The oldest surviving Western epic — Homer's account of a few weeks in the last year of the Trojan War — that established war, heroism, honor, grief, and fate as permanent themes of Western literature and whose portrait of Achilles remains the most complex representation of the relationship between glory and mortality in the ancient world
The Iliad does not begin at the beginning and does not end at the end. It opens ten years into the Trojan War and closes before Troy falls. It has no climactic victory, no satisfying resolution. What it has is Achilles — the greatest warrior of his age — refusing to fight because his honor has been slighted, then returning to battle not to win the war but to avenge his friend's death, then killing Hector, then weeping with Hector's father as the two men share bread in the night. The Iliad established the template for Western epic — and its template refuses to be simple. War in the Iliad is magnificent and horrible simultaneously, and the poem does not resolve that tension.