20 questions on Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War — the golden apple, the wrath of Achilles, Hector, and Priam's ransom.
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The Iliad is the oldest surviving work of European literature, and it is not the story most people think it is. Composed around the 8th century BC and attributed to Homer, its 24 books cover barely fifty days of a war that lasted ten years. There is no wooden horse in it. Achilles does not die in it. Troy does not fall in it. What it contains instead is an argument about rage, honour and what men owe each other.
It opens with a quarrel over a captive woman, Briseis, and the withdrawal of the greatest fighter in the Greek army. Agamemnon has the authority; Achilles has the ability; neither will yield, and ordinary soldiers die for it. The turn comes when Patroclus borrows Achilles's armour, is killed by Hector, and grief transforms sulking into slaughter. Achilles kills Hector beneath the walls and drags the body behind his chariot for twelve days.
And then the poem does something no one expects. Priam, the old king of Troy, crosses the enemy lines at night, enters the tent of the man who killed his son, and kisses his hands. They weep together — one for a father, one for a son — and Achilles gives the body back. The Iliad ends not in triumph but in a funeral, and its final word for Hector is simply 'breaker of horses'.