What was first iliad or odyssey

What did you decide? As this reply is so late that you have probably read it by now. Both are great for different reasons. I think you might enjoy the Odyssey more. Most modern readers seem to. But I think The Illiad is the greater work, a masterpiece of different characters and a perfection in plotting. The themes too are more complex. Which translation are you reading? I prefer the Robert Fagles translations, but Robert Fitzgerald does a decent job too.

Last edited by Virgil; at PM. Originally Posted by Virgil. I think you migght enjoy the Odyssey more. But I think The Illiad is the greater work, a masterpiece of different character and a perfection in plotting. Replies: 5 Last Post: , PM.

What Does It Matter? See Featured Authors Answering Questions. To answer questions about The Odyssey , please sign up. John P. Since the Odyssey is the better of the two books, read it second so that you will be saving the best for last. It is weird though reading from Odysseus being a secondary character in the Iliad to being the hero in the Odyssey.

Write a comment The Iliad provides you huge context, involving the Trojan War, plenty of characters including Odysseus , and the cosmovision of Ancient Greece. About ten years ago, I set off sailing with a friend of mine. We wanted a big adventure, so we decided to sail up the west coast of the British Isles, the exposed Atlantic coast, visiting various remote islands along the way.

I had thrown into my luggage a copy of The Odyssey , translated by Robert Fagles , having never really looked at Homer for about 25 years. We had a rough time. Our instruments broke, and it had been a big hike from Cornwall. Lying in my bunk tied up next to a quay in southwest Ireland, I opened this book and found myself confronted with what felt like the truth—like somebody was telling me what it was like to be alive on Earth, in the figure of Odysseus.

Odysseus is the great metaphor for all of our lives: struggling with storms, coming across incredibly seductive nymphs, finding himself trapped between impossible choices. I suddenly thought, This is talking to me in a way I would never have guessed before.

Seven locations have been given as Homer's birthplace. It's said he was blind. Samuel Butler , the 19th-century satirist, wrote an entire book trying to prove he was actually a she. Do we know anything factual about Homer? I think it's a mistake to think of Homer as a person. Homer is an "it. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it.

Homer is essentially shared. Today we have an author obsession—we want to know biography all the time. But Homer has no biography. The Iliad and The Odyssey are like Viking longships. Nobody knows who made them, no name is attached to them, there's no written design or drawings.

They're simply the evolved beauty of long and careful tradition. There are even doubts about when they were composed. The usual date is about B. You believe the tradition began much earlier than that. Make your case. My claim is that the poems, especially The Iliad, have their beginnings around B. The reason I say that has two strands to it.

One is that there are large elements of the Homeric stories, particularly The Iliad , that are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories.

There are deep elements in Homer that have nothing to do with Greece or the Aegean. The second thing is that the situation in The Iliad is very clearly not one in which two deeply civilized nations are opposed to each other. The civilized nation in The Iliad is Troy. It's a well-set-up, organized city, where women lead very dignified lives. Outside Troy is this camp of wild barbarians—the Greeks. The Greeks are Homer's barbarians.

The atmosphere in the Greek camp is like gang life in the more difficult parts of modern industrialized cities. All ideas of rule and law and love count for nothing. The only thing that makes sense is revenge and self-assertion. And that picture of the Greeks doesn't make sense any later than about to B. After that, the Greeks had arrived in the Mediterranean and started to create a civil society.

Before that, they were essentially tribes from the steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian—nomadic, male-dominated, violent. He died before finishing The Aeneid, which was published shortly after his death. Gods in the classical world are characters in and of themselves. They have full personalities, their own allegiances to the humans below and to each other, and they are prone to the same emotions as mortals: jealousy, love, anger, sadness. All the gods have two names depending on whether they are being referred to by Greeks or Romans.

This conflict was between the Trojans and the Greeks and was estimated to have taken place in the 12th or 13th century BC — it lasted for ten years. The war started when Paris, a Trojan prince, stole Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta.

A colossal Greek army set sail for Troy, led by Agamemnon.