The Iliad (Greek: Ἰλιάς, Iliás) is an epic poem recounting significant events during a portion of the final year of the Trojan War — the Greek siege of the city of Ilion (Troy) — hence the title (“pertaining to Ilion”). In twenty-four scrolls, containing 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter, it tells the wrathful withdrawal from battle of Achilles, the premiere Greek warrior, after King Agamemnon dishonoured him — an internecine quarrel disastrous to the Greek cause. This poem establishes most of the events (including Achilles’s slaying of Hector) later developed in the Epic Cycle narrative poems recounting the Trojan War events not narrated in the Iliad and the Odyssey.^[1]

The Iliad and its sequel, the Odyssey, are attributed to Homer, but his sole authorship is doubted by some scholars who think the poems exhibit different poetic styles (dialect, idiom, metre) which may indicate several authors, a presumed characteristic of the Ancient Greek oral tradition. ^[2] Twentieth century scholars dated these poems to the late-ninth and early-eighth centuries BC, ^[3] notably G. S. Kirk, Richard Janko, and Barry B. Powell (who links its transcription to the invention of the Greek alphabet); however, Martin West and Richard Seaford, posit either the seventh or the sixth centuries BC, as the composition time(s) of this oldest extant literary work of Ancient Greece.