ABSTRACT
The Iliad is a poem with disputed authorship. Even if there actually was a Homer, he used much older stories to compose the Iliad, stories which his audience knew well. The stories came from a common pool and his characters have marks of ancient tradition—they are not just his characters. Eventually the Iliad was assimilated into a cycle of written poems which include Cypria, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilion, The Returns, Odyssey and Telegony(Bowra, 1930; Lattimore, 1951). The dates given by Greek historians for the fall of Troy are between 1334 BC and 1150 BC—Herodotus placed Homer in around 850 BC. Homer thus talks about his past, not about his present. Nevertheless, the Iliad is not a collage of short stories—it is now one poem. The statements in the Greek ‘original’ are dominated by dactylic hexameter, with phrases included because they are stylistically necessary, not because they are descriptively appropriate (Lattimore, 1951). The Iliad though can be translated into prose as, for instance, E.V.Rieu has done.
