The Iliad Retold for Children

The poem Iliad tells what happened during the final weeks of the Trojan War, in which the Greeks and the Trojans fought. The city of Troy, located in Asia Minor, was then also called Ilion, so the story bears the title Iliad. But how did the Iliad begin? It started with the wrath of Achilles, the greatest Greek hero, over the insult he had received from King Agamemnon. How much destruction and suffering that war caused! The beautiful words with which Homer sang this story have allowed it to leave its mark through time, down to our days.

Although nothing is known with certainty, in the 8th century BC a Greek poet named Homer, said to have been blind, sang a marvelous poem titled Iliad, which recounts the exploits of Achilles and other heroes in the Trojan War. It is also said that Homer later created the poem Odyssey, a story about the adventures of Odysseus, Ulysses, who after the war ended set sail from Troy and, ten years later, reached his homeland of Ithaca. These two works were the first oral poems that were sung and later written down. But the truth is that neither of them is certain, and there are those who say Homer never existed…

Nevertheless, the Iliad is a magnificent poem, created many, many years ago, about eight thousand years ago! It is written in Greek, and it is believed to contain 15693 verses.