قصة الكتاب :
The Iliad is an ancient epic Greek poem by Homer which recounts the events that occurred in the final weeks of the Trojan War and the Greek siege of the city of Troy. The Iliad was written in the mid-8th century BC and is sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or the Song of Ilium. The poem is written in the form of 24 books, uses the Trojan War as its subject and the Greek hero Achilles as its prime focus. The legendary war is believed to have occurred sometime during the 13th century BC. The Greeks believed that Homer was from Chios or Ionia and have credited him with two of the greatest masterpieces of Greek literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey. He was considered by the Greeks to be the greatest writer that ever existed and was referred to as the \'poet\' .\r\n
\r\nThe Iliad was composed as one continuous poem and has a metrical form referred to as the dactylic hexameter – a meter associated with several other epic poems. The poem actually deals with a short period in the tenth year of the Trojan War. It does not talk of the entire War. At the time of writing, the story of the entire Trojan war was familiar among the audiences and therefore, focusing on a part of it was a style adopted by poets. The central character in the story is Achilles, the son of the mortal Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis. Achilles gets into a fight with the Greek prince Agememnon and loses his princess to him, an event which leads to Achilles’ withdrawal from the war. He stays in the camp until he hears that his friend Patroclus has been killed. He avenges this death by bursting back into the battlefield and killing the Trojan hero Hector who was responsible for Patroclus’ death. The Iliad ends with the ransom of Hector’s body by his old father Priam. All the events in the story are shown as unfolding under the watchful eyes of the Olympian gods who function both as actors and audience. They are as divided over the fate of Troy as the humans. The demise of Hector here serves as a metaphor for the fall of Troy itself. The actual fall of the city of Troy is not explicitly dealt with in the book.\r\n
\r\nThe Iliad is acclaimed all over the world as being a great story. The central themes in the book are that of pain and pathos, war and gore, honour and betrayal, heroes and villains all set in the days of a glorious past. The poem presents a brilliant depiction of human mortality and how even the most heroic character is not immune to fate as it determines the course of lives. The Iliad has, along the years, inspired several Greek, Roman and Renaissance works. \r\n