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The first word of Homer's Iliad is the ancient Greek word μῆνις
(mēnis), fury, rage, or wrath. This word announces the major theme of
the Iliad: the wrath of Achilles. When Agamemnon, the commander of the
Greek forces at Troy, dishonors Achilles by taking Briseis, a slave
woman given to Achilles as a prize of war, Achilles becomes enraged
and withdraws from the fighting until Book XIX. Without him and his
powerful Myrmidon warriors, the Greeks suffer defeat by the Trojans,
almost to the point of losing their will to fight. Achilles re-enters
the fighting when Patroclus is killed by the Trojan prince Hector.
Achilles slaughters many Trojans and kills Hector. In his rage, he
then refuses to return Hector's body and instead defiles it. Priam,
the father of Hector, ransoms his son's body, and the Iliad ends with
the funeral of Hector.

Homer devotes long passages to frank, blow-by-blow descriptions of
combat. He gives the names of the fighters, recounts their taunts and
battle-cries, and gruesomely details the ways in which they kill and
wound one another. Often, the death of a hero only escalates the
violence, as the two sides battle for his armor and corpse, or his
close companions launch a punitive attack on his killer. The lucky
ones are sometimes whisked away by friendly charioteers or the
intervention of a god, but Homeric warfare is still some of the most
bloody and brutal in literature.

The Iliad has a very strong religious and supernatural element. Both
sides in the war are extremely pious, and both have heroes descended
from divine beings. They sacrifice to the gods and consult priests and
prophets to decide their actions. For their own part, the gods
frequently join in battles, both by advising and protecting their
favorites and even by participating in combat against humans and other
gods.

The Iliad's huge cast of characters connects the Trojan War to many
ancient myths, such as Jason and the Argonauts, the Seven Against
Thebes, and the Labors of Hercules. Many ancient Greek myths exist in
multiple versions, so Homer had some freedom to choose among them to
suit his story. See Greek mythology for more detail.

The action of the Iliad covers only a few weeks of the tenth and final
year of the Trojan War. It does not cover the background and early
years of the war (Paris' abduction of Helen from King Menelaus) nor
its end (the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy). Other epic
poems, collectively known as the Epic Cycle or cyclic epics, narrated
many of these events; these poems only survive in fragments and later
descriptions. See Trojan War for a summary of the events of the war.

[edit] Synopsis
As the poem begins, the Greeks have captured Chryséis, the daughter of
Apollo's priest Chryses, and given her as a prize to Agamemnon. When
Agamemnon threatens Chryses as he attempted to ransom his daughter,
Apollo sends a plague against the Greeks. At an assembly called by
Achilles, the Greeks compel Agamemnon to restore Chryséis to her
father to stop the sickness. Agamemnon agrees reluctantly but also
takes for himself Briséis, whom the Achaeans had given to Achilles as
a spoil of war. This causes Achilles, widely seen as the best warrior
of the war, to withdraw from the fighting.

In counterpoint to Achilles' pride stands the Trojan prince Hector,
son of King Priam, a husband and father who fights to defend his city
and his family. With Achilles on the sidelines, Hector leads
successful counterattacks against the Greeks, who have built a
fortified camp around their ships pulled up on the Trojan beach. The
best remaining Greek fighters, including Odysseus and Diomedes, are
wounded, and the gods favor the Trojans. When the Trojans finally
threatened the Greek ships with fire, Achilles allows Patroclus,
impersonating