The Iliad - Most Important Books or Passages?

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
1

I’ve read The Iliad translated by Fagles and am starting Wilson, as well as just beginning Pharr’s Homeric Greek 4th Ed. I’ve seen volumes in Greek with facing or interlinear vocabulary & commentary for Books 1, 3, 6, 12 & 24 - I may be missing others.

Are these Books are generally regarded as “most important”?

Are there passages that are “most acclaimed”?

2

In Allen Benner’s 1908 “Selections from Homer’s Iliad”, he says in his preface that he includes the books commonly required for admission to American colleges. The complete books he includes are 1, 3, 9, 18 and 22. Although I’ve been working on Attic Greek for some years now and will continue that, I decided to read one book of the Iliad to try to get an intuitive sense for dactylic hexameter. I chose book 3 because there are two audio recordings of the book by Julius Tomin (free) and by Ioannis Stratakis ($24).

If you search Textkit you will find warnings about Pharr’s Homeric Greek because the language of the epics draws vocabulary from multiple dialects and was never used as a spoken language or to write prose. Pharr’s exercises therefore are artificial. You may want to try one of Geoffrey Steadman’s books (6 or 22). He has worksheets on his website to allow you to translate lines of the poem. You could then determine which approach works best for you. Steadman, BTW, says his books are not intended to be stand-alone. He recommends you get an advanced level commentary in addition in order to really understand the poem.

Mark

3

Thanks! I’m in a Great Books of the Western World group and we spend two months on The Iliad. In month 1, I did a complete read of Fagles and in month 2, I’m trying to do a closer read of select books/passages, as a close read of the whole thing isn’t feasible.

While many have advised “going it alone” to gain my own insights, I think I’d do better focusing where brighter minds than I have found value. I have a lifetime to go back, time and time again, but with a lot of content in GBWW, I’ve chosen to take the guided path.

4

The most memorable passages, as listed by my daughter, who just finished her third listen:

  1. “When Patroclus dresses up as Achilles.”

  2. “The fight between Achilles and Hector.”

  3. “The burial of Hector.”

  4. “The Wooden Horse. Even though it’s not really in the Iliad, it’s part of the Iliad, because it happened before.”

C.S. Lewis, in his Prolegomena to Paradise Lost, proposes the Iliad to be a sort of prompt-book, that the oral performer could use to perform a requested section. Whether these sections have anything to do with the book divisions that we currently have has been doubted. But they make far too much of that. While it is obvious that the current book divisions are imperfect, they for the most part really do reflect/recognize natural divisions in the text.

5

I would add the farewell between Hector and Andromaca as one of the most memorable passages of the Iliad. Along with the dialogue between Achilles and Priam, it’s the most touching scene of the poem, in which Hector is presented as father, husband and stronghold of Troy and its inhabitants, all that will be lost, if he dies.

Since Pharr was mentioned, he recommends Homeric Vocabularies, by Owen and Goodspeed (already cited in this forum), as a companionship to his book. It’s a very good homeric lexicon with a statistic approach. Pharr himself reshaped this little work, bringing the corresponding translation of each word to the same page of the original, which can be borrowed on Archive (https://archive.org/details/homericvocabular00owen).