Editions

The Iliad

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780140444445

  • Length: 528  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 362g

  • RRP: £8.99

The Iliad

  • Homer

  • Martin Hammond (Introducer)

  • Martin Hammond (Translator)

'The best modern prose translation of The Iliad' Robin Lane Fox, The Times

The first of the world's great tragedies, The Iliad centres on the pivotal four days towards the end of the ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans. In a series of dramatic set pieces, it follows the story of the humiliation of Achilleus at the hands of Agamemnon and his slaying of Hektor: a barbarous act with repercussions that ultimately determine the fate of Troy. The Iliad not only paints an intimate picture of individual experience, but also offers a universal perspective in which human loss and suffering are set against a vast and unpitying divine background where fickle, quarrelsome gods decide the fate of men.

Translated with an Introduction by Martin Hammond

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780140444445

  • Length: 528  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 362g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • Much the best modern prose translation of the Iliad

    Robin Lane Fox, Financial Times

  • This new prose translation of the Iliad is outstandingly good . . . to read it is to be gripped by it

    Classical Review

  • Superbly direct and eloquent . . . by its sensitivity, fluency, and flexibility, it will win a permanent place on the shelves of Homer-lovers

    Martin Fagg, Times Educational Supplement

  • Martin Hammond's new version is the best and most accurate there has ever been, as smooth as cream but as clear as water . . . Hammond's Iliad deserves to become a standard book

    Peter Levi, Independent

  • Surely the best Iliad in quite a few decades

    Greece & Rome Journal

  • Here is a fine Iliad for our times, to be read with great pleasure

    Philip Howard, The Times

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About the Author

Homer

Caroline Alexander is the author of seven books of non-fiction including the international bestsellers The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition and The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. A contributing writer for National Geographic, Alexander has also written for the New Yorker, Smithsonian and Granta among other publications. Alexander’s latest books are Lost Gold of the Dark Ages: War, Treasure and the Mystery of the Saxons and The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of the Iliad and the Trojan War. Between 1982 and 1985, Alexander established a department of Classics at the University of Malawi, in central-east Africa.

Homer

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Features

10 things you didn’t know about the women of Troy

Classicist, author and researcher Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful imagines the lives of two largely overlooked Trojan women from The Iliad. Here, she tells us about the Trojan women depicted in Homer’s epic, historical facts about their real-life counterparts and the stories about them that survived

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