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Homer
Little is known about the life of Homer; the author credited with composing The Iliad and The Odyssey, and arguably the greatest poet of the ancient world. Historians place his...
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FURTHER READING
Related Poems
The Iliad, Book I, Lines 1-16
by Homer
Poems About War
From War Is Kind
by Stephen Crane
April 27, 1937
by Timothy Steele
Death Fugue
by Paul Celan
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Eighth Air Force
by Randall Jarrell
For the Union Dead
by Robert Lowell
from War Music (an account of books 16-19 of Homer's Iliad)
by Christopher Logue
I Have a Rendezvous with Death
by Alan Seeger
I Hear an Army
by James Joyce
Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai
My Father on His Shield
by Walt McDonald
Spoken From the Hedgerows
by Jorie Graham
The Czar's Last Christmas Letter: A Barn in the Urals
by Norman Dubie
The Fall of Rome
by W. H. Auden
The Star-Spangled Banner
by Francis Scott Key
The War Works Hard
by Dunya Mikhail
Woman Martyr
by Agi Mishol
Other Epics
Inferno, Canto I
by Dante Alighieri
Inferno, Canto XXXIV
by Dante Alighieri
The Iliad, Book I, Lines 1-14
by Homer
The Iliad, Book I, Lines 1-16
by Homer
The Iliad, Book I, ["A Friend Consigned to Death"]
by Homer
The Odyssey, Book I, Lines 1-20
by Homer
The Odyssey, Book XXIII, ["The Trunk of the Olive Tree"]
by Homer
from Don Juan ["If from great nature's or our own abyss"]
by George Gordon Byron
from The Aeneid ["A grove stood in the city"]
by Virgil
from The Aeneid ["First, the sky and the earth"]
by Virgil
from The Aeneid ["So, you traitor"]
by Virgil
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The Iliad, Book I, Lines 1-15  
by Homer
Translated by Stanley Lombardo

RAGE:

Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon--
The Greek warlord--and godlike Achilles.

Which of the immortals set these two
At each other's throats?
Apollo
Zeus' son and Leto's, offended
By the warlord. Agamemnon had dishonored
Chryses, Apollo's priest, so the god
Struck the Greek camp with plague,
And the soldiers were dying of it.



From The Iliad, lines 1-17, by Homer, translated by Stanley Lombardo and published by Hackett Publishing. © 1997 by Stanley Lombardo. Used with permission of Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge, MA. All rights reserved.
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