trojans, so Agamemnon will realize how much the Greeks need Achilles. Thetis does so, and Zeus agrees.
(2) Zeus sends a dream to Agamemnon, urging him to attack the city. Agamemnon heeds the dream but decides to first test the morale of the Greek army by telling them to go home. The plan backfires, and only the intervention of Odysseus, inspired by Athena, stops a rout.
Odysseus confronts and beats Thersites, a common soldier who voices discontent at fighting Agamemnon's war. After a meal, the Greeks deploy in companies upon the Trojan plain. The poet takes the opportunity to describe the provenance of each Greek contingent. When news of the Greek deployment reaches king Priam, the Trojans too sortie upon the plain. In a similar list to that for the Greeks, the poet describes the Trojans and their allies.
(3) The armies approach each other on the plain, but before they meet, Paris offers to end the war by fighting a duel with Menelaus, urged by his brother and head of the Trojan army, Hector. While Helen tells Priam about the Greek commanders from the walls of Troy, both sides swear a truce and promise to abide by the outcome of the duel. Paris is beaten, but Aphrodite rescues him and leads him to bed with Helen before Menelaus could kill him.
(4) Pressured by Hera's hatred of Troy, Zeus arranges for the Trojan Pandaros to break the truce by wounding Menelaus with an arrow. Agamemnon rouses the Greeks, and battle is joined.
(5) In the fighting, Diomedes kills many Trojans, including Pandaros, and defeats Aeneas, whom again Aphrodite rescues, but Diomedes attacks and wounds the goddess. Apollo faces Diomedes, and warns him against warring with gods. Many heroes and commanders join in, including Hector, and the gods supporting each side try to influence the battle. Emboldened by Athena, Diomedes wounds Ares and puts him out of action.
(6) Hector rallies the Trojans and stops a rout; the Greek Diomedes and the Trojan Glaukos find common ground and exchange unequal gifts. Hector enters the city, urges prayers and sacrifices, incites Paris to battle, bids his wife Andromache and son Astyanax farewell on the city walls, and rejoins the battle.
(7) Hector duels with Ajax, but nightfall interrupts the fight and both sides retire. The Greeks agree to burn their dead and build a wall to protect their ships and camp, while the Trojans quarrel about returning Helen. Paris offers to return the treasure he took, and give further wealth as compensation, but without returning Helen, and the offer is refused. A day's truce is agreed for burning the dead, during which the Greeks also build their wall and trench.
(8) The next morning, Zeus prohibits the gods from interfering, and fighting begins anew. The Trojans prevail and force the Greeks back to their wall while Hera and Athena are forbidden from helping. Night falls before the Trojans can assail the Greek wall. They camp in the field to attack at first light, and their watchfires light the plain like stars.



Iliad, Book VIII, lines 245–53, Greek manuscript, late 5th, early 6th centuries AD.
(9) Meanwhile, the Greeks are desperate. Agamemnon admits his error, and sends an embassy composed of Odysseus, Ajax, Phoenix, and two heralds to offer Briseis and extensive gifts to Achilles, who has been camped next to his ships throughout, if only he would return to the fighting. Achilles and his companion Patroclus receive the embassy well, but Achilles angrily refuses Agamemnon's offer, and declares that he would only return to battle if the Trojans reach his ships and threaten them with fire. The embassy returns empty-handed.
(10) Later that night, Odysseus and Diomedes venture out to the Trojan lines, killing the Trojan Dolon and wreaking havoc in the camps of some Thracian allies of Troy.
(11) In the morning, the fighting is fierce and Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Odysseus are all wounded. Achilles sends Patroclus from his camp to inquire about the Greek casualties, and while there Patroclus is moved to pity by a speech of Nestor.
(12) The Trojans assault the Greek wall on foot. Hector, ignoring an omen, leads the terrible fighting. The Greeks are overwhelmed in rout, the wall's gate is broken, and Hector charges in.
(13) Many fall on both sides. The Trojan seer Polydamas urges Hector to fall back and warns him about Achilles, but is ignored.
(14) Hera seduces Zeus and lures him to sleep, allowing Poseidon to help the Greeks, and the Trojans are driven back onto the plain.
(15) Zeus awakes and is enraged by Poseidon's intervention. Against the mounting discontent of the Greek-supporting gods, Zeus sends Apollo to aid the Trojans, who once again breach the wall, and the battle reaches the ships.
(16) Patroclus can stand to watch no longer, and begs Achilles to be allowed to defend the ships. Achilles relents, and lends Patroclus his armor, but sends him off with a stern admonition not to pursue the Trojans, lest he take Achilles's glory. Patroclus leads the Myrmidons to battle and arrives as the Trojans set fire to the first ships. The Trojans are routed by the sudden onslaught, and Patroclus begins his assault by killing the Trojan hero Sarpedon. Patroclus, ignoring Achilles's command, pursues and reaches the gates of Troy, where Apollo himself stops him. Patroclus is set upon by Apollo and Euphorbos, and is finally killed by Hector.
(17) Hector takes Achilles's armor from the fallen Patroclus, but fighting develops around Patroclus' body.
(18) Achilles is mad with grief when he hears of Patroclus's death, and vows to take vengeance on Hector; his mother Thetis grieves, too, knowing that Achilles is fated to die young if he kills Hector. Achilles is urged to help retrieve Patroclus' body, but has no armour. Made brilliant by Athena, Achilles stands next to the Greek wall and roars in rage. The Trojans are dismayed by his appearance and the Greeks manage to bear Patroclus' body away. Again Polydamas urges Hector to withdraw into the city, again Hector refuses, and the Trojans camp in the plain at nightfall. Patroclus is mourned, and meanwhile, at Thetis' request, Hephaestus fashions a new set of armor for Achilles, among which is a magnificently wrought shield.
(19) In the morning, Agamemnon gives Achilles all the promised gifts, including Briseis, but he is indifferent to them. Achilles fasts while the Greeks take their meal, and straps on his new armor, and heaves his great spear. His horse Xanthos prophesies to Achilles his death. Achilles drives his chariot into battle.
(20) Zeus lifts the ban on the gods' interference, and the gods freely intervene on both sides. The onslaught of Achilles, burning with rage and grief, is terrible, and he slays many.
(21) Driving the Trojans before him, Achilles cuts off half in the river Skamandros and proceeds to slaughter them and fills the river with the dead. The river, angry at the killing, confronts Achilles, but is beaten back by Hephaestus' firestorm. The gods fight among themselves. The great gates of the city are opened to receive the fleeing Trojans, and Apollo leads Achilles away from the city by pretending to be a Trojan.
(22) When Apollo reveals himself to Achilles, the Trojans had retreated into the city, all except for Hector, who, having twice ignored the counsels of Polydamas, feels the shame of rout and resolves to face Achilles, in spite of the pleas of Priam and Hecuba, his parents. When Achilles approaches, Hector's will fails him, and he is chased around the city by Achilles. Finally, Athena tricks him to stop running, and he turns to face his opponent. After a brief duel, Achilles stabs Hector through the neck. Before dying, Hector reminds Achilles that he is fated to die in the war as well. Achilles takes Hector's body and dishonours it.
(23) The ghost of Patroclus comes to Achilles in a dream and urges the burial of his body. The Greeks hold a day of funeral games, and Achilles gives out the prizes.
(24) Dismayed by Achilles' continued abuse of Hector's body, Zeus decides that it must be returned to Priam. Led by Hermes, Priam takes a wagon out of Troy, across the plains, and enters the Greek camp unnoticed. He grasps Achilles by the knees and begs to have his son's body. Achilles is moved to tears, and the two lament their losses in the war. After a meal, Priam carries Hector's body back into Troy. Hector is buried, and the city mourns.
Major characters[edit]
Main article: List of characters in the Iliad
See also: Category: Deities in the Iliad
The many characters of the Iliad are catalogued; the latter-half of Book II, the "Catalogue of Ships", lists commanders and cohorts; battle scenes feature quickly slain minor characters.
Achaeans[edit]
##The Achaeans (Ἀχαιοί) — also called Hellenes (Greeks), Danaans (Δαναοί), or Argives (Ἀργεĩοι). ##Agamemnon — King of Mycenae, leader of the Greeks.
##Achilles — Leader of the Myrmidons, hero, son of a divine mother, Thetis.
##Odysseus — King of Ithaca, Greek commander.
##Ajax the Greater — son of Telamon and king of Salamis.
##Menelaus — King of Sparta, husband of Helen and brother of Agamemnon.
##Diomedes — son of Tydeus, King of Argos.
##Ajax the Lesser — son of Oileus, often partner of Ajax the Greater.
##Patroclus — Achilles' closest companion.
##Nestor — King of Pylos, and trusted advisor to Agamemnon.

Achilles and Patroclus[edit]
Main article: Achilles and Patroclus



Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus (1855) by the Russian realist Nikolai Ge
Much debate has surrounded the nature of the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus, as to whether it can be described as a homoerotic one or not. Classical and Hellenistic Athenian scholars perceived it as pederastic,[4] while others perceived it as a platonic warrior-bond.[5]
Trojans[edit]
##The Trojan men ##Hector — son of King Priam and the foremost Trojan warrior.
##Aeneas — son of Anchises and Aphrodite.
##Deiphobus — brother of Hector and Paris.
##Paris — Helen's lover-abductor.
##Priam — the aged King of Troy.
##Polydamas — a prudent commander whose advice is ignored; he is Hector's foil.
##Agenor — a Trojan warrior, son of Antenor, who attempts to fight Achilles (Book XXI).
##Sarpedon, son of Zeus — killed by Patroclus. Was friend of Glaucus and co-leader of the Lycians (fought for the Trojans).
##Glaucus, son of Hippolochus — friend of Sarpedon and co-leader of the Lycians (fought for the Trojans).
##Euphorbus — first Trojan warrior to wound Patroclus.
##Dolon — a spy upon the Greek camp (Book X).
##Antenor — King Priam's advisor, who argues for returning Helen to end the war.
##Polydorus — son of Priam and Laothoe.
##Pandarus — famous archer and son of Lycaon.
##The Trojan women ##Hecuba (Ἑκάβη, Hekabe) — Priam's wife, mother of Hector, Cassandra, Paris, and others.
##Helen (Ἑλένη) — daughter of Zeus; Menelaus's wife; espoused first to Paris, then to Deiphobus; her abduction by Paris precipitated the war.
##Andromache — Hector's wife, mother of Astyanax.
##Cassandra — Priam's daughter.
##Briseis — a Trojan woman captured by the Greeks; she was Achilles' prize of the Trojan war.

Gods[edit]
In the literary Trojan War of the Iliad, the Olympic gods, goddesses, and demigods fight and play great roles in human warfare. Unlike practical Greek religious observance, Homer's portrayals of them suited his narrative purpose, being very different from the polytheistic ideals Greek society used. To wit, the Classical-era historian Herodotus says that Homer, and his contemporary, the poet Hesiod, were the first artists to name and describe their appearance and characters.[6]
In Greek Gods Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths, Mary Lefkowitz discusses the relevance of divine action in the Iliad, attempting to answer the question of whether or not divine intervention is a discrete occurrence (for its own sake), or if such godly behaviors are mere human character metaphors. The intellectual interest of Classic-era authors, such as Thucydides and Plato, was limited to their utility as "a way of talking about human life rather than a description or a truth", because, if the gods remain religious figures, rather than human metaphors, their "existence"—without the foundation of either dogma or a bible of faiths—then allowed Greek culture the intellectual breadth and freedom to conjure gods fitting any religious function they required as a people.[7][8]
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, psychologist Julian Jaynes uses the Iliad as a major supporting evidence for his theory of Bicameralism, which posits that until about the time described in the Iliad, humans had a much different mentality than present day humans, essentially lacking in what we call consciousness. He suggests that humans heard and obeyed commands from what they identified as gods, until the change in human mentality that incorporated the motivating force into the conscious self. He points out that almost every action in the Iliad is directed, caused, or influenced by a god, and that earlier translations show an astonishing lack of words suggesting thought, planning, or introspection. Those that do appear, he argues, are misinterpretations made by translators imposing a modern mentality on the characters.[9]
##The major deities: ##Zeus (Neutral)
##Hera (Achaeans)
##Artemis (Trojans)
##Apollo (Trojans)
##Hades (Neutral)
##Aphrodite (Trojans)
##Ares (Trojans)
##Athena (Achaeans)
##Hermes (Neutral)
##Poseidon (Achaeans)
##Hephaestus (Achaeans)
##The minor deities: ##Eris
##Iris
##Thetis
##Leto
##Proteus
##Scamander
##Phobos
##Deimos
##Hypnos

Themes[edit]
Nostos[edit]
Nostos (νόστος, "homecoming") occurs seven times in the poem.[10] Thematically, the concept of homecoming is much explored in Ancient Greek literature, especially in the post-war homeward fortunes experienced by the Atreidae (Agamemnon and Menelaus), and Odysseus (see the Odyssey). Thus, nostos is impossible without sacking Troy—King Agamemnon's motive for winning, at any cost.
Kleos[edit]
Kleos (κλέος, "glory, fame") is the concept of glory earned in heroic battle.[11] For most of the Greek invaders of Troy, notably Odysseus, kleos is earned in a victorious nostos (homecoming). Yet, Achilles must choose only one of the two rewards, either nostos or kleos.[12] In Book IX (IX.410–16), he poignantly tells Agamemnon's envoys—Odysseus, Phoenix, Ajax—begging his reinstatement to battle about having to choose between two fates (διχθαδίας κήρας, 9.411).[13]
The passage reads (the translation is Lattimore's):




μήτηρ γάρ τέ μέ φησι θεὰ Θέτις ἀργυρόπεζα (410)
διχθαδίας κῆρας φερέμεν θανάτοιο τέλος δέ.
εἰ μέν κ’ αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι,
ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται
 εἰ δέ κεν οἴκαδ’ ἵκωμι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν,
ὤλετό μοι κλέος ἐσθλόν, ἐπὶ δηρὸν δέ μοι αἰὼν (415)
ἔσσεται, οὐδέ κέ μ’ ὦκα τέλος θανάτοιο κιχείη.[14]

For my mother Thetis the goddess of silver feet tells me
 I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,
 if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,
 my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;
 but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
 the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
 left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.[15]

In forgoing his nostos, he will earn the greater reward of kleos aphthiton (κλέος ἄφθιτον, "fame imperishable").[13] In the poem, aphthiton (ἄφθιτον, "imperishable") occurs five other times,[16] each occurrence denotes an object: Agamemnon's sceptre, the wheel of Hebe's chariot, the house of Poseidon, the throne of Zeus, the house of Hephaestus. Translator Lattimore renders kleos aphthiton as forever immortal and as forever imperishable—connoting Achilles's mortality by underscoring his greater reward in returning to battle Troy.
Achilles' shield, crafted by Hephaestus and given to him by his mother Thetis, bears an image of stars in the centre. The stars conjure profound images of the place of a single man, no matter how heroic, in the perspective of the entire cosmos.
Timê[edit]
Akin to kleos is timê (τιμή, "respect, honour"), the concept denoting the respectability an honourable man accrues with accomplishment (cultural, political, martial), per his station in life. In Book I, the Greek troubles begin with King Agamemnon's dishonourable, unkingly behaviour—first, by threatening the priest Chryses (1.11), then, by aggravating them in disrespecting Achilles, by confiscating Briseis from him (1.171). The warrior's consequent rancour against the dishonourable king ruins the Greek military cause.
Wrath[edit]



The Wrath of Achilles (1819), by Michel Drolling.
The poem's initial word, μῆνιν (mēnin, accusative of μῆνις, mēnis, "wrath, rage, fury"), establishes the Iliad's principal theme: The "Wrath of Achilles."[17] His personal rage and wounded soldier's vanity propel the story: the Greeks' faltering in battle, the slayings of Patroclus and Hector, and the fall of Troy. In Book I, the Wrath of Achilles first emerges in the Achilles-convoked meeting, between the Greek kings and the seer Calchas. King Agamemnon dishonours Chryses, the Trojan priest of Apollo, by refusing with a threat the restitution of his daughter, Chryseis—despite the proffered ransom of "gifts beyond count".[18] The insulted priest prays his god's help, and a nine-day rain of divine plague arrows falls upon the Greeks. Moreover, in that meeting, Achilles accuses Agamemnon of being "greediest for gain of all men".[19] To that, Agamemnon replies:

But here is my threat to you.
 Even as Phoibos Apollo is taking away my Chryseis.
 I shall convey her back in my own ship, with my own
 followers; but I shall take the fair-cheeked Briseis,
 your prize, I myself going to your shelter, that you may learn well
 how much greater I am than you, and another man may shrink back
 from likening himself to me and contending against me.[20]

After that, only Athena stays Achilles's wrath. He vows to never again obey orders from Agamemnon. Furious, Achilles cries to his mother, Thetis, who persuades Zeus's divine intervention—favouring the Trojans—until Achilles's rights are restored. Meanwhile, Hector leads the Trojans to almost pushing the Greeks back to the sea (Book XII). Later, Agamemnon contemplates defeat and retreat to Greece (Book XIV). Again, the Wrath of Achilles turns the war's tide in seeking vengeance when Hector kills Patroclus. Aggrieved, Achilles tears his hair and dirties his face. Thetis comforts her mourning son, who tells her:

So it was here that the lord of men Agamemnon angered me.
 Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, and for all our
 sorrow beat down by force the anger deeply within us.
 Now I shall go, to overtake that killer of a dear life,
 Hektor; then I will accept my own death, at whatever
 time Zeus wishes to bring it about, and the other immortals.[21]

Accepting the prospect of death as fair price for avenging Patroclus, he returns to battle, dooming Hector and Troy, thrice chasing him 'round the Trojan walls, before slaying him, then dragging the corpse behind his chariot, back to camp.



Achilles Slays Hector, by Peter Paul Rubens (1630–35).
Fate[edit]
Fate (κήρ, kēr, "fated death") propels most of the events of the Iliad. Once set, gods and men abide it, neither truly able nor willing to contest it. How fate is set is unknown, but it is told by the Fates and by Zeus through sending omens to seers such as Calchas. Men and their gods continually speak of heroic acceptance and cowardly avoidance of one's slated fate.[22] Fate does not determine every action, incident, and occurrence, but it does determine the outcome of life—before killing him, Hector calls Patroclus a fool for cowardly avoidance of his fate, by attempting his defeat; Patroclus retorts: [23]

No, deadly destiny, with the son of Leto, has killed me,
 and of men it was Euphorbos; you are only my third slayer.
 And put away in your heart this other thing that I tell you.
 You yourself are not one who shall live long, but now already
 death and powerful destiny are standing beside you,
 to go down under the hands of Aiakos' great son, Achilleus.[24]
Here, Patroclus alludes to fated death by Hector's hand, and Hector's fated death by Achilles's hand. Each accepts the outcome of his life, yet, no-one knows if the gods can alter fate. The first instance of this doubt occurs in Book XVI. Seeing Patroclus about to kill Sarpedon, his mortal son, Zeus says:

Ah me, that it is destined that the dearest of men, Sarpedon,
 must go down under the hands of Menoitios' son Patroclus.[25]

About his dilemma, Hera asks Zeus:

Majesty, son of Kronos, what sort of thing have you spoken?
 Do you wish to bring back a man who is mortal, one long since
 doomed by his destiny, from ill-sounding death and release him?
 Do it, then; but not all the rest of us gods shall approve you.[26]

In deciding between losing a son or abiding fate, Zeus, King of the Gods, allows it. This motif recurs when he considers sparing Hector, whom he loves and respects. Again, Athena asks him:

Father of the shining bolt, dark misted, what is this you said?
 Do you wish to bring back a man who is mortal, one long since
 doomed by his destiny, from ill-sounding death and release him?
 Do it, then; but not all the rest of us gods shall approve you.[27]

Again, Zeus appears capable of altering fate, but does not, deciding instead to abide set outcomes; yet, contrariwise, fate spares Aeneas, after Apollo convinces the over-matched Trojan to fight Achilles. Poseidon cautiously speaks:

But come, let us ourselves get him away from death, for fear
 the son of Kronos may be angered if now Achilleus
 kills this man. It is destined that he shall be the survivor,
 that the generation of Dardanos shall not die ...[28]

Divinely aided, Aeneas escapes the wrath of Achilles and survives the Trojan War. Whether or not the gods can alter fate, they do abide it, despite its countering their human allegiances; thus, the mysterious origin of fate is a power beyond the gods. Fate implies the primeval, tripartite division of the world that Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades effected in deposing their father, Cronus, for its dominion. Zeus took the Air and the Sky, Poseidon the Waters, and Hades the Underworld, the land of the dead—yet they share dominion of the Earth. Despite the earthly powers of the Olympic gods, only the Three Fates set the destiny of Man.
Date and textual history[edit]
Further information: Homeric question and Historicity of the Iliad
The poem dates to the archaic period of Classical Antiquity. Scholarly consensus mostly places it in the 8th century BC, although some favour a 7th-century date. Herodotus placed Homer at approximately 400 years before his own time, which would place Homer at circa 850 BC.
The historical backdrop of the poem is the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse, in the early 12th century BC. Homer is thus separated from his subject matter by about 400 years, the period known as the Greek Dark Ages. Intense scholarly debate has surrounded the question of which portions of the poem preserve genuine traditions from the Mycenaean period. The Catalogue of Ships in particular has the striking feature that its geography does not portray Greece in the Iron Age, the time of Homer, but as it was before the Dorian invasion.
The title Ἰλιάς "Ilias" (genitive Ἰλιάδος "Iliados") is elliptic for ἡ ποίησις Ἰλιάς "he poiesis Ilias", meaning "the Trojan poem". Ἰλιάς, "of Troy", is the specifically feminine adjective form from Ἴλιον, "Troy"; the masculine adjective form would be Ἰλιακός or Ἴλιος.[29] It is used by Herodotus.[30]
Venetus A, copied in the 10th century AD, is the oldest fully extant manuscript of the Iliad.[31] The editio princeps dates to 1488, printed by Demetrius Chalcondyles in Florence.
The Iliad as oral tradition[edit]
In antiquity, the Greeks applied the Iliad and the Odyssey as the bases of pedagogy. Literature was central to the educational-cultural function of the itinerant rhapsode, who composed consistent epic poems from memory and improvisation, and disseminated them, via song and chant, in his travels and at the Panathenaic Festival of athletics, music, poetics, and sacrifice, celebrating Athena's birthday.[32]
Originally, Classical scholars treated the Iliad and the Odyssey as written poetry, and Homer as a writer. Yet, by the 1920s, Milman Parry (1902–1935) had launched a movement claiming otherwise. His investigation of the oral Homeric style—"stock epithets" and "reiteration" (words, phrases, stanzas) —established that these formulae were artifacts of oral tradition easily applied to an hexametric line. A two-word stock epithet (e.g. "resourceful Odysseus") reiteration may complement a character name by filling a half-line, thus, freeing the poet to compose a half-line of "original" formulaic text to complete his meaning.[33] In Yugoslavia, Parry and his assistant, Albert Lord (1912–1991), studied the oral-formulaic composition of Serbian oral poetry, yielding the Parry/Lord thesis that established oral tradition studies, later developed by Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Gregory Nagy.
In The Singer of Tales (1960), Lord presents likenesses between the tragedies of the Greek Patroclus, in the Iliad, and of the Sumerian Enkidu, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and claims to refute, with "careful analysis of the repetition of thematic patterns", that the Patroclus storyline upsets Homer's established compositional formulae of "wrath, bride-stealing, and rescue"; thus, stock-phrase reiteration does not restrict his originality in fitting story to rhyme.[34][35] Likewise, in The Arming Motif, Prof. James Armstrong reports that the poem's formulae yield richer meaning because the "arming motif" diction—describing Achilles, Agamemnon, Paris, and Patroclus—serves to "heighten the importance of ... an impressive moment", thus, "[reiteration] creates an atmosphere of smoothness", wherein, Homer distinguishes Patroclus from Achilles, and foreshadows the former's death with positive and negative turns of phrase.[36][37]
In the Iliad, occasional syntactic inconsistency may be an oral tradition effect—for example, Aphrodite is "laughter-loving", despite being painfully wounded by Diomedes (Book V, 375); and the divine representations may mix Mycenaean and Greek Dark Age (ca. 1150–800 BC) mythologies, parallelling the hereditary basileis nobles (lower social rank rulers) with minor deities, such as Scamander, et al.[38]
Warfare in the Iliad[edit]
Depiction of infantry combat[edit]
Despite Mycenae and Troy being maritime powers, the Iliad features no sea battles.[39] So, the Trojan shipwright (of the ship that transported Helen to Troy), Phereclus, fights afoot, as an infantryman.[40] The battle dress and armour of hero and soldier are well-described. They enter battle in chariots, launching javelins into the enemy formations, then dismount—for hand-to-hand combat with yet more javelin throwing, rock throwing, and if necessary hand to hand sword and a shoulder-borne hoplon (shield) fighting.[41] Ajax the Greater, son of Telamon, sports a large, rectangular shield (σάκος, sakos) with which he protects himself and Teucer, his brother:
Ninth came Teucer, stretching his curved bow.He stood beneath the shield of Ajax, son of Telamon.As Ajax cautiously pulled his shield aside,Teucer would peer out quickly, shoot off an arrow,hit someone in the crowd, dropping that soldierright where he stood, ending his life—then he'd duck back,crouching down by Ajax, like a child beside its mother.Ajax would then conceal him with his shining shield.(Iliad 8.267–72, Ian Johnston, translator)
Ajax's cumbersome shield is more suitable for defence than for offence, while his cousin, Achilles, sports a large, rounded, octagonal shield that he successfully deploys along with his spear against the Trojans:
Just as a man constructs a wall for some high house,using well-fitted stones to keep out forceful winds,that's how close their helmets and bossed shields lined up,shield pressing against shield, helmet against helmetman against man. On the bright ridges of the helmets,horsehair plumes touched when warriors moved their heads.That's how close they were to one another.(Iliad 16.213–7, Ian Johnston, translator)
In describing infantry combat, Homer names the phalanx formation,[42] but most scholars do not believe the historical Trojan War was so fought.[43] In the Bronze Age, the chariot was the main battle transport-weapon (e.g. the Battle of Kadesh). The available evidence, from the Dendra armour and the Pylos Palace paintings, indicate the Mycenaeans used two-man chariots, with a long-spear-armed principal rider, unlike the three-man Hittite chariots with short-spear-armed riders, and unlike the arrow-armed Egyptian and Assyrian two-man chariots. Nestor spearheads his troops with chariots; he advises them:
In your eagerness to engage the Trojans,don't any of you charge ahead of others,trusting in your strength and horsemanship.And don't lag behind. That will hurt our charge.Any man whose chariot confronts an enemy'sshould thrust with his spear at him from there.That's the most effective tactic, the waymen wiped out city strongholds long ago —their chests full of that style and spirit.(Iliad 4.301–09, Ian Johnston, translator)
Although Homer's depictions are graphic, it can be seen in the very end that victory in war is a far more somber occasion, where all that is lost becomes apparent. On the other hand, the funeral games are lively, for the dead man's life is celebrated. This overall depiction of war runs contrary to many other[citation needed] ancient Greek depictions, where war is an aspiration for greater glory.
Influence on classical Greek warfare[edit]
While the Homeric poems (the Iliad in particular) were not necessarily revered scripture of the ancient Greeks, they were most certainly seen as guides that were important to the intellectual understanding of any educated Greek citizen. This is evidenced by the fact that in the late fifth century BC, "it was the sign of a man of standing to be able to recite the Iliad and Odyssey by heart."[44] Moreover, it can be argued that the warfare shown in the Iliad, and the way in which it was depicted, had a profound and very traceable effect on Greek warfare in general. In particular, the effect of epic literature can be broken down into three categories: tactics, ideology, and the mindset of commanders. In order to discern these effects, it is necessary to take a look at a few examples from each of these categories.
Much of the detailed fighting in the Iliad is done by the heroes in an orderly, one-on-one fashion. Much like the Odyssey, there is even a set ritual which must be observed in each of these conflicts. For example, a major hero may encounter a lesser hero from the opposing side, in which case the minor hero is introduced, threats may be exchanged, and then the minor hero is slain. The victor often strips the body of its armor and military accoutrements.[45] Here is an example of this ritual and this type of one-on-one combat in the Iliad:

There Telamonian Ajax struck down the son of Anthemion, Simoeisios in his stripling's beauty, whom once his mother descending from Ida bore beside the banks of Simoeis when she had followed her father and mother to tend the sheepflocks. Therefore they called him Simoeisios; but he could not render again the care of his dear parents; he was short-lived, beaten down beneath the spear of high-hearted Ajax, who struck him as he first came forward beside the nipple of the right breast, and the bronze spearhead drove clean through the shoulder.[46]
The biggest issue in reconciling the connection between the epic fighting of the Iliad and later Greek warfare is the phalanx, or hoplite, warfare seen in Greek history well after Homer's Iliad. While there are discussions of soldiers arrayed in semblances of the phalanx throughout the Iliad, the focus of the poem on the heroic fighting, as mentioned above, would seem to contradict the tactics of the phalanx. However, the phalanx did have its heroic aspects. The masculine one-on-one fighting of epic is manifested in phalanx fighting on the emphasis of holding one's position in formation. This replaces the singular heroic competition found in the Iliad.[47]
One example of this is the Spartan tale of 300 picked men fighting against 300 picked Argives. In this battle of champions, only two men are left standing for the Argives and one for the Spartans. Othryades, the remaining Spartan, goes back to stand in his formation with mortal wounds while the remaining two Argives go back to Argos to report their victory. Thus, the Spartans claimed this as a victory, as their last man displayed the ultimate feat of bravery by maintaining his position in the phalanx.[48]
In terms of the ideology of commanders in later Greek history, the Iliad has an interesting effect. The Iliad expresses a definite disdain for tactical trickery, when Hector says, before he challenges the great Ajax:

I know how to storm my way into the struggle of flying horses; I know how to tread the measures on the grim floor of the war god. Yet great as you are I would not strike you by stealth, watching
for my chance, but openly, so, if perhaps I might hit you.[49]
However, despite examples of disdain for this tactical trickery, there is reason to believe that the Iliad, as well as later Greek warfare, endorsed tactical genius on the part of their commanders. For example, there are multiple passages in the Iliad with commanders such as Agamemnon or Nestor discussing the arraying of troops so as to gain an advantage. Indeed, the Trojan War is won by a notorious example of Greek guile in the Trojan Horse. This is even later referred to by Homer in the Odyssey. The connection, in this case, between guileful tactics of the Greeks in the Iliad and those of the later Greeks is not a difficult one to find. Spartan commanders, often seen as the pinnacle of Greek military prowess, were known for their tactical trickery, and, for them, this was a feat to be desired in a commander. Indeed, this type of leadership was the standard advice of Greek tactical writers.[50]
Ultimately, while Homeric (or epic) fighting is certainly not completely replicated in later Greek warfare, many of its ideals, tactics, and instruction are.[51]
Hans van Wees argues that the period that the descriptions of warfare relate can be pinned down fairly specifically—to the first half of the 7th century BC.[52]
Influence on the arts and literature[edit]
Main article: Trojan War in popular culture
The Iliad was a standard work of great importance already in Classical Greece and remained so throughout the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. It made its return to Italy and Western Europe beginning in the 15th century, primarily through translations into Latin and the vernacular languages. Prior to this reintroduction, a shortened Latin version of the poem, known as the Ilias Latina, was very widely studied and read as a basic school text. The West, however, had tended to look at Homer as a liar as they believed they possessed much more down to earth and realistic eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War written by Dares and Dictys Cretensis who were supposedly present at the events.
These late antique forged accounts formed the basis of several eminently popular medieval chivalric romances, most notably those of Benoit de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne. These in turn spawned many others in various European languages, such as the first printed English book, the 1473 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Other accounts read in the Middle Ages were antique Latin retellings such as the Excidium Troiae and works in the vernaculars such as the Icelandic Troy Saga. Even without Homer, the Trojan War story had remained central to Western European medieval literary culture and its sense of identity. Most nations and several royal houses traced their origins to heroes at the Trojan War. Britain was supposedly settled by the Trojan Brutus, for instance.
Subjects from the Trojan War were a favourite among ancient Greek dramatists. Aeschylus' trilogy, the Oresteia, comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, follows the story of Agamemnon after his return from the war.
Homer also came to be of great influence in European culture with the resurgence of interest in Greek antiquity during the Renaissance, and it remains the first and most influential work of the Western canon.
William Shakespeare used the plot of the Iliad as source material for his play Troilus and Cressida, but focused on a medieval legend, the love story of Troilus, son of King Priam of Troy, and Cressida, daughter of the Trojan soothsayer Calchas. The play, often considered to be a comedy, reverses traditional views on events of the Trojan War and depicts Achilles as a coward, Ajax as a dull, unthinking mercenary, etc.
William Theed the elder made an impressive bronze statue of Thetis as she brought Achilles his new armor forged by Hephaesthus. It has been on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City since 2013.
Robert Browning's poem Development discusses his childhood introduction to the matter of the Iliad and his delight in the epic, as well as contemporary debates about its authorship.
20th century[edit]
Simone Weil wrote the essay The Iliad or the Poem of Force in 1939 shortly after the commencement of World War II. It has been claimed that the essay describes how the Iliad demonstrates the way force, exercised to the extreme in war, reduces both victim and aggressor to the level of the slave and the unthinking automaton.[53]
The 1954 Broadway musical The Golden Apple by librettist John Treville Latouche and composer Jerome Moross was freely adapted from the Iliad and the Odyssey, re-setting the action to America's Washington state in the years after the Spanish-American War, with events inspired by the Iliad in Act One and events inspired by the Odyssey in Act Two.
Christa Wolf's 1983 novel Cassandra is a critical engagement with the Iliad. Wolf's narrator is Cassandra, whose thoughts we hear at the moment just before her murder by Clytemnestra in Sparta. Wolf's narrator presents a feminist's view of the war, and of war in general. Cassandra's story is accompanied by four essays which Wolf delivered as the Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen. The essays present Wolf's concerns as a writer and rewriter of this canonical story and show the genesis of the novel through Wolf's own readings and in a trip she took to Greece.
David Melnick's Men in Aida (cf. μῆνιν ἄειδε) (1983) is a postmodern homophonic translation of Book One into a farcical bathhouse scenario, preserving the sounds but not the meaning of the original.
Contemporary popular culture[edit]
An epic science fiction adaptation/tribute by acclaimed author Dan Simmons titled Ilium was released in 2003. The novel received a Locus Award for best science fiction novel of 2003.
Yokanaan Kearns wrote a stage version of The Iliad titled Dis/Troy. The one-hour adaptation aimed at adolescents, in which four actors play all the major characters, was workshopped and read to the public at the Kennedy Center 2002 New Visions/New Voices Festival, premiered in 2003 at Honolulu Theatre for Youth, and published by Playscripts Inc.
A loose film adaptation of the Iliad, Troy, was released in 2004. Though the film received mixed reviews, it was a commercial success, particularly in international sales. It grossed $133 million in the United States and $497 million worldwide, placing it in the 88th top-grossing movies of all time.[54]
An excerpt from the Iliad is featured in volume one of the graphic novel anthology The Graphic Canon, with artwork and adaptation executed by Alice Duke. The anthology is edited by Russ Kick and published by Seven Stories Press.
Age of Bronze is an American comics series by writer/artist Eric Shanower retelling the legend of the Trojan War. It began in 1998 and is published by Image Comics.[55][56][57]
Published October 2011,[58] Alice Oswald's sixth collection, Memorial, is based on the Iliad but departs from the narrative form of the Iliad to focus on, and so commemorate, the individually-named characters whose deaths are mentioned in that poem.[59][60][61] Later in October 2011, Memorial was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize,[62] but in December 2011, Oswald withdrew the book from the shortlist,[63][64] citing concerns about the ethics of the prize's sponsors.[65]
English translations[edit]



Wenceslas Hollar's engraved title page of a 1660 edition of the Iliad, translated by John Ogilby.
Further information: English translations of Homer
George Chapman published his translation of the Iliad, in instalments, beginning in 1598, published in "fourteeners", a long-line ballad metre that "has room for all of Homer's figures of speech and plenty of new ones, as well as explanations in parentheses. At its best, as in Achilles' rejection of the embassy in Iliad Nine; it has great rhetorical power".[66] It quickly established itself as a classic in English poetry. In the preface to his own translation, Pope praises "the daring fiery spirit" of Chapman's rendering, which is "something like what one might imagine Homer, himself, would have writ before he arrived at years of discretion".
John Keats praised Chapman in the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816). John Ogilby's mid-seventeenth-century translation is among the early annotated editions; Alexander Pope's 1715 translation, in heroic couplet, is "The classic translation that was built on all the preceding versions",[67] and, like Chapman's, it is a major poetic work in its own right. William Cowper's Miltonic, blank verse 1791 edition is highly regarded for its greater fidelity to the Greek than either the Chapman or the Pope versions: "I have omitted nothing; I have invented nothing", Cowper says in prefacing his translation.
In the lectures On Translating Homer (1861), Matthew Arnold addresses the matters of translation and interpretation in rendering the Iliad to English; commenting upon the versions contemporarily available in 1861, he identifies the four essential poetic qualities of Homer to which the translator must do justice:

[i] that he is eminently rapid; [ii] that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; [iii] that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, [iv] that he is eminently noble.
After a discussion of the metres employed by previous translators, Arnold argues for a poetical dialect hexameter translation of the Iliad, like the original. "Laborious as this meter was, there were at least half a dozen attempts to translate the entire Iliad or Odyssey in hexameters; the last in 1945. Perhaps the most fluent of them was by J. Henry Dart [1862] in response to Arnold".[68] In 1870, the American poet William Cullen Bryant published a blank verse version, that Van Wyck Brooks describes as "simple, faithful".
Since 1950, there have been several English translations. Richmond Lattimore's version (1951) is "a free six-beat" line-for-line rendering that explicitly eschews "poetical dialect" for "the plain English of today". It is literal, unlike older verse renderings. Robert Fitzgerald's version (Oxford World's Classics, 1974) strives to situate the Iliad in the musical forms of English poetry. His forceful version is freer, with shorter lines that increase the sense of swiftness and energy. Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1990) and Stanley Lombardo (1997) are bolder than Lattimore in adding dramatic significance to Homer's conventional and formulaic language. Barry B. Powell's translation (Oxford University Press, 2014) renders the Homeric Greek with a simplicity and dignity reminiscent of the original.
Manuscripts[edit]
There are more than 2000 manuscripts of Homer.[69][70] Some of the most notable manuscripts include:
##Rom. Bibl. Nat. gr.6 + Matriti. Bibl. Nat. 4626 from 870-890 AD
##Venetus A = Venetus Marc. 822 from the 10th century
##Venetus B = Venetus Marc. 821 from the 11th century
##Ambrosian Iliad
##Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 20
##Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 21
##Codex Nitriensis (palimpsest)
See also[edit]
##Portal icon Hellenismos portal
##Mask of Agamemnon
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "Iliad". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
2.Jump up ^ Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Le monde d'Homère (The World of Homer), Perrin (2000), p. 19
3.Jump up ^ "Linguistic evidence supports date for Homeric epics - Altschuler - 2013 - BioEssays - Wiley Online Library". Onlinelibrary.wiley.com. 2013-02-18. Retrieved 2014-03-13.
4.Jump up ^ Aeschylus does portray it so in Fragment 134a.
5.Jump up ^ Hornblower, S. and Spawforth, A. The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization (1998) pp. 3, 347, 352.
6.Jump up ^ Homer's Iliad, Classical Technology Center.
7.Jump up ^ Lefkowitz, Mary. Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths (2003) New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press
8.Jump up ^ Taplin, Oliver. "Bring Back the Gods", The New York Times 14 December 2003.
9.Jump up ^ Jaynes, Julian. (1976) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Pg. 221
10.Jump up ^ 2.155, 2.251, 9.413, 9.434, 9.622, 10.509, 16.82
11.Jump up ^ "The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization". Athome.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2010-04-18.
12.Jump up ^ "Heroes and the Homeric Iliad". Uh.edu. Retrieved 2010-04-18.
13.^ Jump up to: a b Volk, Katharina. "ΚΛΕΟΣ ΑΦΘΙΤΟΝ Revisited". Classical Philology, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 61–68.
14.Jump up ^ 9.410-416
15.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951)
16.Jump up ^ II.46, V.724, XIII.22, XIV.238, XVIII.370
17.Jump up ^ Rouse, W.H.D. The Iliad (1938) p.11
18.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad, Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 1.13.
19.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad, Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 1.122.
20.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 1.181–7.
21.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 18.111–16.
22.Jump up ^ Fate as presented in Homer's "The Iliad", Everything2
23.Jump up ^ Iliad Study Guide[dead link], Brooklyn College
24.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 16.849–54.
25.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 16.433–4.
26.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 16.440–3.
27.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 22.178–81.
28.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 20.300–4.
29.Jump up ^ Ἰλιάς, Ἰλιακός, Ἴλιος. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
30.Jump up ^ Hist. 2.116
31.Jump up ^ Robot Scans Ancient Manuscript in 3-D, Wired.[unreliable source?]
32.Jump up ^ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition (1994) p.173
33.Jump up ^ Porter, John. The Iliad as Oral Formulaic Poetry (8 May 2006) University of Saskatchewan. Retrieved 26 November 2007.
34.Jump up ^ Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1960) p.190
35.Jump up ^ Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1960) p.195
36.Jump up ^ Iliad, Book XVI, 130–54
37.Jump up ^ Armstrong, James I. The Arming Motif in the Iliad. The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 79, No. 4. (1958), pp.337–54.
38.Jump up ^ Toohey, Peter. Reading Epic: An Introduction to the Ancient Narrative. New Fetter Lane, London: Routledge, (1992).
39.Jump up ^ Iliad 3.45–50
40.Jump up ^ Iliad 59–65
41.Jump up ^ Keegan, John. A History of Warfare (1993) p.248
42.Jump up ^ Iliad 6.6
43.Jump up ^ Cahill, Tomas. Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
44.Jump up ^ Lendon, J.E."Soldiers and Ghosts" (2005) p.36
45.Jump up ^ Lendon, J.E. "Soldiers and Ghosts" (2005) p. 22–3
46.Jump up ^ Iliad. 4.473-83, Lattimore, translator
47.Jump up ^ Lendon, J.E. "Soldiers and Ghosts" (2005) p.51
48.Jump up ^ 5.17
49.Jump up ^ (Iliad. 7.237-43, Lattimore, translator)
50.Jump up ^ Lendon, J.E. "Soldiers and Ghosts" (2005) p.240
51.Jump up ^ A large amount of the citations and argumentation in this section of the article must be ultimately attributed to:Lendon, J.E. Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005.
52.Jump up ^ Greek Warfare: Myth and Realities [Paperback] Hans Van Wees, p 249
53.Jump up ^ Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim (2008). On Violence: A Reader. Duke University Press. p. 377. ISBN 978-0-8223-3769-0.
54.Jump up ^ IMDB. "All Time Worldwide Box Office Grosses", Box Office Mojo
55.Jump up ^ A Thousand Ships (2001, ISBN 1-58240-200-0)
56.Jump up ^ Sacrifice (2004, ISBN 1-58240-360-0)
57.Jump up ^ Betrayal, Part One (2008, ISBN 978-1-58240-845-3)
58.Jump up ^ Oswald, Alice (2011). Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-27416-1.
59.Jump up ^ Holland, Tom (17 October 2011). "The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller / Memorial by Alice Oswald. Surfing the rip tide of all things Homeric.". The New Statesman (London: New Statesman). Retrieved 1 June 2012.
60.Jump up ^ Kellaway, Kate (2 October 2011). "Memorial by Alice Oswald – review". The Observer (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 1 June 2012.
61.Jump up ^ Higgins, Charlotte (28 October 2011). "The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and more – review". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 1 June 2012.
62.Jump up ^ Flood, Alison (20 October 2011). "TS Eliot prize 2011 shortlist revealed". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 1 June 2012.
63.Jump up ^ Waters, Florence (6 December 2011). "Poet withdraws from TS Eliot prize over sponsorship". The Telegraph (London: Telegraph Media Group Limited). Retrieved 2012-02-13.
64.Jump up ^ Flood, Alison (6 December 2011). "Alice Oswald withdraws from TS Eliot prize in protest at sponsor Aurum". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 2012-02-13.
65.Jump up ^ Oswald, Alice (12 December 2011). "Why I pulled out of the TS Eliot poetry prize". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 2012-02-13.
66.Jump up ^ The Oxford Guide to English Literature in Translation, p.351
67.Jump up ^ The Oxford Guide to English Literature in Translation, p.352
68.Jump up ^ The Oxford Guide to English Literature in Translation, p.354
69.Jump up ^ OCLC 722287142
70.Jump up ^ Bird, Graeme D. (2010). Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad : the witness of the ptolemaic papyr. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies. ISBN 0-674-05323-0.
References[edit]
##Budimir, Milan (1940). On the Iliad and Its Poet.
##Mueller, Martin (1984). The Iliad. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-800027-2.
##Nagy, Gregory (1979). The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-2388-9.
##Powell, Barry B. (2004). Homer. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-5325-6.
##Seaford, Richard (1994). Reciprocity and Ritual. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-815036-9.
##West, Martin (1997). The East Face of Helicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-815221-3.
##Fox, Robin Lane (2008). Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their myths in the epic age of Homer. Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-7139-9980-8.
Further reading[edit]
##Murray, A.T.; Wyatt, William F., Homer: The Iliad, Books I-XII, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-674-99579-6
##Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume I, Books 1-4, Cambridge University Press, 1985. ISBN 0-521-23709-2
##Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume II, Books 5-8, Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-521-23710-6
##Hainsworth, Bryan; Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume III, Books 9-12, Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-23711-4
##Edwards, Mark W.; Janko, Richard; Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume IV, Books 13-16, Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-521-28171-7
##Edwards, Mark W.; Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume V, Books 17–20, Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-521-30959-X
##Richardson, Nicholas; Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume VI, Books 21–24, Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-30960-3
##West, Martin L., Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad, München : K.G. Saur, 2001. ISBN 3-598-73005-5
External links[edit]
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to John Flaxman's Iliad 1793. First edition 1795..
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
The Iliad

 Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Ἰλιάς

##D. B. Monro, Homer: Iliad, Books I-XII, with an Introduction, a Brief Homeric Grammar, and Notes (3rd ed., 1890)
##D. B. Monro, Homer: Iliad, Books XIII-XXIV, with Notes (4th ed., 1903)
##D. B. Monro, A Grammar of the Homeric Dialect (2nd ed., 1891)
##Iliad, online version of the work by Homer (English). Pope translation.
##Iliad in Ancient Greek: from the Perseus Project (PP), with the Murray and Butler translations and hyperlinks to mythological and grammatical commentary; via the Chicago Homer, with the Lattimore translation and markup indicating formulaic repetitions
##Links to translations freely available online are included in the list above.
##Gods, Achaeans and Troyans. An interactive visualization of Iliad's characters flow and relations.
##The Iliad: A Study Guide
##Classical images illustrating the Iliad. Repertory of outstanding painted vases, wall paintings and other ancient iconography of the War of Troy.
##Comments on background, plot, themes, authorship, and translation issues by 2008 translator Herbert Jordan.
##The Iliad of Homer a Parsed Interlinear Text, Books 1-24: Kindle edition
##Flaxman illustrations of the Iliad
##The Iliad study guide, themes, quotes, teacher resources
##The Iliad of Homer, Translated into English Blank Verse by William Cowper, edition c.1860. Online at Project Gutenberg.
##The Opening to the Iliad (Proem), Read in Ancient Greek with a simultaneous translation.
##The Iliad Map, map of locations in The Iliad
##Published English translations of Homer, with samples and some reviews by translator and scholar Ian Johnston


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Iliad
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This article is about the epic poem. For other uses, see Iliad (disambiguation).

Trojan War

Akhilleus Patroklos Antikensammlung Berlin F2278.jpg
Achilles tending the wounded Patroclus
 (Attic red-figure kylix, c. 500 BC)

The war
Setting: Troy (modern Hisarlik, Turkey)
Period: Bronze Age
Traditional dating: c. 1194–1184 BC
 Modern dating: between 1260 and 1240 BC
Outcome: Greek victory, destruction of Troy
See also: Historicity of the Iliad

Literary sources
Iliad · Epic Cycle · Aeneid, Book 2 ·
Iphigenia in Aulis · Philoctetes ·
Ajax · The Trojan Women · Posthomerica
See also: Trojan War in popular culture

Episodes
Judgement of Paris · Seduction of Helen ·
Trojan Horse · Sack of Troy · The Returns ·
Wanderings of Odysseus ·
Aeneas and the Founding of Rome

Greeks and allies
Agamemnon · Achilles · Helen · Menelaus · Nestor · Odysseus · Ajax · Diomedes · Patroclus · Thersites · Achaeans · Myrmidons
See also: Catalogue of Ships

Trojans and allies
Priam · Hecuba · Hector · Paris · Cassandra · Andromache · Aeneas · Memnon  · Troilus · Penthesilea and the Amazons · Sarpedon
See also: Trojan Battle Order

Related topics
Homeric question · Archaeology of Troy · Mycenae · Bronze Age warfare
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The Iliad (/ˈɪliəd/;[1] sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) 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 (Ilium) 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.
Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege; the earlier events, such as the gathering of warriors for the siege, the cause of the war, and related concerns tend to appear near the beginning. Then the epic narrative takes up events prophesied for the future, such as Achilles' looming death and the sack of Troy, prefigured and alluded to more and more vividly, so that when it reaches an end, the poem has told a more or less complete tale of the Trojan War.
The Iliad is paired with something of a sequel, the Odyssey, also attributed to Homer. Along with the Odyssey, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, and its written version is usually dated to around the eighth century BC.[2] Recent statistical modelling based on language evolution has found it to date to 760–710 BC.[3] In the modern vulgate (accepted version), the Iliad contains 15,693 lines; it is written in Homeric Greek, a literary amalgam of Ionic Greek and other dialects.


Contents  [hide]
1 Synopsis
2 Major characters 2.1 Achaeans 2.1.1 Achilles and Patroclus
2.2 Trojans
2.3 Gods
3 Themes 3.1 Nostos
3.2 Kleos
3.3 Timê
3.4 Wrath
3.5 Fate
4 Date and textual history 4.1 The Iliad as oral tradition
5 Warfare in the Iliad 5.1 Depiction of infantry combat
5.2 Influence on classical Greek warfare
6 Influence on the arts and literature 6.1 20th century
6.2 Contemporary popular culture
7 English translations
8 Manuscripts
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links

Synopsis[edit]
Note: Book numbers are in parentheses and come before the synopsis of the book.
(1) After an invocation to the Muses, the story launches in medias res (in the middle of things) towards the end of the Trojan War between the Trojans and the besieging Greeks. Chryses, a Trojan priest of Apollo, offers the Greeks wealth for the return of his daughter Chryseis, a captive of Agamemnon, the Greek leader. Although most of the Greek army is in favour of the offer, Agamemnon refuses. Chryses prays for Apollo's help, and Apollo causes a plague throughout the Greek army.
After nine days of plague, Achilles, the leader of the Myrmidon contingent, calls an assembly to solve the plague problem. Under pressure, Agamemnon agrees to return Chryseis to her father, but also decides to take Achilles's captive, Briseis, as compensation. Angered, Achilles declares that he and his men will no longer fight for Agamemnon, but will go home. Odysseus takes a ship and brings Chryseis to her father, whereupon Apollo ends the plague.



 The first verses of the Iliad
In the meantime, Agamemnon's messengers take Briseis away. Achilles then asks his mother, Thetis, to ask Zeus that the Greeks be brought to breaking point by the Trojans, so Agamemnon will realize how much the Greeks need Achilles. Thetis does so, and Zeus agrees.
(2) Zeus sends a dream to Agamemnon, urging him to attack the city. Agamemnon heeds the dream but decides to first test the morale of the Greek army by telling them to go home. The plan backfires, and only the intervention of Odysseus, inspired by Athena, stops a rout.
Odysseus confronts and beats Thersites, a common soldier who voices discontent at fighting Agamemnon's war. After a meal, the Greeks deploy in companies upon the Trojan plain. The poet takes the opportunity to describe the provenance of each Greek contingent. When news of the Greek deployment reaches king Priam, the Trojans too sortie upon the plain. In a similar list to that for the Greeks, the poet describes the Trojans and their allies.
(3) The armies approach each other on the plain, but before they meet, Paris offers to end the war by fighting a duel with Menelaus, urged by his brother and head of the Trojan army, Hector. While Helen tells Priam about the Greek commanders from the walls of Troy, both sides swear a truce and promise to abide by the outcome of the duel. Paris is beaten, but Aphrodite rescues him and leads him to bed with Helen before Menelaus could kill him.
(4) Pressured by Hera's hatred of Troy, Zeus arranges for the Trojan Pandaros to break the truce by wounding Menelaus with an arrow. Agamemnon rouses the Greeks, and battle is joined.
(5) In the fighting, Diomedes kills many Trojans, including Pandaros, and defeats Aeneas, whom again Aphrodite rescues, but Diomedes attacks and wounds the goddess. Apollo faces Diomedes, and warns him against warring with gods. Many heroes and commanders join in, including Hector, and the gods supporting each side try to influence the battle. Emboldened by Athena, Diomedes wounds Ares and puts him out of action.
(6) Hector rallies the Trojans and stops a rout; the Greek Diomedes and the Trojan Glaukos find common ground and exchange unequal gifts. Hector enters the city, urges prayers and sacrifices, incites Paris to battle, bids his wife Andromache and son Astyanax farewell on the city walls, and rejoins the battle.
(7) Hector duels with Ajax, but nightfall interrupts the fight and both sides retire. The Greeks agree to burn their dead and build a wall to protect their ships and camp, while the Trojans quarrel about returning Helen. Paris offers to return the treasure he took, and give further wealth as compensation, but without returning Helen, and the offer is refused. A day's truce is agreed for burning the dead, during which the Greeks also build their wall and trench.
(8) The next morning, Zeus prohibits the gods from interfering, and fighting begins anew. The Trojans prevail and force the Greeks back to their wall while Hera and Athena are forbidden from helping. Night falls before the Trojans can assail the Greek wall. They camp in the field to attack at first light, and their watchfires light the plain like stars.



Iliad, Book VIII, lines 245–53, Greek manuscript, late 5th, early 6th centuries AD.
(9) Meanwhile, the Greeks are desperate. Agamemnon admits his error, and sends an embassy composed of Odysseus, Ajax, Phoenix, and two heralds to offer Briseis and extensive gifts to Achilles, who has been camped next to his ships throughout, if only he would return to the fighting. Achilles and his companion Patroclus receive the embassy well, but Achilles angrily refuses Agamemnon's offer, and declares that he would only return to battle if the Trojans reach his ships and threaten them with fire. The embassy returns empty-handed.
(10) Later that night, Odysseus and Diomedes venture out to the Trojan lines, killing the Trojan Dolon and wreaking havoc in the camps of some Thracian allies of Troy.
(11) In the morning, the fighting is fierce and Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Odysseus are all wounded. Achilles sends Patroclus from his camp to inquire about the Greek casualties, and while there Patroclus is moved to pity by a speech of Nestor.
(12) The Trojans assault the Greek wall on foot. Hector, ignoring an omen, leads the terrible fighting. The Greeks are overwhelmed in rout, the wall's gate is broken, and Hector charges in.
(13) Many fall on both sides. The Trojan seer Polydamas urges Hector to fall back and warns him about Achilles, but is ignored.
(14) Hera seduces Zeus and lures him to sleep, allowing Poseidon to help the Greeks, and the Trojans are driven back onto the plain.
(15) Zeus awakes and is enraged by Poseidon's intervention. Against the mounting discontent of the Greek-supporting gods, Zeus sends Apollo to aid the Trojans, who once again breach the wall, and the battle reaches the ships.
(16) Patroclus can stand to watch no longer, and begs Achilles to be allowed to defend the ships. Achilles relents, and lends Patroclus his armor, but sends him off with a stern admonition not to pursue the Trojans, lest he take Achilles's glory. Patroclus leads the Myrmidons to battle and arrives as the Trojans set fire to the first ships. The Trojans are routed by the sudden onslaught, and Patroclus begins his assault by killing the Trojan hero Sarpedon. Patroclus, ignoring Achilles's command, pursues and reaches the gates of Troy, where Apollo himself stops him. Patroclus is set upon by Apollo and Euphorbos, and is finally killed by Hector.
(17) Hector takes Achilles's armor from the fallen Patroclus, but fighting develops around Patroclus' body.
(18) Achilles is mad with grief when he hears of Patroclus's death, and vows to take vengeance on Hector; his mother Thetis grieves, too, knowing that Achilles is fated to die young if he kills Hector. Achilles is urged to help retrieve Patroclus' body, but has no armour. Made brilliant by Athena, Achilles stands next to the Greek wall and roars in rage. The Trojans are dismayed by his appearance and the Greeks manage to bear Patroclus' body away. Again Polydamas urges Hector to withdraw into the city, again Hector refuses, and the Trojans camp in the plain at nightfall. Patroclus is mourned, and meanwhile, at Thetis' request, Hephaestus fashions a new set of armor for Achilles, among which is a magnificently wrought shield.
(19) In the morning, Agamemnon gives Achilles all the promised gifts, including Briseis, but he is indifferent to them. Achilles fasts while the Greeks take their meal, and straps on his new armor, and heaves his great spear. His horse Xanthos prophesies to Achilles his death. Achilles drives his chariot into battle.
(20) Zeus lifts the ban on the gods' interference, and the gods freely intervene on both sides. The onslaught of Achilles, burning with rage and grief, is terrible, and he slays many.
(21) Driving the Trojans before him, Achilles cuts off half in the river Skamandros and proceeds to slaughter them and fills the river with the dead. The river, angry at the killing, confronts Achilles, but is beaten back by Hephaestus' firestorm. The gods fight among themselves. The great gates of the city are opened to receive the fleeing Trojans, and Apollo leads Achilles away from the city by pretending to be a Trojan.
(22) When Apollo reveals himself to Achilles, the Trojans had retreated into the city, all except for Hector, who, having twice ignored the counsels of Polydamas, feels the shame of rout and resolves to face Achilles, in spite of the pleas of Priam and Hecuba, his parents. When Achilles approaches, Hector's will fails him, and he is chased around the city by Achilles. Finally, Athena tricks him to stop running, and he turns to face his opponent. After a brief duel, Achilles stabs Hector through the neck. Before dying, Hector reminds Achilles that he is fated to die in the war as well. Achilles takes Hector's body and dishonours it.
(23) The ghost of Patroclus comes to Achilles in a dream and urges the burial of his body. The Greeks hold a day of funeral games, and Achilles gives out the prizes.
(24) Dismayed by Achilles' continued abuse of Hector's body, Zeus decides that it must be returned to Priam. Led by Hermes, Priam takes a wagon out of Troy, across the plains, and enters the Greek camp unnoticed. He grasps Achilles by the knees and begs to have his son's body. Achilles is moved to tears, and the two lament their losses in the war. After a meal, Priam carries Hector's body back into Troy. Hector is buried, and the city mourns.
Major characters[edit]
Main article: List of characters in the Iliad
See also: Category: Deities in the Iliad
The many characters of the Iliad are catalogued; the latter-half of Book II, the "Catalogue of Ships", lists commanders and cohorts; battle scenes feature quickly slain minor characters.
Achaeans[edit]
##The Achaeans (Ἀχαιοί) — also called Hellenes (Greeks), Danaans (Δαναοί), or Argives (Ἀργεĩοι). ##Agamemnon — King of Mycenae, leader of the Greeks.
##Achilles — Leader of the Myrmidons, hero, son of a divine mother, Thetis.
##Odysseus — King of Ithaca, Greek commander.
##Ajax the Greater — son of Telamon and king of Salamis.
##Menelaus — King of Sparta, husband of Helen and brother of Agamemnon.
##Diomedes — son of Tydeus, King of Argos.
##Ajax the Lesser — son of Oileus, often partner of Ajax the Greater.
##Patroclus — Achilles' closest companion.
##Nestor — King of Pylos, and trusted advisor to Agamemnon.

Achilles and Patroclus[edit]
Main article: Achilles and Patroclus



Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus (1855) by the Russian realist Nikolai Ge
Much debate has surrounded the nature of the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus, as to whether it can be described as a homoerotic one or not. Classical and Hellenistic Athenian scholars perceived it as pederastic,[4] while others perceived it as a platonic warrior-bond.[5]
Trojans[edit]
##The Trojan men ##Hector — son of King Priam and the foremost Trojan warrior.
##Aeneas — son of Anchises and Aphrodite.
##Deiphobus — brother of Hector and Paris.
##Paris — Helen's lover-abductor.
##Priam — the aged King of Troy.
##Polydamas — a prudent commander whose advice is ignored; he is Hector's foil.
##Agenor — a Trojan warrior, son of Antenor, who attempts to fight Achilles (Book XXI).
##Sarpedon, son of Zeus — killed by Patroclus. Was friend of Glaucus and co-leader of the Lycians (fought for the Trojans).
##Glaucus, son of Hippolochus — friend of Sarpedon and co-leader of the Lycians (fought for the Trojans).
##Euphorbus — first Trojan warrior to wound Patroclus.
##Dolon — a spy upon the Greek camp (Book X).
##Antenor — King Priam's advisor, who argues for returning Helen to end the war.
##Polydorus — son of Priam and Laothoe.
##Pandarus — famous archer and son of Lycaon.
##The Trojan women ##Hecuba (Ἑκάβη, Hekabe) — Priam's wife, mother of Hector, Cassandra, Paris, and others.
##Helen (Ἑλένη) — daughter of Zeus; Menelaus's wife; espoused first to Paris, then to Deiphobus; her abduction by Paris precipitated the war.
##Andromache — Hector's wife, mother of Astyanax.
##Cassandra — Priam's daughter.
##Briseis — a Trojan woman captured by the Greeks; she was Achilles' prize of the Trojan war.

Gods[edit]
In the literary Trojan War of the Iliad, the Olympic gods, goddesses, and demigods fight and play great roles in human warfare. Unlike practical Greek religious observance, Homer's portrayals of them suited his narrative purpose, being very different from the polytheistic ideals Greek society used. To wit, the Classical-era historian Herodotus says that Homer, and his contemporary, the poet Hesiod, were the first artists to name and describe their appearance and characters.[6]
In Greek Gods Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths, Mary Lefkowitz discusses the relevance of divine action in the Iliad, attempting to answer the question of whether or not divine intervention is a discrete occurrence (for its own sake), or if such godly behaviors are mere human character metaphors. The intellectual interest of Classic-era authors, such as Thucydides and Plato, was limited to their utility as "a way of talking about human life rather than a description or a truth", because, if the gods remain religious figures, rather than human metaphors, their "existence"—without the foundation of either dogma or a bible of faiths—then allowed Greek culture the intellectual breadth and freedom to conjure gods fitting any religious function they required as a people.[7][8]
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, psychologist Julian Jaynes uses the Iliad as a major supporting evidence for his theory of Bicameralism, which posits that until about the time described in the Iliad, humans had a much different mentality than present day humans, essentially lacking in what we call consciousness. He suggests that humans heard and obeyed commands from what they identified as gods, until the change in human mentality that incorporated the motivating force into the conscious self. He points out that almost every action in the Iliad is directed, caused, or influenced by a god, and that earlier translations show an astonishing lack of words suggesting thought, planning, or introspection. Those that do appear, he argues, are misinterpretations made by translators imposing a modern mentality on the characters.[9]
##The major deities: ##Zeus (Neutral)
##Hera (Achaeans)
##Artemis (Trojans)
##Apollo (Trojans)
##Hades (Neutral)
##Aphrodite (Trojans)
##Ares (Trojans)
##Athena (Achaeans)
##Hermes (Neutral)
##Poseidon (Achaeans)
##Hephaestus (Achaeans)
##The minor deities: ##Eris
##Iris
##Thetis
##Leto
##Proteus
##Scamander
##Phobos
##Deimos
##Hypnos

Themes[edit]
Nostos[edit]
Nostos (νόστος, "homecoming") occurs seven times in the poem.[10] Thematically, the concept of homecoming is much explored in Ancient Greek literature, especially in the post-war homeward fortunes experienced by the Atreidae (Agamemnon and Menelaus), and Odysseus (see the Odyssey). Thus, nostos is impossible without sacking Troy—King Agamemnon's motive for winning, at any cost.
Kleos[edit]
Kleos (κλέος, "glory, fame") is the concept of glory earned in heroic battle.[11] For most of the Greek invaders of Troy, notably Odysseus, kleos is earned in a victorious nostos (homecoming). Yet, Achilles must choose only one of the two rewards, either nostos or kleos.[12] In Book IX (IX.410–16), he poignantly tells Agamemnon's envoys—Odysseus, Phoenix, Ajax—begging his reinstatement to battle about having to choose between two fates (διχθαδίας κήρας, 9.411).[13]
The passage reads (the translation is Lattimore's):




μήτηρ γάρ τέ μέ φησι θεὰ Θέτις ἀργυρόπεζα (410)
διχθαδίας κῆρας φερέμεν θανάτοιο τέλος δέ.
εἰ μέν κ’ αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι,
ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται
 εἰ δέ κεν οἴκαδ’ ἵκωμι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν,
ὤλετό μοι κλέος ἐσθλόν, ἐπὶ δηρὸν δέ μοι αἰὼν (415)
ἔσσεται, οὐδέ κέ μ’ ὦκα τέλος θανάτοιο κιχείη.[14]

For my mother Thetis the goddess of silver feet tells me
 I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,
 if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,
 my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;
 but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
 the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
 left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.[15]

In forgoing his nostos, he will earn the greater reward of kleos aphthiton (κλέος ἄφθιτον, "fame imperishable").[13] In the poem, aphthiton (ἄφθιτον, "imperishable") occurs five other times,[16] each occurrence denotes an object: Agamemnon's sceptre, the wheel of Hebe's chariot, the house of Poseidon, the throne of Zeus, the house of Hephaestus. Translator Lattimore renders kleos aphthiton as forever immortal and as forever imperishable—connoting Achilles's mortality by underscoring his greater reward in returning to battle Troy.
Achilles' shield, crafted by Hephaestus and given to him by his mother Thetis, bears an image of stars in the centre. The stars conjure profound images of the place of a single man, no matter how heroic, in the perspective of the entire cosmos.
Timê[edit]
Akin to kleos is timê (τιμή, "respect, honour"), the concept denoting the respectability an honourable man accrues with accomplishment (cultural, political, martial), per his station in life. In Book I, the Greek troubles begin with King Agamemnon's dishonourable, unkingly behaviour—first, by threatening the priest Chryses (1.11), then, by aggravating them in disrespecting Achilles, by confiscating Briseis from him (1.171). The warrior's consequent rancour against the dishonourable king ruins the Greek military cause.
Wrath[edit]



The Wrath of Achilles (1819), by Michel Drolling.
The poem's initial word, μῆνιν (mēnin, accusative of μῆνις, mēnis, "wrath, rage, fury"), establishes the Iliad's principal theme: The "Wrath of Achilles."[17] His personal rage and wounded soldier's vanity propel the story: the Greeks' faltering in battle, the slayings of Patroclus and Hector, and the fall of Troy. In Book I, the Wrath of Achilles first emerges in the Achilles-convoked meeting, between the Greek kings and the seer Calchas. King Agamemnon dishonours Chryses, the Trojan priest of Apollo, by refusing with a threat the restitution of his daughter, Chryseis—despite the proffered ransom of "gifts beyond count".[18] The insulted priest prays his god's help, and a nine-day rain of divine plague arrows falls upon the Greeks. Moreover, in that meeting, Achilles accuses Agamemnon of being "greediest for gain of all men".[19] To that, Agamemnon replies:

But here is my threat to you.
 Even as Phoibos Apollo is taking away my Chryseis.
 I shall convey her back in my own ship, with my own
 followers; but I shall take the fair-cheeked Briseis,
 your prize, I myself going to your shelter, that you may learn well
 how much greater I am than you, and another man may shrink back
 from likening himself to me and contending against me.[20]

After that, only Athena stays Achilles's wrath. He vows to never again obey orders from Agamemnon. Furious, Achilles cries to his mother, Thetis, who persuades Zeus's divine intervention—favouring the Trojans—until Achilles's rights are restored. Meanwhile, Hector leads the Trojans to almost pushing the Greeks back to the sea (Book XII). Later, Agamemnon contemplates defeat and retreat to Greece (Book XIV). Again, the Wrath of Achilles turns the war's tide in seeking vengeance when Hector kills Patroclus. Aggrieved, Achilles tears his hair and dirties his face. Thetis comforts her mourning son, who tells her:

So it was here that the lord of men Agamemnon angered me.
 Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, and for all our
 sorrow beat down by force the anger deeply within us.
 Now I shall go, to overtake that killer of a dear life,
 Hektor; then I will accept my own death, at whatever
 time Zeus wishes to bring it about, and the other immortals.[21]

Accepting the prospect of death as fair price for avenging Patroclus, he returns to battle, dooming Hector and Troy, thrice chasing him 'round the Trojan walls, before slaying him, then dragging the corpse behind his chariot, back to camp.



Achilles Slays Hector, by Peter Paul Rubens (1630–35).
Fate[edit]
Fate (κήρ, kēr, "fated death") propels most of the events of the Iliad. Once set, gods and men abide it, neither truly able nor willing to contest it. How fate is set is unknown, but it is told by the Fates and by Zeus through sending omens to seers such as Calchas. Men and their gods continually speak of heroic acceptance and cowardly avoidance of one's slated fate.[22] Fate does not determine every action, incident, and occurrence, but it does determine the outcome of life—before killing him, Hector calls Patroclus a fool for cowardly avoidance of his fate, by attempting his defeat; Patroclus retorts: [23]

No, deadly destiny, with the son of Leto, has killed me,
 and of men it was Euphorbos; you are only my third slayer.
 And put away in your heart this other thing that I tell you.
 You yourself are not one who shall live long, but now already
 death and powerful destiny are standing beside you,
 to go down under the hands of Aiakos' great son, Achilleus.[24]
Here, Patroclus alludes to fated death by Hector's hand, and Hector's fated death by Achilles's hand. Each accepts the outcome of his life, yet, no-one knows if the gods can alter fate. The first instance of this doubt occurs in Book XVI. Seeing Patroclus about to kill Sarpedon, his mortal son, Zeus says:

Ah me, that it is destined that the dearest of men, Sarpedon,
 must go down under the hands of Menoitios' son Patroclus.[25]

About his dilemma, Hera asks Zeus:

Majesty, son of Kronos, what sort of thing have you spoken?
 Do you wish to bring back a man who is mortal, one long since
 doomed by his destiny, from ill-sounding death and release him?
 Do it, then; but not all the rest of us gods shall approve you.[26]

In deciding between losing a son or abiding fate, Zeus, King of the Gods, allows it. This motif recurs when he considers sparing Hector, whom he loves and respects. Again, Athena asks him:

Father of the shining bolt, dark misted, what is this you said?
 Do you wish to bring back a man who is mortal, one long since
 doomed by his destiny, from ill-sounding death and release him?
 Do it, then; but not all the rest of us gods shall approve you.[27]

Again, Zeus appears capable of altering fate, but does not, deciding instead to abide set outcomes; yet, contrariwise, fate spares Aeneas, after Apollo convinces the over-matched Trojan to fight Achilles. Poseidon cautiously speaks:

But come, let us ourselves get him away from death, for fear
 the son of Kronos may be angered if now Achilleus
 kills this man. It is destined that he shall be the survivor,
 that the generation of Dardanos shall not die ...[28]

Divinely aided, Aeneas escapes the wrath of Achilles and survives the Trojan War. Whether or not the gods can alter fate, they do abide it, despite its countering their human allegiances; thus, the mysterious origin of fate is a power beyond the gods. Fate implies the primeval, tripartite division of the world that Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades effected in deposing their father, Cronus, for its dominion. Zeus took the Air and the Sky, Poseidon the Waters, and Hades the Underworld, the land of the dead—yet they share dominion of the Earth. Despite the earthly powers of the Olympic gods, only the Three Fates set the destiny of Man.
Date and textual history[edit]
Further information: Homeric question and Historicity of the Iliad
The poem dates to the archaic period of Classical Antiquity. Scholarly consensus mostly places it in the 8th century BC, although some favour a 7th-century date. Herodotus placed Homer at approximately 400 years before his own time, which would place Homer at circa 850 BC.
The historical backdrop of the poem is the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse, in the early 12th century BC. Homer is thus separated from his subject matter by about 400 years, the period known as the Greek Dark Ages. Intense scholarly debate has surrounded the question of which portions of the poem preserve genuine traditions from the Mycenaean period. The Catalogue of Ships in particular has the striking feature that its geography does not portray Greece in the Iron Age, the time of Homer, but as it was before the Dorian invasion.
The title Ἰλιάς "Ilias" (genitive Ἰλιάδος "Iliados") is elliptic for ἡ ποίησις Ἰλιάς "he poiesis Ilias", meaning "the Trojan poem". Ἰλιάς, "of Troy", is the specifically feminine adjective form from Ἴλιον, "Troy"; the masculine adjective form would be Ἰλιακός or Ἴλιος.[29] It is used by Herodotus.[30]
Venetus A, copied in the 10th century AD, is the oldest fully extant manuscript of the Iliad.[31] The editio princeps dates to 1488, printed by Demetrius Chalcondyles in Florence.
The Iliad as oral tradition[edit]
In antiquity, the Greeks applied the Iliad and the Odyssey as the bases of pedagogy. Literature was central to the educational-cultural function of the itinerant rhapsode, who composed consistent epic poems from memory and improvisation, and disseminated them, via song and chant, in his travels and at the Panathenaic Festival of athletics, music, poetics, and sacrifice, celebrating Athena's birthday.[32]
Originally, Classical scholars treated the Iliad and the Odyssey as written poetry, and Homer as a writer. Yet, by the 1920s, Milman Parry (1902–1935) had launched a movement claiming otherwise. His investigation of the oral Homeric style—"stock epithets" and "reiteration" (words, phrases, stanzas) —established that these formulae were artifacts of oral tradition easily applied to an hexametric line. A two-word stock epithet (e.g. "resourceful Odysseus") reiteration may complement a character name by filling a half-line, thus, freeing the poet to compose a half-line of "original" formulaic text to complete his meaning.[33] In Yugoslavia, Parry and his assistant, Albert Lord (1912–1991), studied the oral-formulaic composition of Serbian oral poetry, yielding the Parry/Lord thesis that established oral tradition studies, later developed by Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Gregory Nagy.
In The Singer of Tales (1960), Lord presents likenesses between the tragedies of the Greek Patroclus, in the Iliad, and of the Sumerian Enkidu, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and claims to refute, with "careful analysis of the repetition of thematic patterns", that the Patroclus storyline upsets Homer's established compositional formulae of "wrath, bride-stealing, and rescue"; thus, stock-phrase reiteration does not restrict his originality in fitting story to rhyme.[34][35] Likewise, in The Arming Motif, Prof. James Armstrong reports that the poem's formulae yield richer meaning because the "arming motif" diction—describing Achilles, Agamemnon, Paris, and Patroclus—serves to "heighten the importance of ... an impressive moment", thus, "[reiteration] creates an atmosphere of smoothness", wherein, Homer distinguishes Patroclus from Achilles, and foreshadows the former's death with positive and negative turns of phrase.[36][37]
In the Iliad, occasional syntactic inconsistency may be an oral tradition effect—for example, Aphrodite is "laughter-loving", despite being painfully wounded by Diomedes (Book V, 375); and the divine representations may mix Mycenaean and Greek Dark Age (ca. 1150–800 BC) mythologies, parallelling the hereditary basileis nobles (lower social rank rulers) with minor deities, such as Scamander, et al.[38]
Warfare in the Iliad[edit]
Depiction of infantry combat[edit]
Despite Mycenae and Troy being maritime powers, the Iliad features no sea battles.[39] So, the Trojan shipwright (of the ship that transported Helen to Troy), Phereclus, fights afoot, as an infantryman.[40] The battle dress and armour of hero and soldier are well-described. They enter battle in chariots, launching javelins into the enemy formations, then dismount—for hand-to-hand combat with yet more javelin throwing, rock throwing, and if necessary hand to hand sword and a shoulder-borne hoplon (shield) fighting.[41] Ajax the Greater, son of Telamon, sports a large, rectangular shield (σάκος, sakos) with which he protects himself and Teucer, his brother:
Ninth came Teucer, stretching his curved bow.He stood beneath the shield of Ajax, son of Telamon.As Ajax cautiously pulled his shield aside,Teucer would peer out quickly, shoot off an arrow,hit someone in the crowd, dropping that soldierright where he stood, ending his life—then he'd duck back,crouching down by Ajax, like a child beside its mother.Ajax would then conceal him with his shining shield.(Iliad 8.267–72, Ian Johnston, translator)
Ajax's cumbersome shield is more suitable for defence than for offence, while his cousin, Achilles, sports a large, rounded, octagonal shield that he successfully deploys along with his spear against the Trojans:
Just as a man constructs a wall for some high house,using well-fitted stones to keep out forceful winds,that's how close their helmets and bossed shields lined up,shield pressing against shield, helmet against helmetman against man. On the bright ridges of the helmets,horsehair plumes touched when warriors moved their heads.That's how close they were to one another.(Iliad 16.213–7, Ian Johnston, translator)
In describing infantry combat, Homer names the phalanx formation,[42] but most scholars do not believe the historical Trojan War was so fought.[43] In the Bronze Age, the chariot was the main battle transport-weapon (e.g. the Battle of Kadesh). The available evidence, from the Dendra armour and the Pylos Palace paintings, indicate the Mycenaeans used two-man chariots, with a long-spear-armed principal rider, unlike the three-man Hittite chariots with short-spear-armed riders, and unlike the arrow-armed Egyptian and Assyrian two-man chariots. Nestor spearheads his troops with chariots; he advises them:
In your eagerness to engage the Trojans,don't any of you charge ahead of others,trusting in your strength and horsemanship.And don't lag behind. That will hurt our charge.Any man whose chariot confronts an enemy'sshould thrust with his spear at him from there.That's the most effective tactic, the waymen wiped out city strongholds long ago —their chests full of that style and spirit.(Iliad 4.301–09, Ian Johnston, translator)
Although Homer's depictions are graphic, it can be seen in the very end that victory in war is a far more somber occasion, where all that is lost becomes apparent. On the other hand, the funeral games are lively, for the dead man's life is celebrated. This overall depiction of war runs contrary to many other[citation needed] ancient Greek depictions, where war is an aspiration for greater glory.
Influence on classical Greek warfare[edit]
While the Homeric poems (the Iliad in particular) were not necessarily revered scripture of the ancient Greeks, they were most certainly seen as guides that were important to the intellectual understanding of any educated Greek citizen. This is evidenced by the fact that in the late fifth century BC, "it was the sign of a man of standing to be able to recite the Iliad and Odyssey by heart."[44] Moreover, it can be argued that the warfare shown in the Iliad, and the way in which it was depicted, had a profound and very traceable effect on Greek warfare in general. In particular, the effect of epic literature can be broken down into three categories: tactics, ideology, and the mindset of commanders. In order to discern these effects, it is necessary to take a look at a few examples from each of these categories.
Much of the detailed fighting in the Iliad is done by the heroes in an orderly, one-on-one fashion. Much like the Odyssey, there is even a set ritual which must be observed in each of these conflicts. For example, a major hero may encounter a lesser hero from the opposing side, in which case the minor hero is introduced, threats may be exchanged, and then the minor hero is slain. The victor often strips the body of its armor and military accoutrements.[45] Here is an example of this ritual and this type of one-on-one combat in the Iliad:

There Telamonian Ajax struck down the son of Anthemion, Simoeisios in his stripling's beauty, whom once his mother descending from Ida bore beside the banks of Simoeis when she had followed her father and mother to tend the sheepflocks. Therefore they called him Simoeisios; but he could not render again the care of his dear parents; he was short-lived, beaten down beneath the spear of high-hearted Ajax, who struck him as he first came forward beside the nipple of the right breast, and the bronze spearhead drove clean through the shoulder.[46]
The biggest issue in reconciling the connection between the epic fighting of the Iliad and later Greek warfare is the phalanx, or hoplite, warfare seen in Greek history well after Homer's Iliad. While there are discussions of soldiers arrayed in semblances of the phalanx throughout the Iliad, the focus of the poem on the heroic fighting, as mentioned above, would seem to contradict the tactics of the phalanx. However, the phalanx did have its heroic aspects. The masculine one-on-one fighting of epic is manifested in phalanx fighting on the emphasis of holding one's position in formation. This replaces the singular heroic competition found in the Iliad.[47]
One example of this is the Spartan tale of 300 picked men fighting against 300 picked Argives. In this battle of champions, only two men are left standing for the Argives and one for the Spartans. Othryades, the remaining Spartan, goes back to stand in his formation with mortal wounds while the remaining two Argives go back to Argos to report their victory. Thus, the Spartans claimed this as a victory, as their last man displayed the ultimate feat of bravery by maintaining his position in the phalanx.[48]
In terms of the ideology of commanders in later Greek history, the Iliad has an interesting effect. The Iliad expresses a definite disdain for tactical trickery, when Hector says, before he challenges the great Ajax:

I know how to storm my way into the struggle of flying horses; I know how to tread the measures on the grim floor of the war god. Yet great as you are I would not strike you by stealth, watching
for my chance, but openly, so, if perhaps I might hit you.[49]
However, despite examples of disdain for this tactical trickery, there is reason to believe that the Iliad, as well as later Greek warfare, endorsed tactical genius on the part of their commanders. For example, there are multiple passages in the Iliad with commanders such as Agamemnon or Nestor discussing the arraying of troops so as to gain an advantage. Indeed, the Trojan War is won by a notorious example of Greek guile in the Trojan Horse. This is even later referred to by Homer in the Odyssey. The connection, in this case, between guileful tactics of the Greeks in the Iliad and those of the later Greeks is not a difficult one to find. Spartan commanders, often seen as the pinnacle of Greek military prowess, were known for their tactical trickery, and, for them, this was a feat to be desired in a commander. Indeed, this type of leadership was the standard advice of Greek tactical writers.[50]
Ultimately, while Homeric (or epic) fighting is certainly not completely replicated in later Greek warfare, many of its ideals, tactics, and instruction are.[51]
Hans van Wees argues that the period that the descriptions of warfare relate can be pinned down fairly specifically—to the first half of the 7th century BC.[52]
Influence on the arts and literature[edit]
Main article: Trojan War in popular culture
The Iliad was a standard work of great importance already in Classical Greece and remained so throughout the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. It made its return to Italy and Western Europe beginning in the 15th century, primarily through translations into Latin and the vernacular languages. Prior to this reintroduction, a shortened Latin version of the poem, known as the Ilias Latina, was very widely studied and read as a basic school text. The West, however, had tended to look at Homer as a liar as they believed they possessed much more down to earth and realistic eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War written by Dares and Dictys Cretensis who were supposedly present at the events.
These late antique forged accounts formed the basis of several eminently popular medieval chivalric romances, most notably those of Benoit de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne. These in turn spawned many others in various European languages, such as the first printed English book, the 1473 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Other accounts read in the Middle Ages were antique Latin retellings such as the Excidium Troiae and works in the vernaculars such as the Icelandic Troy Saga. Even without Homer, the Trojan War story had remained central to Western European medieval literary culture and its sense of identity. Most nations and several royal houses traced their origins to heroes at the Trojan War. Britain was supposedly settled by the Trojan Brutus, for instance.
Subjects from the Trojan War were a favourite among ancient Greek dramatists. Aeschylus' trilogy, the Oresteia, comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, follows the story of Agamemnon after his return from the war.
Homer also came to be of great influence in European culture with the resurgence of interest in Greek antiquity during the Renaissance, and it remains the first and most influential work of the Western canon.
William Shakespeare used the plot of the Iliad as source material for his play Troilus and Cressida, but focused on a medieval legend, the love story of Troilus, son of King Priam of Troy, and Cressida, daughter of the Trojan soothsayer Calchas. The play, often considered to be a comedy, reverses traditional views on events of the Trojan War and depicts Achilles as a coward, Ajax as a dull, unthinking mercenary, etc.
William Theed the elder made an impressive bronze statue of Thetis as she brought Achilles his new armor forged by Hephaesthus. It has been on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City since 2013.
Robert Browning's poem Development discusses his childhood introduction to the matter of the Iliad and his delight in the epic, as well as contemporary debates about its authorship.
20th century[edit]
Simone Weil wrote the essay The Iliad or the Poem of Force in 1939 shortly after the commencement of World War II. It has been claimed that the essay describes how the Iliad demonstrates the way force, exercised to the extreme in war, reduces both victim and aggressor to the level of the slave and the unthinking automaton.[53]
The 1954 Broadway musical The Golden Apple by librettist John Treville Latouche and composer Jerome Moross was freely adapted from the Iliad and the Odyssey, re-setting the action to America's Washington state in the years after the Spanish-American War, with events inspired by the Iliad in Act One and events inspired by the Odyssey in Act Two.
Christa Wolf's 1983 novel Cassandra is a critical engagement with the Iliad. Wolf's narrator is Cassandra, whose thoughts we hear at the moment just before her murder by Clytemnestra in Sparta. Wolf's narrator presents a feminist's view of the war, and of war in general. Cassandra's story is accompanied by four essays which Wolf delivered as the Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen. The essays present Wolf's concerns as a writer and rewriter of this canonical story and show the genesis of the novel through Wolf's own readings and in a trip she took to Greece.
David Melnick's Men in Aida (cf. μῆνιν ἄειδε) (1983) is a postmodern homophonic translation of Book One into a farcical bathhouse scenario, preserving the sounds but not the meaning of the original.
Contemporary popular culture[edit]
An epic science fiction adaptation/tribute by acclaimed author Dan Simmons titled Ilium was released in 2003. The novel received a Locus Award for best science fiction novel of 2003.
Yokanaan Kearns wrote a stage version of The Iliad titled Dis/Troy. The one-hour adaptation aimed at adolescents, in which four actors play all the major characters, was workshopped and read to the public at the Kennedy Center 2002 New Visions/New Voices Festival, premiered in 2003 at Honolulu Theatre for Youth, and published by Playscripts Inc.
A loose film adaptation of the Iliad, Troy, was released in 2004. Though the film received mixed reviews, it was a commercial success, particularly in international sales. It grossed $133 million in the United States and $497 million worldwide, placing it in the 88th top-grossing movies of all time.[54]
An excerpt from the Iliad is featured in volume one of the graphic novel anthology The Graphic Canon, with artwork and adaptation executed by Alice Duke. The anthology is edited by Russ Kick and published by Seven Stories Press.
Age of Bronze is an American comics series by writer/artist Eric Shanower retelling the legend of the Trojan War. It began in 1998 and is published by Image Comics.[55][56][57]
Published October 2011,[58] Alice Oswald's sixth collection, Memorial, is based on the Iliad but departs from the narrative form of the Iliad to focus on, and so commemorate, the individually-named characters whose deaths are mentioned in that poem.[59][60][61] Later in October 2011, Memorial was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize,[62] but in December 2011, Oswald withdrew the book from the shortlist,[63][64] citing concerns about the ethics of the prize's sponsors.[65]
English translations[edit]



Wenceslas Hollar's engraved title page of a 1660 edition of the Iliad, translated by John Ogilby.
Further information: English translations of Homer
George Chapman published his translation of the Iliad, in instalments, beginning in 1598, published in "fourteeners", a long-line ballad metre that "has room for all of Homer's figures of speech and plenty of new ones, as well as explanations in parentheses. At its best, as in Achilles' rejection of the embassy in Iliad Nine; it has great rhetorical power".[66] It quickly established itself as a classic in English poetry. In the preface to his own translation, Pope praises "the daring fiery spirit" of Chapman's rendering, which is "something like what one might imagine Homer, himself, would have writ before he arrived at years of discretion".
John Keats praised Chapman in the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816). John Ogilby's mid-seventeenth-century translation is among the early annotated editions; Alexander Pope's 1715 translation, in heroic couplet, is "The classic translation that was built on all the preceding versions",[67] and, like Chapman's, it is a major poetic work in its own right. William Cowper's Miltonic, blank verse 1791 edition is highly regarded for its greater fidelity to the Greek than either the Chapman or the Pope versions: "I have omitted nothing; I have invented nothing", Cowper says in prefacing his translation.
In the lectures On Translating Homer (1861), Matthew Arnold addresses the matters of translation and interpretation in rendering the Iliad to English; commenting upon the versions contemporarily available in 1861, he identifies the four essential poetic qualities of Homer to which the translator must do justice:

[i] that he is eminently rapid; [ii] that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; [iii] that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, [iv] that he is eminently noble.
After a discussion of the metres employed by previous translators, Arnold argues for a poetical dialect hexameter translation of the Iliad, like the original. "Laborious as this meter was, there were at least half a dozen attempts to translate the entire Iliad or Odyssey in hexameters; the last in 1945. Perhaps the most fluent of them was by J. Henry Dart [1862] in response to Arnold".[68] In 1870, the American poet William Cullen Bryant published a blank verse version, that Van Wyck Brooks describes as "simple, faithful".
Since 1950, there have been several English translations. Richmond Lattimore's version (1951) is "a free six-beat" line-for-line rendering that explicitly eschews "poetical dialect" for "the plain English of today". It is literal, unlike older verse renderings. Robert Fitzgerald's version (Oxford World's Classics, 1974) strives to situate the Iliad in the musical forms of English poetry. His forceful version is freer, with shorter lines that increase the sense of swiftness and energy. Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1990) and Stanley Lombardo (1997) are bolder than Lattimore in adding dramatic significance to Homer's conventional and formulaic language. Barry B. Powell's translation (Oxford University Press, 2014) renders the Homeric Greek with a simplicity and dignity reminiscent of the original.
Manuscripts[edit]
There are more than 2000 manuscripts of Homer.[69][70] Some of the most notable manuscripts include:
##Rom. Bibl. Nat. gr.6 + Matriti. Bibl. Nat. 4626 from 870-890 AD
##Venetus A = Venetus Marc. 822 from the 10th century
##Venetus B = Venetus Marc. 821 from the 11th century
##Ambrosian Iliad
##Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 20
##Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 21
##Codex Nitriensis (palimpsest)
See also[edit]
##Portal icon Hellenismos portal
##Mask of Agamemnon
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "Iliad". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
2.Jump up ^ Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Le monde d'Homère (The World of Homer), Perrin (2000), p. 19
3.Jump up ^ "Linguistic evidence supports date for Homeric epics - Altschuler - 2013 - BioEssays - Wiley Online Library". Onlinelibrary.wiley.com. 2013-02-18. Retrieved 2014-03-13.
4.Jump up ^ Aeschylus does portray it so in Fragment 134a.
5.Jump up ^ Hornblower, S. and Spawforth, A. The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization (1998) pp. 3, 347, 352.
6.Jump up ^ Homer's Iliad, Classical Technology Center.
7.Jump up ^ Lefkowitz, Mary. Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths (2003) New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press
8.Jump up ^ Taplin, Oliver. "Bring Back the Gods", The New York Times 14 December 2003.
9.Jump up ^ Jaynes, Julian. (1976) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Pg. 221
10.Jump up ^ 2.155, 2.251, 9.413, 9.434, 9.622, 10.509, 16.82
11.Jump up ^ "The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization". Athome.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2010-04-18.
12.Jump up ^ "Heroes and the Homeric Iliad". Uh.edu. Retrieved 2010-04-18.
13.^ Jump up to: a b Volk, Katharina. "ΚΛΕΟΣ ΑΦΘΙΤΟΝ Revisited". Classical Philology, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 61–68.
14.Jump up ^ 9.410-416
15.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951)
16.Jump up ^ II.46, V.724, XIII.22, XIV.238, XVIII.370
17.Jump up ^ Rouse, W.H.D. The Iliad (1938) p.11
18.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad, Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 1.13.
19.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad, Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 1.122.
20.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 1.181–7.
21.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 18.111–16.
22.Jump up ^ Fate as presented in Homer's "The Iliad", Everything2
23.Jump up ^ Iliad Study Guide[dead link], Brooklyn College
24.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 16.849–54.
25.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 16.433–4.
26.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 16.440–3.
27.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 22.178–81.
28.Jump up ^ Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1951). 20.300–4.
29.Jump up ^ Ἰλιάς, Ἰλιακός, Ἴλιος. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
30.Jump up ^ Hist. 2.116
31.Jump up ^ Robot Scans Ancient Manuscript in 3-D, Wired.[unreliable source?]
32.Jump up ^ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition (1994) p.173
33.Jump up ^ Porter, John. The Iliad as Oral Formulaic Poetry (8 May 2006) University of Saskatchewan. Retrieved 26 November 2007.
34.Jump up ^ Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1960) p.190
35.Jump up ^ Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1960) p.195
36.Jump up ^ Iliad, Book XVI, 130–54
37.Jump up ^ Armstrong, James I. The Arming Motif in the Iliad. The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 79, No. 4. (1958), pp.337–54.
38.Jump up ^ Toohey, Peter. Reading Epic: An Introduction to the Ancient Narrative. New Fetter Lane, London: Routledge, (1992).
39.Jump up ^ Iliad 3.45–50
40.Jump up ^ Iliad 59–65
41.Jump up ^ Keegan, John. A History of Warfare (1993) p.248
42.Jump up ^ Iliad 6.6
43.Jump up ^ Cahill, Tomas. Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
44.Jump up ^ Lendon, J.E."Soldiers and Ghosts" (2005) p.36
45.Jump up ^ Lendon, J.E. "Soldiers and Ghosts" (2005) p. 22–3
46.Jump up ^ Iliad. 4.473-83, Lattimore, translator
47.Jump up ^ Lendon, J.E. "Soldiers and Ghosts" (2005) p.51
48.Jump up ^ 5.17
49.Jump up ^ (Iliad. 7.237-43, Lattimore, translator)
50.Jump up ^ Lendon, J.E. "Soldiers and Ghosts" (2005) p.240
51.Jump up ^ A large amount of the citations and argumentation in this section of the article must be ultimately attributed to:Lendon, J.E. Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005.
52.Jump up ^ Greek Warfare: Myth and Realities [Paperback] Hans Van Wees, p 249
53.Jump up ^ Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim (2008). On Violence: A Reader. Duke University Press. p. 377. ISBN 978-0-8223-3769-0.
54.Jump up ^ IMDB. "All Time Worldwide Box Office Grosses", Box Office Mojo
55.Jump up ^ A Thousand Ships (2001, ISBN 1-58240-200-0)
56.Jump up ^ Sacrifice (2004, ISBN 1-58240-360-0)
57.Jump up ^ Betrayal, Part One (2008, ISBN 978-1-58240-845-3)
58.Jump up ^ Oswald, Alice (2011). Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-27416-1.
59.Jump up ^ Holland, Tom (17 October 2011). "The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller / Memorial by Alice Oswald. Surfing the rip tide of all things Homeric.". The New Statesman (London: New Statesman). Retrieved 1 June 2012.
60.Jump up ^ Kellaway, Kate (2 October 2011). "Memorial by Alice Oswald – review". The Observer (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 1 June 2012.
61.Jump up ^ Higgins, Charlotte (28 October 2011). "The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and more – review". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 1 June 2012.
62.Jump up ^ Flood, Alison (20 October 2011). "TS Eliot prize 2011 shortlist revealed". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 1 June 2012.
63.Jump up ^ Waters, Florence (6 December 2011). "Poet withdraws from TS Eliot prize over sponsorship". The Telegraph (London: Telegraph Media Group Limited). Retrieved 2012-02-13.
64.Jump up ^ Flood, Alison (6 December 2011). "Alice Oswald withdraws from TS Eliot prize in protest at sponsor Aurum". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 2012-02-13.
65.Jump up ^ Oswald, Alice (12 December 2011). "Why I pulled out of the TS Eliot poetry prize". The Guardian (London: Guardian News and Media Limited). Retrieved 2012-02-13.
66.Jump up ^ The Oxford Guide to English Literature in Translation, p.351
67.Jump up ^ The Oxford Guide to English Literature in Translation, p.352
68.Jump up ^ The Oxford Guide to English Literature in Translation, p.354
69.Jump up ^ OCLC 722287142
70.Jump up ^ Bird, Graeme D. (2010). Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad : the witness of the ptolemaic papyr. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies. ISBN 0-674-05323-0.
References[edit]
##Budimir, Milan (1940). On the Iliad and Its Poet.
##Mueller, Martin (1984). The Iliad. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-800027-2.
##Nagy, Gregory (1979). The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-2388-9.
##Powell, Barry B. (2004). Homer. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-5325-6.
##Seaford, Richard (1994). Reciprocity and Ritual. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-815036-9.
##West, Martin (1997). The East Face of Helicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-815221-3.
##Fox, Robin Lane (2008). Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their myths in the epic age of Homer. Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-7139-9980-8.
Further reading[edit]
##Murray, A.T.; Wyatt, William F., Homer: The Iliad, Books I-XII, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-674-99579-6
##Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume I, Books 1-4, Cambridge University Press, 1985. ISBN 0-521-23709-2
##Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume II, Books 5-8, Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-521-23710-6
##Hainsworth, Bryan; Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume III, Books 9-12, Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-23711-4
##Edwards, Mark W.; Janko, Richard; Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume IV, Books 13-16, Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-521-28171-7
##Edwards, Mark W.; Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume V, Books 17–20, Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-521-30959-X
##Richardson, Nicholas; Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume VI, Books 21–24, Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-30960-3
##West, Martin L., Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad, München : K.G. Saur, 2001. ISBN 3-598-73005-5
External links[edit]
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to John Flaxman's Iliad 1793. First edition 1795..
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
The Iliad

 Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Ἰλιάς

##D. B. Monro, Homer: Iliad, Books I-XII, with an Introduction, a Brief Homeric Grammar, and Notes (3rd ed., 1890)
##D. B. Monro, Homer: Iliad, Books XIII-XXIV, with Notes (4th ed., 1903)
##D. B. Monro, A Grammar of the Homeric Dialect (2nd ed., 1891)
##Iliad, online version of the work by Homer (English). Pope translation.
##Iliad in Ancient Greek: from the Perseus Project (PP), with the Murray and Butler translations and hyperlinks to mythological and grammatical commentary; via the Chicago Homer, with the Lattimore translation and markup indicating formulaic repetitions
##Links to translations freely available online are included in the list above.
##Gods, Achaeans and Troyans. An interactive visualization of Iliad's characters flow and relations.
##The Iliad: A Study Guide
##Classical images illustrating the Iliad. Repertory of outstanding painted vases, wall paintings and other ancient iconography of the War of Troy.
##Comments on background, plot, themes, authorship, and translation issues by 2008 translator Herbert Jordan.
##The Iliad of Homer a Parsed Interlinear Text, Books 1-24: Kindle edition
##Flaxman illustrations of the Iliad
##The Iliad study guide, themes, quotes, teacher resources
##The Iliad of Homer, Translated into English Blank Verse by William Cowper, edition c.1860. Online at Project Gutenberg.
##The Opening to the Iliad (Proem), Read in Ancient Greek with a simultaneous translation.
##The Iliad Map, map of locations in The Iliad
##Published English translations of Homer, with samples and some reviews by translator and scholar Ian Johnston


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