The armies approach each other, but before they meet, Paris offers to end the war by fighting a duel with Menelaus, urged by Hector, his brother and hero of Troy.

Agamemnon admits his error and sends an embassy composed of Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix to offer Briseis and extensive gifts to Achilles, if he will return to the fighting.

"[19] Hera and Athena continue to support the Achaean forces throughout the poem as a result of this, while Aphrodite aids Paris and the Trojans.The emotions between the goddesses often translate to actions they take in the mortal world.

For example, in Book 3 of the Iliad, Paris is about to be defeated by Menelaus, who had challenged him to single combat: "Now he'd have hauled him off and won undying glory but Aphrodite, Zeus's daughter, was quick to the mark, snapped the rawhide strap.

This connection of emotions to actions is just one example out of many that occur throughout the poem: there is constant intervention by all of the gods, especially to give motivational speeches to their respective protégés, often appearing in the shape of a human being they are familiar with.

[21] The intellectual interest of 5th- and 4th-century BCE authors, such as Thucydides and Plato, was limited to their utility as "a way of talking about human life rather than a description or a truth", because, if the gods remain religious figures, rather than human metaphors, their 'existence' - without the foundation of either dogma or a bible of faiths - then allowed Greek culture the intellectual breadth and freedom to conjure gods fitting any religious function they required as a people.

He points out that almost every action in the Iliad is directed, caused, or influenced by a god and that earlier translations show an astonishing lack of words suggesting thought, planning, or introspection.

Those that do appear, he argues, are misinterpretations made by translators imposing a modern mentality on the characters,[23] a form of reverse logic by which a conclusion determines the validity of evidence.

It is highlighted and referenced throughout the narrative in multiple methods, for example, Zeus sending omens to seers such as Calchas, or Thetis' prophecies of Achilles' imminent death.

[27] In Book 9 (9.410–16), Achilles poignantly tells Agamemnon's envoys - Odysseus, Phoenix, and Ajax - begging his reinstatement to battle about having to choose between two fates (διχθαδίας κήρας, 9.411).

Yet the concept of homecoming is much explored in other Ancient Greek literature, especially in the postwar homeward fortunes experienced by the Atreidae (Agamemnon and Menelaus) and Odysseus (see the Odyssey).

Due to this slight, Achilles refuses to fight and asks his mother, Thetis, to make sure that Zeus causes the Achaeans to suffer on the battlefield until Agamemnon comes to realize the harm he has done to him.

In Book I, the Achaean troubles begin with King Agamemnon's dishonorable, unkingly behavior—first, by threatening the priest Chryses (1.11), then, by aggravating them in disrespecting Achilles, by confiscating Briseis from him (1.171).

Agamemnon spurs the Achaeans to fight by calling into question Odysseus, Diomedes, and Nestor's pride, asking why they are cowering and waiting for help when they should be the ones leading the charge.

[35] His personal rage and wounded soldier's pride propel the story: the Achaeans' faltering in battle, the slayings of Patroclus and Hector, and the fall of Troy.

King Agamemnon dishonours Chryses, the Trojan priest of Apollo, by refusing with a threat the restitution of his daughter, Chryseis—despite the proffered ransom of "gifts beyond count".

Accepting the prospect of death as fair price for avenging Patroclus, he returns to battle, dooming Hector and Troy, thrice chasing him around the Trojan walls before slaying him and then dragging the corpse behind his chariot, back to camp.

Literature was central to the educational-cultural function of the itinerant rhapsode, who composed consistent epic poems from memory and improvisation and disseminated them, via song and chant, in his travels and at the Panathenaic Festival of athletics, music, poetics, and sacrifice, celebrating Athena's birthday.

[48] Originally, Classical scholars treated the Iliad and the Odyssey as written poetry, and Homer as a writer, yet by the 1920s, Milman Parry (1902–1935) had launched a movement claiming otherwise.

In The Singer of Tales (1960), Lord presents likenesses between the tragedies of the Achaean Patroclus in the Iliad and the Sumerian Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh and claims to refute, with "careful analysis of the repetition of thematic patterns", that the Patroclus storyline upsets Homer's established compositional formulae of "wrath, bride-stealing, and rescue"; thus, stock-phrase reiteration does not restrict his originality in fitting story to rhyme.

Therefore they called him Simoeisios; but he could not render again the care of his dear parents; he was short-lived, beaten down beneath the spear of high-hearted Ajax, who struck him as he first came forward beside the nipple of the right breast, and the bronze spearhead drove clean through the shoulder.

Homer also came to be of great influence in European culture with the resurgence of interest in Greek antiquity during the Renaissance, and it remains the first and most influential work of the Western canon.

In its full form, the text made its return to Italy and Western Europe beginning in the 15th century, primarily through translations into Latin and the vernacular languages.

[39] The West tended to view Homer as unreliable, as they believed they possessed much more down-to-earth and realistic eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War written by Dares and Dictys Cretensis, who were supposedly present at the events.

[citation needed] These late antique forged accounts formed the basis of several eminently popular medieval chivalric romances, most notably those of Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne.

The play, often considered to be a comedy, reverses traditional views on events of the Trojan War and depicts Achilles as a coward, Ajax as a dull, unthinking mercenary, etc.

[64] Robert Browning's poem Development discusses his childhood introduction to the matter of the Iliad and his delight in the epic, as well as contemporary debates about its authorship.

In the preface to his own translation, Pope praises "the daring fiery spirit" of Chapman's rendering, which is "something like what one might imagine Homer, himself, would have writ before he arrived at years of discretion.

"[93]: 354  In 1870, the American poet William Cullen Bryant published a blank verse version, that Van Wyck Brooks describes as "simple, faithful".

Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1990) and Stanley Lombardo (1997) are bolder than Lattimore in adding more contemporary American-English idioms to convey Homer's conventional and formulaic language.