Ok, there's is the movie "Troy" and there's Brad Pitt, but do you know anything about The Iliad, the literary piece which the movie is based on? Do you know anything about its author? Did you know that The Iliad is a poem? Here's a good opportunity to know a bit more about these questions, check it out!

The Iliad

Consisting of 15,693 lines of verse, The Iliad has been hailed as the greatest epic of Western civilization. Although we know little about the time period when it was composed and still less about the epic's composer, The Iliad's influence on subsequent generations of poets and writers is incalculable. After 2,700 years, it remains unsurpassed as the West's greatest war story. The Iliad has its basis in the rich mythology of Greece. Knowledge of mythology can be an obstacle as well as an aid for the modern reader approaching The Iliad, because the myths underwent changes and variations throughout the centuries before and after Homer.

Archeological evidence suggests that there was a great city near the Hellespont, on the site traditionally ascribed to Troy. It was destroyed by war sometime around the thirteenth century BC. Homer's epics deal with a time when no Greek lived in Asia. Given the evidence, it seems safe to say that his work attempts to reconstruct stories from a past that was already distant. The heroes of The Iliad were very real to the Greeks, holding a place in their history as well as their literature and religion. During the time of Alexander the Great, Greeks recognized a structure in Asia Minor as the burial mound of Achilles and Patroclus, and families often traced their ancestry back to heroes in The Iliad.


Homer

Beyond a few fragments of information, historians and classicists can only speculate about the life of the man who composed The Iliad and The Odyssey. The details are few. The Greeks attributed both of the epics to the same man, and we have little hard evidence that would make us doubt the ancient authorities, but uncertainty is a constant feature of scholarly work dealing with Homer's era of Greek history. The Greeks hailed him as their greatest poet, as well as their first. Although the Greeks recognized other poets who composed in Greek before Homer, no texts from these earlier poets survived. Homer was probably on the cusp between the tradition of oral poetry and the new invention of written language. It is impossible to pin down with any certainty when Homer lived. Eratosthenes gave the traditional date of 1184 BC for the end of the Trojan War, the semi-mythical event which forms the basis for The Iliad. The great Greek historian Herodotus put the date at 1250 BC. Herodotus estimated that Homer lived and wrote in the ninth century BC. He almost certainly lived in one of the Greek city-states in Asia Minor.


For more information on Greek history and the characters of The Iliad check: http://www.gradesaver.com