The Iliad & The Odyssey annotated

by Homer facts

Kindle Edition

Published October 12, 2021

Reviews

[Sieglinde · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I didn't like the names being Romanized, that's my only complaint about this. Book two is the only one that is a bit annoying to get through but beyond that, the Iliad and the Odyssey had me tear up at moments, almost laugh out loud to myself like a crazy person, and had me hooked throughout the entirety of it. I see why it's a classic now, and I put it up there with my favorites

[Glen Kirby · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Iliad review is found on my website www.glenvckirby.com due to word count.

Let me tell you what I thought the Odyssey was about before I read it. I thought it was about a man trying to get home. A hero, a journey, some monsters, a faithful wife waiting, a happy ending. I thought it was an adventure story wearing the clothes of mythology. I thought I more or less knew what I was getting.

I was wrong. Not about the plot. The plot is exactly that. I was wrong about what the plot means.

The Odyssey is not about getting home. It is about what getting home costs. And more than that, more quietly and more devastatingly than that, it is about what home becomes once you have been away long enough that both you and it have changed beyond easy recognition. That idea, so simple to state and so difficult to fully absorb, is what stayed with me long after I closed the book. You spend ten years at war and another ten trying to get back, and by the time you walk through the door you are not the person who left. And neither is anyone else.

That is not an adventure story. That is one of the most human things literature has ever put into words.

Where It Sits on This List

I read the Iliad first. Then this. That ordering is important and I want to spend a moment on it because the contrast between the two books is part of what makes each of them work.

The Iliad is about collective suffering, honour and the machinery of war. Also about what it does to everyone caught inside it. Individual heroes emerge, Achilles, Hector, Patroclus, but the war itself is always the largest presence in the room.

Then there is The Odyssey, which is intimate. One man. One journey. One home. And ten years of him trying to reach it, and a wave full of obstacles trying to kill, distract or seduce him into failure. After the collective tragedy of the Iliad, the focus narrows to something you can hold in your hands. And that narrowing is an enormous relief that somehow makes everything hit harder.

Odysseus

I need to talk about Odysseus properly because he is one of the great creations in all of literature and I do not think he always gets his due in the way that Achilles does.

Achilles is easier to understand. He is pure. Pure rage, pure grief, pure pride, pure love for Patroclus. His emotions are enormous and singular and they drive everything he does. You always know exactly where you are with Achilles because he is always feeling one thing with his entire being.

Odysseus is different. He is cunning, brave and loyal. He was also surprisingly unfaithful. But his ability to be patient and impulsive, sometimes within the same scene made him intriguing to me. He is a man who can spend years on Calypso's island in what any external observer would describe as paradise, sleeping with a goddess, living in comfort, and still sit on the shore every evening weeping for home. He contains contradictions that do not resolve. He is, in that specific sense, completely real. Have you ever been in paradise and still missed home, I know I have!

What I find most interesting about him is that he is not the greatest warrior in the room. That was always Achilles. Odysseus is the smartest person in the room, every room, and he knows it, and he uses it, and occasionally it gets him into trouble because being the smartest person in the room can make you careless about other people's feelings. The Cyclops episode is the perfect example. He blinds Polyphemus, escapes, and then cannot resist shouting his real name back across the water as he sails away. Pure ego. Completely unnecessary. It is the act that ensures Poseidon will spend the next several years trying to kill him.

He knows better. He does it anyway. That is Odysseus in one moment. Brilliant and human and his own worst enemy.

The Monsters

Let us talk about the monsters because they are extraordinary and because I think they are doing more work than they might first appear to be doing.

The Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, Circe who turns men into pigs, the Lotus Eaters who offer a forgetting so pleasant it becomes its own kind of death. Reading them in sequence you start to notice something. Every monster or obstacle on Odysseus's journey is, in some way, a version of the same temptation. Stop. Stay. Forget where you were going. The Lotus Eaters offer literal forgetting. Circe offers transformation into something that no longer needs to go home. Calypso offers immortality, actual immortality, eternal life in paradise, in exchange for giving up the idea of Ithaca entirely.

And Odysseus, to his immense credit and at enormous personal cost, keeps saying no. Not always immediately. Not always without considerable human weakness along the way. But eventually, always, no. He wants to go home more than he wants any of the things being offered to him. That is his defining characteristic and it is a more interesting one than brute strength or battlefield glory.

There is also the Sirens, which I want to single out because it is my favourite episode in the book. Odysseus knows the Sirens will lure him to his death if he hears them unprotected. So he has his crew plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast, with instructions not to release him no matter what he does or says. And then he listens. He is the only human being in the story who hears the Sirens and survives. He hears them because he has built a system around his own weakness rather than pretending the weakness does not exist.

As a filmmaker and a writer I find that image endlessly useful. The man tied to the mast, experiencing the thing that would destroy him, surviving it precisely because he was honest enough about his own limits to plan around them. That is not just mythology. That is a philosophy of how to live with yourself.

Penelope

Penelope is one of the great characters in ancient literature and I want to say that plainly because she does not always get the recognition she deserves, which is frankly a pattern with the women in these epics and one I have noticed consistently throughout this challenge.

She has been waiting twenty years. Twenty years with no confirmation that her husband is alive, surrounded by suitors who are eating her out of house and home and pressuring her to choose one of them and move on. She has a son who was a baby when Odysseus left and is now a grown man trying to figure out who he is without a father. She is managing an entire household and a political situation of genuine complexity entirely alone.

And she is not passive. That is the crucial thing. The shroud she weaves for Laertes by day and unravels by night, buying herself time, is one of the great acts of quiet defiance in all of literature. She is outnumbered and outpowered and she is winning anyway, through patience and intelligence and an absolute refusal to give up on something that by any reasonable external measure she should have given up on years ago.

When Odysseus finally returns in disguise, she tests him. She has this stranger, who she does not know is her husband, describe the bed they shared. The bed that Odysseus built himself, around a living olive tree, so that it cannot be moved. Only Odysseus would know this. It is the most intimate possible proof of identity. After twenty years of waiting she does not simply throw herself into his arms. She makes him prove it.

That is not distrust. That is a woman who has survived twenty years by being careful and she is not stopping now just because she wants it to be him. The recognition scene between them is one of the most emotionally precise moments in the book and it belongs entirely to her intelligence.

Going Home

Here is the thing about the ending that I keep returning to. Odysseus gets home. He kills the suitors in a scene of considerable and deliberate violence. He reunites with Penelope. He goes to see his elderly father Laertes, who has been grieving him for twenty years, living rough in an orchard. He reclaims his kingdom.

And yet.

There is a quality to the ending of the Odyssey that is not quite triumphant in the way you might expect. Odysseus is home, but he is also, inescapably, changed. Like a post-university backpacker returning from a 6 week trip to Thai Land. “You haven’t seen what these eyes have seen!” The man who left for Troy was a king at the height of his powers with a young wife and a newborn son. The man who returns is someone who has spent twenty years being tested in ways that leave marks. He has seen the underworld. He has buried companions. He has spent years on an island weeping for a home that started to feel like a memory. You can get back to the place. You cannot entirely get back to who you were when you left it.

That is what the Odyssey is actually about and it is why it is still being read after three thousand years. Not the monsters. Not the gods interfering in human affairs. Not even the cunning of Odysseus, magnificent as that is. It is about the particular human experience of going away and coming back and finding that both you and the thing you came back to have moved in ways that do not perfectly align anymore. Home is still home. But it fits differently now.

I have never been away at war for twenty years. I suspect most of you reading this have not either. And yet there is something in that experience, that specific feeling of return and misalignment and love that persists anyway, that feels completely recognisable. That is what Homer understood and why this book belongs in a different category to almost everything that came after it.

What It Does That Nothing Else Does

I have now read the Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the Odyssey in sequence on this challenge. And what strikes me most about the Odyssey is how modern it feels in comparison. Not modern in a superficial sense. Modern in its psychological understanding of a single human being. Gilgamesh is about an archetype confronting mortality. The Iliad is about collective human experience inside an institution of violence. The Odyssey is about one specific, complicated, contradictory man and his interior life across twenty years of trying to get back to the people he loves.

That is the novel. Not as a form that had been invented yet, but as an impulse. The sustained, intimate, psychologically curious examination of what it feels like to be one particular person navigating a world that keeps trying to stop them. Homer did it three thousand years ago and most of what has come since is, in one way or another, in conversation with it.

Legacy

The Odyssey's fingerprints are on everything. James Joyce spent seven years writing Ulysses, one of the most celebrated novels in the English language, as a direct structural parallel to the Odyssey set across a single day in Dublin. The Coen Brothers made O Brother Where Art Thou, one of my favourite films, as an Odyssey retelling set in 1930s Mississippi. Margaret Atwood wrote The Penelopiad to give Penelope her own voice. Every story about a long journey home, every story about a clever protagonist who survives by wit rather than strength, every story about what it costs to keep going when stopping would be so much easier, carries something of this book in its bones.

That is not influence in the academic sense. That is a story that understood something so true about human experience that it has never stopped being useful.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Iliad

Author: Homer, the legendary poet of ancient Greece, is credited with composing The Iliad and The Odyssey, two foundational epics of Western literature. Traditionally imagined as a blind bard from Ionia who lived around the 8th or 9th century BCE, he remains partly hidden behind the poems themselves: scholars still debate whether he was one poet, several poets, or the name later attached to a vast oral tradition. Yet the force of the epics is unmistakable. Through gods, heroes, war, grief, honour, cunning, and the ache for home, Homer shaped the Greek literary imagination. In The Iliad, that inheritance begins in its most brutal form: a quarrel before the ships, a warrior trapped in rage, and glory shadowed by the bodies it leaves behind.

Premise: The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem, traditionally attributed to Homer and divided into 24 books, that centres on a brief but devastating period near the end of the Trojan War. Rather than telling the whole fall of Troy, it begins with the anger of Achilles, the greatest Achaean warrior, whose wounded honour hardens into rage before grief forces him back toward human recognition.

Thematic Vision: The Iliad presents a stark but compassionate vision of mortal life: human beings are brief, flawed, and often trapped between their own violence and the quarrelling designs of the gods, yet still capable of dignity, tenderness, and astonishing empathy. Its deepest movement is from rage toward grief, from honour as something men demand for themselves to compassion as the last human answer left when war, fate, and divine argument have taken everything else.

Synposis: The Iliad dramatizes a brief but catastrophic stretch near the end of the Trojan War, centring on the rupture between Achilles, the greatest Achaean warrior, and the army that depends on him. The crisis begins when Agamemnon seizes Briseis, Achilles' captive prize, as compensation for losing his own. Humiliated, Achilles withdraws from battle and asks his mother, Thetis, to persuade Jove (Zeus) to punish the Achaeans until they understand how much they need him. Jove grants the request, and Hector, Troy's greatest defender, drives the Achaeans back toward their ships while the gods quarrel over the war's direction.

Achilles' refusal to fight becomes unbearable when Patroclus, his beloved companion, enters battle wearing Achilles' armour and is killed by Hector. Grief breaks through Achilles' pride and turns his anger into something more terrible. He reconciles with Agamemnon, receives divine armour from Vulcan (Hephaestus), and returns to battle no longer seeking honour or victory, but revenge.

Achilles hunts Hector to the walls of Troy, where Hector is deceived by Minerva (Athena) and finally turns to face him. Achilles kills him, refuses his plea for burial, and drags his corpse around Patroclus' tomb, trying to make the body carry the weight of his grief. Yet the gods preserve Hector's body, denying Achilles the satisfaction of reducing his enemy to nothing.

The poem ends not with Troy's fall, but with mercy. Guided by the gods, Priam enters Achilles' tent and begs for his son's body, reminding Achilles of his own father and of the grief waiting for every mortal family touched by war. Achilles relents, shares food and tears with his enemy, and grants Troy time to bury Hector. In that quiet ending, The Iliad lets violence give way to something more difficult and human: the dignity of grief.

Characters:
Achilles: Achilles is the central figure of The Iliad, though for much of the poem he is defined by his refusal to act. After Agamemnon publicly dishonours him by taking Briseis, his captive prize, Achilles withdraws from battle, even as his absence allows countless Achaeans to die at the hands of the Trojans. His pride darkens into something more terrible when Patroclus, his beloved companion, is killed by Hector while wearing Achilles' armour. Grief drives Achilles back into the war, but his return is not heroic in any simple sense. He comes back consumed by revenge, armed by the gods, and so powerful that the battlefield seems almost helpless before him.

After killing Hector, Achilles refuses to be satisfied by victory. He denies Hector's dying request for burial, drags his corpse behind his chariot, and tries to make the body carry the punishment his grief cannot finish. Yet the gods preserve Hector's corpse, preventing Achilles from reducing his enemy to an object of total humiliation. His transformation comes when Priam, Hector's father, enters his tent and begs for his son's body. Faced with another grieving father, Achilles recognizes the cruelty grief has made him commit. In one of the poem's most profound moments of empathy, he returns Hector's body and grants the Trojans twelve days to mourn, briefly allowing grief to become stronger than rage.

Jove: Jove is the most powerful of all Olympians and his temperament is as fickle as the winds he commands. He starts off the story strongly favouring the Trojans in order to cause suffering to the Greeks and King Agememnon, who had dishonored Achilles. His stance caused so much bloodshed that his own family had to work against him in order to avoid total annihilation of the Greek side. Jove’s mind is only changed when Achilles himself, one of Jove’s favored grandchildren, returns to battle.

Although Jove plays a major role in the story, he is less a developed character than the poem's highest expression of divine power. He does not simply reward the good and punish the wicked; he weighs oaths, destiny, family loyalties, and the competing claims of gods and heroes. To the humans below, his decisions can seem arbitrary or cruel because they experience fate not as order, but as loss. In that sense, Jove helps make The Iliad feel tragic: the gods may govern the world, but their governance does not spare mortals from grief.

Juno, Neptune & Minerva: Juno, Neptune, and Minerva are among the few divine powers in The Iliad strong enough to resist Jove's will, even if they cannot finally overrule him. Their involvement makes Olympus feel less like a clean chain of command than a household of powers, grudges, alliances, and interruptions hovering above the battlefield. The gods argue, scheme, take sides, protect favourites, and contradict one another, so human beings are not trapped beneath one simple design. Fate is still terrifying, but it is not tidy. It moves through quarrels, bargains, seductions, warnings, and delays, which means hope can sometimes enter the world through the cracks in divine authority.

Favourite Moments:
Juno Puts Jove to Sleep, Book XIV: Juno sees the Trojans driving the Achaeans back toward their ships and decides that if Jove cannot be beaten, he can at least be distracted. She washes herself with ambrosia, borrows Venus's girdle of charm, bribes Sleep with the promise of Pasithea, and walks into her husband's sight like a goddess setting a trap with every step. It is such a strange, funny, brilliant piece of divine theatre: the war below is all spears, ships, blood, and panic, while its fate is being bent by perfume, seduction, family politics, and one very dangerous nap. Jove remains terrifyingly powerful, but Book XIV makes that power feel wonderfully interruptible. His will does not vanish; it gets tangled in marriage, desire, secrecy, resentment, and the fact that Olympus is less a court of law than a house where everyone knows exactly how to get under everyone else's skin. Behind the battle stands Jove's will; behind Jove's will stands a marriage, a grudge, and a household full of gods who refuse to stay in their place.

The Hands That Killed His Son, Book XXIV: At the end of The Iliad, Priam crosses the enemy camp in the dark with ransom for the body of Hector, the son Achilles has killed, dishonoured, and dragged through the dust. He enters Achilles' tent alone, clasps his knees, and kisses the "dread murderous hands" that have taken so many of his children from him. The scene is almost unbearable in its simplicity: the old king lowering himself before the man who destroyed his house, and Achilles, still raw with Patroclus' death, suddenly forced to see his enemy through a father's grief. Hector's body stops being something Achilles can punish. It becomes a son who must be carried home. The scene gathers the whole poem into one tent: rage, honour, vengeance, age, fathers, sons, food, tears, and the fragile pause before war begins again. Here, Homer lets grief become stronger than triumph, and lets the hands that killed Hector become the hands that return him.

Opinion/Analysis:
I rate The Iliad 2.0/5.0. Its ending is powerful, and I loved the glimpse it offers of the Ancient Greek gods as active, quarrelling forces inside human history, but the actual reading experience was often rough. The poem's age is not just background context; it is something you feel on the page. The long catalogues of names, lineages, battlefield deaths, speeches, boasts, and repeated warrior sequences made much of the first fifteen books difficult to get through, even when I could recognize why they mattered historically and literarily.

My strongest takeaways come from the two moments that stayed most alive for me: Priam kissing the hands that killed his son, and Juno putting Jove to sleep. Those scenes show the poem at its most interesting, because they make ancient storytelling feel strange, theatrical, and suddenly human. Warriors pause in the heat of battle to announce identity, lineage, grievance, and fate, as though combat is also a form of narration. The gods shape history through disguise, seduction, interruption, favouritism, and family arguments. I did not love The Iliad as a book, but I liked what it opened up: an older world where suffering becomes story, divine power behaves like personality, and even a low rating can leave me more curious about Homer than I was before. That curiosity is what I want to carry into The Odyssey and Christopher Nolan's 2026 film adaptation.

The Odyssey

Premise: The Odyssey follows Ulysses (Odysseus) through his ten-year struggle to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, while his wife and son fight their own battles to preserve his household in his absence. Through Ulysses' journey, Penelope's resistance, and Telemachus' coming-of-age, the poem turns homecoming into something larger than geography: the restoration of identity, family, and a house that can become a home again.

Thematic Vision: The Odyssey affirms the enduring value of home, family, and cultural tradition as the foundations of a meaningful life, while showing that such foundations have to be preserved before they can be restored. Home is the place Ulysses reaches, the house Penelope guards, the name Telemachus grows into, and the shared order that cunning, patience, loyalty, and endurance make possible again.

Synposis: Prince Telemachus' home has been overrun by suitors competing for Penelope's hand, since most believe Ulysses was lost at sea after the Trojan War. Penelope still hopes he is alive and delays remarriage through every strategy available to her, most famously by weaving and secretly unweaving Laertes' burial shroud. Her resistance preserves Ulysses' place, but the suitors keep consuming the household's wealth. Guided by Minerva (Athena), Telemachus travels to Pylos and Sparta for news of his father, learning to act publicly in defence of his family.

Meanwhile, Ulysses has been trapped for seven years on Calypso's island until Jove (Zeus) sends Mercury (Hermes) to command his release. His long journey is revealed through the stories he tells the Phaeacians: he blinds Polyphemus and earns Neptune's (Poseidon's) wrath, survives Circe, descends to the Underworld, hears the Sirens, passes Scylla and Charybdis, and loses his crew after they slaughter the Sun-god's cattle. By the time the Phaeacians carry him back to Ithaca, Ulysses is the only survivor of his voyage.

Once home, Minerva disguises Ulysses as a beggar so he can test his household's loyalty. He shelters with Eumaeus, reunites with Telemachus, and plans the suitors' destruction. Penelope announces an archery contest with Ulysses' bow; none of the suitors can string it, but Ulysses does so easily, reveals himself, and slaughters the men devouring his house. He proves himself to Penelope through the secret of their marriage bed, and after the suitors' families threaten revenge, Minerva intervenes to restore peace to Ithaca.

Characters:
Ulysses: Ulysses is the central figure of The Odyssey, though his arc is less about becoming a new man than surviving long enough to become himself again. When the poem begins, he has been away from Ithaca for twenty years: ten at Troy, and ten struggling to return. Released from Calypso by the will of the gods, he endures shipwreck, monsters, enchantment, temptation, and the loss of every companion before he reaches home. These trials test the qualities that define him: strength, cunning, patience, endurance, and the ability to keep wanting home when every force in the world seems designed to delay him.

Yet Ulysses' return shows that homecoming is not finished at the shore. Disguised by Minerva, he enters Ithaca as a beggar and moves through his own house as a stranger, testing the loyalty of the people who have lived inside his absence. Telemachus must prove he has grown into a son capable of action, while Penelope proves that her fidelity has been active, intelligent, and fiercely guarded. Once Ulysses knows who has preserved his house and who has consumed it, he reveals himself, strings the bow, slaughters the suitors, and punishes the disloyal servants. Even then, he still has to prove himself to Penelope through the secret of their marriage bed. Only when recognition becomes mutual can the house become a home again, and with Minerva's final intervention, Ithaca is brought back into peace.

Favourite Moments:
Where the Dead Still Speak, Book XI: Ulysses sails past the edge of daylight to ask the dead how he can get home. In the mist-dark land of the Cimmerians, he digs the trench, pours the offerings, and waits with his sword drawn as the ghosts gather around the blood. Elpenor comes first, begging for burial and an oar planted above his grave. Teiresias follows with the hard shape of the journey still ahead: restraint, sacrifice, the slaughter of the suitors, and one last wandering with an oar over his shoulder. Then the scene deepens from prophecy into grief. Agamemnon warns him that a house can turn murderous. Achilles, famous forever, would trade glory for one poor life under the sun. Anticlea, Ulysses' own mother, tells him that longing for him was the thing that killed her, and when he reaches for her, she slips through his arms like a dream. That is the chapter's terrible beauty: the underworld is crowded with memory, and every ghost gives home another cost. Ulysses comes looking for the road to Ithaca, but the dead teach him what no map can. Some losses will still be waiting for him, even if he makes it back.

The Bed That Cannot Be Moved, Book XXIII: After the bow, the blood, and the long disguise, Penelope keeps her distance. She tells Euryclea to take the bed outside the chamber Ulysses built, and the request cuts straight through him. The bed is fixed to a living olive tree at the centre of the room: Ulysses shaped the trunk into its post, built the walls around it, inlaid it with gold and silver, and stretched crimson leather across it. His anger gives Penelope the answer she needs. Her own odyssey has been inside the house, held through cunning, patience, endurance, and loyalty strong enough to keep absence from becoming surrender. Ulysses names the bed, and Penelope breaks. The house, so long crowded with strangers, finds its centre again in the thing rooted beneath it. At the olive tree, Ithaca is home again.

Opinion/Analysis:
I rate The Odyssey 3.5/5.0. It was much easier to follow than The Iliad, though it did not hit me with the same emotional force. Its structure is more approachable: Homer uses stories within the story to carry the larger adventures without crowding the main plot the way The Iliad crowds the battlefield. At the same time, many episodes feel like tests of Ulysses' established qualities rather than stages in a deep transformation. He is already cunning, resilient, proud, and determined. The journey proves him more than it changes him.

Before the poem even gives us Ulysses' point of view, we feel his absence through Telemachus. Without his father, Telemachus struggles with identity, authority, and his place inside his own home. His journey to Pylos and Sparta becomes a public step toward manhood as much as a search for news. That father-shadow pattern still feels alive: the son cannot fully become himself until he confronts the force of the absent father, whether by recovering him, replacing him, or escaping what his absence has made of the house. I have admired that idea in later stories before, so it was illuminating to see how ancient the pattern really is.

Like The Iliad, The Odyssey shows early versions of storytelling techniques that still feel familiar today. The poem begins in medias res, uses flashbacks to reveal crucial events, moves between Telemachus and Ulysses to make absence feel active, and builds toward a clear climax of disguise, recognition, revenge, and restored order. The characters are not developed with modern psychological depth, but the storytelling is far more controlled than I expected. The poem understands suspense, delayed revelation, secret identity, household testing, and the emotional power of returning to a place that has had twenty years to change without you.

Divine intervention is also central, though the gods feel less overwhelming here than they did in The Iliad. Neptune turns Ulysses' voyage into a prolonged punishment, while Minerva guides both Telemachus and Ulysses toward actions they already seem inwardly prepared to take. She sharpens their courage, timing, and self-command. Jove's approval still governs the largest turns, including Ulysses' release from Calypso and the restoration of order after the slaughter of the suitors. In The Odyssey, the gods do not erase human agency. They clear a path, stir a heart, hide a man in rags, hold back the dawn, and give the house of Ulysses enough divine room to become a home again.