Homer’s mighty epic, the Iliad, is the first work of western literature and one of the defining masterpieces of our culture. The purpose of this new line-by-line commentary is to help as wide an audience as possible to understand and appreciate the poem through the best of recent scholarship on the man and his work.

Peter Jones has selected three of the most widely used translations on which to base his commentary, those of E.V. Rieu (revised and updated by Peter Jones), Martin Hammond, and Richmond Lattimore. There is a useful introduction to the whole work and separate short introductions to each book of the Iliad. Each passage selected for comment is given a line-reference and quoted from all three translations.