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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

Seven Greek cities claim the honour of being the birthplace of Homer (c. 8th-7th century BC), the poet to whom the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey are attributed. The Iliad is the oldest surviving work of Western literature, but the identity - or even the existence - of Homer himself is a complete mystery, with no reliable biographical information having survived. E. V. Rieu initiated Penguin Classics with Allen Lane and his famous translation of the Odyssey was the first book published in the series in 1947. The Iliad followed in 1950.

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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