The Iliad · wrath, sing, goddess
the Iliad’s ancient company: a guide
The Iliad was never alone. It stands at the head of a crowd of ancient works that continue it, contradict it, dramatize its aftermath, parody it, argue about it, and forge eyewitness rebuttals to it — a conversation that ran for well over a thousand years before the poem reached us, and whose voices are already present in this edition's notes (Aristarchus athetizing, Zenodotus emending, Plutarch preserving four suppressed lines, Strabo reporting the variant Rome preferred). This list gathers that company. It is arranged not by date but by relationship to the Iliad — the companion, the sequels, the stage, the parody, the quarrel, the answer, the hoax, the scholars — because that is how the works themselves understood their positions. Each entry notes what survives and in what form; the losses are part of the story, and are reported as plainly as the survivals. Dates are approximate throughout; almost every early date in this field is argued about.
A note on access: nearly everything here exists in a Loeb Classical Library volume (Greek or Latin with facing English), and most of it in public-domain translations available through Perseus or the Internet Archive. Specific standard editions are named where they matter.
THE ODYSSEY · attributed to Homer · complete, 12,109 lines
The other survivor. Composed in the same formulaic tradition, plausibly within a generation or two of the Iliad, and built to fit around it with astonishing tact: the Odyssey retells almost nothing the Iliad narrates, and instead slots its Trojan flashbacks — the horse, the sack, the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles, the ghosts of Achilles and Ajax — into the gaps the older poem left. Where the Iliad asks what a short glorious life is worth, the Odyssey asks what a long unglorious survival is worth; the shade of Achilles, telling Odysseus in the underworld that he would rather be a poor man's field-hand among the living than king of all the dead, is the one poem answering the other. A companion translation on the same principles as this one, sharing its formula register where the poems share formulas, sits beside this project.
Antiquity possessed the whole war in verse: six more epics, collectively the "Epic Cycle," wrapped around the Iliad and Odyssey like the lost panels of an altarpiece. All six perished. What survives is a set of terse plot summaries made by one Proclus (perhaps 2nd c. AD) for his Chrestomathy — themselves preserved only in Photius and in the margins of Iliad manuscripts — plus a few dozen quoted fragments. The standard collection is M. L. West's Loeb, Greek Epic Fragments (2003). Aristotle (Poetics 23) already saw the difference in kind: the cyclic poets narrated everything in order, one thing after another, while Homer took a single action and made everything else radiate from it. The Cycle is the everything; reading even its skeletons shows what the Iliad chose not to be.
THE CYPRIA · attributed to Stasinus · 11 books, lost; summary and ~50 fragments
The prequel: Zeus's plan to thin mankind, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the Judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the gathering at Aulis, Iphigenia, Philoctetes abandoned, the first nine years — everything the Iliad presupposes in its opening line. Herodotus (2.117) already argued it could not be Homer's, because it contradicts the Iliad's account of Paris's voyage: the oldest surviving act of Homeric source-criticism.
THE AETHIOPIS · attributed to Arctinus of Miletus · 5 books, lost; summary and fragments
The direct sequel — it opened where our Book 24 closes, with a line ancient readers knew as an alternative ending to the Iliad itself ("So they busied themselves with the burial of Hector; and an Amazon came..."). Penthesileia the Amazon queen, killed by Achilles as they fall in love across the spear; Memnon the Aethiopian, son of the Dawn, killed for killing Antilochus; and then Achilles' own death at the Scaean Gates by the arrow of Paris and Apollo — the event the Iliad prophesies five times and refuses to narrate.
THE LITTLE ILIAD · attributed to Lesches · 4 books, lost; summary and fragments
The Judgment of the Arms (Achilles' armor awarded to Odysseus; Ajax's madness and suicide), Philoctetes fetched, Neoptolemus brought from Scyros — the poem behind the son Achilles mourns for in our Book 19 — and the building of the horse.
THE SACK OF ILION (Iliou Persis) · attributed to Arctinus · 2 books, lost; summary and fragments
The horse debated, Laocoon, the night of the fall: Priam killed at the altar of Zeus, Astyanax thrown from the wall — the death Andromache foresees for him at our 24.734-738 — Polyxena sacrificed at Achilles' tomb. The atrocities that made the "sack of a city" the ancient shorthand for ultimate suffering all lived here.
THE RETURNS (Nostoi) · attributed to Agias of Troezen · 5 books, lost; summary
The costly homecomings: the wreck of Ajax son of Oileus, Menelaus blown to Egypt, and Agamemnon walking into his own murder — the story the Odyssey uses as its dark counter-example and the tragedians made their own.
THE TELEGONY · attributed to Eugammon of Cyrene · 2 books, lost; summary
The Cycle's strange coda: Odysseus's last wanderings and his death at the hands of Telegonus, his son by Circe — killed by a spear barbed with a sting-ray's spine, the sea reaching inland at last.
QUINTUS OF SMYRNA · Posthomerica · probably 3rd c. AD · complete, 14 books
Late antiquity, missing its Cycle, rewrote the gap: Quintus begins at Hector's funeral and marches in Homeric hexameters all the way to the sack and the storm over the returning fleet — Penthesileia, Memnon, the death of Achilles, the Judgment of the Arms, Philoctetes, the horse. Homer's manner without Homer's inwardness, but the only continuous ancient narrative of the war's end, and often better than its reputation.
TRIPHIODORUS · The Sack of Troy · 3rd-4th c. AD · complete, 691 lines
A single night in a single sitting: a compact, theatrical telling of the horse and the fall.
COLLUTHUS · The Rape of Helen · c. 500 AD · complete, ~390 lines
The last ancient Troy poem: a small, ornamental epyllion on the Judgment of Paris and the abduction — the war's first evening, written at the tradition's last.
Aeschylus is said to have called his plays "slices from the great banquets of Homer" (Athenaeus 8.347e), and the phrase is exact: fifth-century Athens treated the Trojan matter — mostly the Cycle's panels rather than the Iliad's own plot — as its common story-hoard. This is the ancient fan fiction, written by masters, and it consistently does what fan fiction does: it goes looking for the people the epic wronged.
AESCHYLUS · Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides) · 458 BC · complete — the only surviving trilogy
The homecoming as catastrophe: Agamemnon walks the crimson cloth into the bath, and three plays work the blood out of the house. The Iliad's king of men becomes a study in what the war cost the victors; the herald's speech on the rains and frosts at Troy is the veteran's Iliad in twenty lines. His lost Achilles trilogy (Myrmidons, Nereids, Phrygians) dramatized our Books 9-24 directly — the surviving fragments of Achilles' lament over Patroclus were famous in antiquity, and their loss is among the tradition's heaviest.
SOPHOCLES · Ajax · c. 440s BC · complete
What happens to the Iliad's second-best fighter when the poem's economy of honor fails him: cheated of Achilles' arms, mad among the cattle, and dead by the sword Hector gave him at the end of our Book 7 — the guest-gift completing its arc. The quiet debate over his burial replays the Iliad's final question (what is owed a dead enemy?) in a Greek camp without an Achilles to answer it.
SOPHOCLES · Philoctetes · 409 BC · complete
The man the expedition abandoned, the bow the war requires, and the young son of Achilles caught between honesty and Odysseus: the epic's margins turned into the sharpest ethics on the Athenian stage.
EURIPIDES · Trojan Women · 415 BC · complete
The sack from beneath: Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, one day on the beach among the allotted captives, and the body of Astyanax brought in on his father's shield — the deliberate answering echo of every Hector-and-Andromache scene in the Iliad. Produced months after Athens massacred Melos; the oldest surviving anti-war play, made entirely of Homer's widows.
EURIPIDES · Hecuba · c. 424 BC · complete
Polyxena sacrificed to Achilles' ghost, Polydorus murdered by a guest-friend for gold — a different death from the one Achilles gives him at our 20.407-418; the tradition never agreed on its youngest victim — and the old queen's revenge: grief curdling into atrocity.
EURIPIDES · Andromache · c. 425 BC · complete
The afterlife of Hector's wife as the war-prize of Achilles' son: the sequel to our 6.450-465, where Hector foresaw exactly this.
EURIPIDES · Iphigenia at Aulis · 405 BC · complete
The war's first death, bought before the fleet could sail: the Cypria's story done as domestic tragedy, with Agamemnon drafting and redrafting the letter — the ancestor of every study in the cowardice of command.
EURIPIDES · Helen · 412 BC · complete
Built on Stesichorus's recantation (below): the real Helen sat out the war in Egypt, and Troy burned for a phantom. The Iliad weighed against a hypothesis: what if it was for nothing — literally nothing?
RHESUS · transmitted under Euripides' name; authorship disputed · complete
The one surviving tragedy that dramatizes an actual episode of the Iliad: our Book 10, the night raid, seen this time from the Trojan watch-fires. Whoever wrote it, it is the only chance to watch the fifth century stage a scene we also have in Homer.
Lost, and worth mourning by name: Aeschylus's Myrmidons (above); Sophocles' Polyxena and his Lovers of Achilles; Euripides' Alexandros (Paris exposed and recognized — partially recovered from papyrus), Palamedes, and Philoctetes (the versions that competed with the survivors). The tragic Troy we have is perhaps a tenth of the tragic Troy there was.
SAPPHO · fragment 44 ("The Wedding of Hector and Andromache") · c. 600 BC
The marriage the Iliad only mourns, sung whole: Hector and Andromache brought over the salt sea to Troy amid myrrh and cassia and the sound of pipes, "like to the gods." Whether it ends in shadow is invisible — the fragment breaks off at the height of the joy, which is somehow the most Iliadic thing about it.
STESICHORUS · Palinode · 6th c. BC · fragments
The poet struck blind, tradition said, for blaming Helen — and cured on recanting: "The story is not true. You never went in the well-benched ships; you never came to the citadel of Troy." The first recorded retraction in Western literature, and the seed of Euripides' Helen.
PINDAR · Nemean 7, Nemean 8, Isthmian 8, and passim · early 5th c. BC · complete odes
The Iliad's heroes as the currency of praise: Nemean 8 on Ajax destroyed by the secret ballot ("envy fastens always on the good"); Nemean 7 on Neoptolemus dead at Delphi, with Pindar's startling charge that Odysseus's reputation outruns his deeds because sweet-worded Homer inflated it; Isthmian 8 on Themis's prophecy that Thetis's son would outdo his father — the divine near-miss behind the whole poem. Pindar reads Homer the way the fifth century did: as scripture to be corrected.
BATRACHOMYOMACHIA ("The Battle of Frogs and Mice") · Hellenistic, though antiquity credited it to Homer · complete, ~300 lines
A mouse drowns; the mice arm for war; Zeus convenes the gods to watch; crabs settle it. Every convention of the Iliad — the arming scene, the aristeia, the divine council, the pathetic obituary — miniaturized onto a pond. The ancients thought Homer wrote it as a joke on himself, which is false as scholarship and perfect as criticism.
LUCIAN · True History; Dialogues of the Dead · 2nd c. AD · complete
In the True History Lucian sails to the Isle of the Blest and interviews Homer, settling the scholarly questions directly: asked about the lines the critics bracket as spurious, Homer says he wrote every one — a joke aimed precisely at the atheteses recorded throughout this edition's notes. The Dialogues of the Dead send Achilles, Ajax, and Helen's skull down to Hades to be needled by Menippus: the underworld of Odyssey 11 replayed as satire.
Homer was ancient Greece's schoolbook, scripture, and moral authority — which is why the philosophers could not leave him alone.
XENOPHANES and HERACLITUS · 6th-5th c. BC · fragments
The opening shots: Xenophanes — "Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods everything that is shame and reproach among men"; Heraclitus — Homer "deserves to be thrown out of the contests and beaten with a staff." The scandal of the Iliad's gods, stated at maximum volume, within two centuries of the poem.
PLATO · Ion; Republic, books 2-3 and 10 · 4th c. BC · complete
The Ion teases a Homeric performer who knows everything about the poems and nothing about anything; the Republic, with visible reluctance and repeated professions of love, banishes Homer from the ideal city for making gods lie and good men wail — citing the Iliad's grieving Achilles by name. "There is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry": this is where it is declared, and the Iliad is the battlefield.
ARISTOTLE · Poetics · 4th c. BC · complete (the surviving book)
The defense. Homer is "divine beyond the rest" precisely for what this edition's introduction calls the poem's shape: he took one action — not the whole war — and made a unity of it, and he knew, alone among epic poets, when to shut up and let his people speak. Aristotle's few pages set the terms of epic criticism permanently.
LONGINUS · On the Sublime · 1st c. AD · complete (with gaps)
The most quotable of ancient critics on the Iliad's grandeur (the gods' battle, the horses' leap — our 5.770-772 — measured against the space of the world), and author of the famous verdict that in the Odyssey Homer is the setting sun: the greatness remains, without the intensity.
PLUTARCH · How the Young Man Should Study Poetry · 1st-2nd c. AD · complete
The ancient world's reading manual for Homer — how to profit from a poet who shows bad behavior — and, for this project, a benefactor: his quotation is the sole preserver of the four suppressed lines of Phoenix's confession (our 9.458-461 gap, translated in the note there from his text).
DIO CHRYSOSTOM · Oration 11, "The Trojan Discourse" · c. 100 AD · complete
A sophist's tour de force arguing, with a straight face, that Homer lied and Troy won the war. Silly and serious at once: the earliest full display of how much play there is in a story everyone knows from one contested source.
VIRGIL · Aeneid · 19 BC · complete, 12 books
The losers' sequel and the Iliad's greatest reply. Virgil takes the one Trojan the Iliad conspicuously saves — Aeneas, rescued by Poseidon in our Book 20 "so that the race of Dardanus not perish seedless," with the note there recording the variant Strabo knew, in which his line shall rule "over all" — and builds Rome on the prophecy. Books 1-6 rewrite the Odyssey, books 7-12 the Iliad, and the poem ends on a deliberate, troubling inversion of our Book 24: where Achilles yields to a suppliant, Aeneas, remembering a dead friend, does not.
OVID · Metamorphoses, books 12-13; Heroides 3 · c. 8 AD · complete
Metamorphoses 12-13 run the war past at Ovid's speed — invulnerable Cygnus, the centaurs' brawl told by Nestor grown even older, and the Judgment of the Arms staged as a full courtroom debate between Ajax's deeds and Ulysses' words (words win; Ajax becomes a flower). Heroides 3 is the letter of Briseis to Achilles: the woman over whom the Iliad's quarrel broke, given at last a voice and a viewpoint — the ancient poem this project's Briseis passages most want beside them.
CATULLUS · Poem 64 · c. 55 BC · complete
The wedding of Peleus and Thetis in miniature epic, with the Fates singing the unborn Achilles as a prophecy of glorious slaughter — the Iliad's future tense made a lullaby, and meant to chill.
SENECA · Trojan Women · 1st c. AD · complete
Euripides' beach re-staged in the imperial manner: Astyanax and Polyxena, rhetoric at the cliff's edge. The Troy play as Rome's meditation on its own capacity for atrocity.
ILIAS LATINA · attributed to Baebius Italicus · 1st c. AD · complete, ~1,070 lines
The Iliad compressed into a Latin school text — and, after the West lost its Greek, the thread by which the poem itself (as opposed to the Troy story) stayed faintly alive in Europe for a thousand years.
DICTYS CRETENSIS · Journal of the Trojan War · Greek original c. 1st-2nd c. AD (papyrus-confirmed), Latin version 4th c. · complete in Latin DARES PHRYGIUS · The Fall of Troy: A History · Latin, 5th-6th c. · complete
The fake eyewitnesses: "Dictys" claims to be a Cretan soldier's war diary dug up from his tomb, "Dares" a Trojan priest's account (he is borrowed from our 5.9, where a Dares serves as priest of Hephaestus) — both "predating" Homer, both correcting him, both stripping out the gods, and both written centuries after him. The Middle Ages, preferring eyewitnesses to poets, took them as history: through Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne they begat the medieval Troy, and thence Boccaccio, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida — a whole tradition descended from two forgeries and a minor character. (Troilus himself gets one line in the Iliad, among the dead sons Priam counts at 24.257.)
PHILOSTRATUS · Heroicus ("On Heroes") · early 3rd c. AD · complete
A Phoenician traveler and a vinedresser talk in a vineyard haunted by the ghost of Protesilaus — the first Achaean to die at Troy, dead before the Iliad opens — who corrects Homer on points of detail from personal experience. The gentlest of the rebuttal-fictions, and the one closest to this project's next undertaking: it is, in its way, an interview with the fallen.
THE ALEXANDRIANS · Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus · 3rd-2nd c. BC · surviving only through the scholia
The founders of the text: the librarians of Alexandria who collated the manuscripts, invented the critical signs, bracketed what they doubted, and fixed the vulgate this translation renders. They appear throughout this edition's notes as living interlocutors — Zenodotus making Agamemnon stand, Aristarchus doubting the divine singer and the Judgment of Paris — because the poem we have is, in part, their argument.
THE SCHOLIA · especially the Venetus A manuscript (10th c. AD) · edited by Erbse (1969-88)
The margins of the great Byzantine Iliad manuscripts preserve, in compressed centuries-deep layers, the wreckage of ancient Homeric scholarship — Aristarchus's judgments, rejected variants, allegorists, grammarians, the lot. The Venetus A, whose margins carry the richest layer, is the single most important physical object in the poem's transmission; its apparatus is the ancestor of the one extracted for this project. High-resolution images of the manuscript itself are freely available online through the Homer Multitext project.
PORPHYRY · Homeric Questions · 3rd c. AD · partially preserved
The problem-and-solution tradition: apparent contradictions in Homer posed and resolved, some brilliantly, some by main force. The ancestor of every "but in Book 5 he was wounded" argument readers have with epics to this day.
EUSTATHIUS OF THESSALONICA · Commentaries on the Iliad · 12th c. AD · complete, enormous
A Byzantine archbishop's line-by-line commentary that folds in everything he could still read of the older scholarship — much of it now surviving nowhere else. The last ancient reader, in effect, writing at the door of the modern ones.
THE CONTEST OF HOMER AND HESIOD (Certamen) · compiled 2nd c. AD from older material · complete
A fiction in which the two founding poets compete before a king: Hesiod asks the trick questions, Homer answers in effortless hexameters, and the prize goes to Hesiod — because the judge prefers the poet of peace and farming to the poet of slaughter. The tradition's own verdict on the Iliad's greatness, and its own joke about what greatness is for.
The shortest true history of ancient literature is that it is a long argument with the Iliad. The Odyssey answers it; the Cycle completes it; the tragedians prosecute it on behalf of its victims; the philosophers put it on trial; Alexandria edits it; Rome appropriates it; the forgers depose it; the satirists interview it; and the scholiasts annotate every round of the fight in the margins. Any door in this list opens back into the poem. Begin anywhere.