# Iliad

- id: iliad
- original title: Ἰλιάς / Ilias
- author: Homer
- language: Greek
- composed: c. 750 BCE
- field: poetry

The wrath of Achilles, sung before Greece could write it down. The founding epic of European literature waited two thousand years for a complete Western translation.

## The chain

- **c. 1360–1362** Greek -> Latin, translation [attested]
  Leontius Pilatus (translator), Giovanni Boccaccio (patron), Florence
  The first complete Latin Homer of the medieval West, made line by line while Pilatus lodged in Boccaccio's house and lectured on Greek. Petrarch, who owned a Greek Homer he could not read, had begged for exactly this.
  Evidence: N. G. Wilson 1992 (Pilatus's Florentine Homer project for Boccaccio)
- **1598–1611** Greek -> English, translation [attested]
  George Chapman (translator), London
  Issued in installments from 1598 and completed in 1611: the first full English Iliad. In 1816 a young apothecary's apprentice stayed up all night reading a borrowed copy and wrote a sonnet about it before breakfast.
  Evidence: George Chapman 1611
- **1715–1720** Greek -> English, translation [attested]
  Alexander Pope (translator), London
  Sold by subscription in six volumes, it made Pope financially independent for life: the clearest case in this atlas of a translation as a business model.
  Evidence: Alexander Pope 1715
- **1898** Greek -> English, translation [attested]
  Samuel Butler (translator), London
  Plain prose by the novelist of Erewhon. The text carried in this library is the Perseus revision by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy, which restores Greek names (Zeus for Jove, Odysseus for Ulysses).
  Evidence: Samuel Butler 1898; Thothica 2026 (the corpus copy and its provenance)

## Worth knowing

Unlike most books in this atlas, the Iliad never crossed into Arabic or Latin in antiquity entire; the medieval West knew Troy through Latin digests and romances while the Greek text lived in Byzantium. Its first complete Western crossing came absurdly late, in 1360s Florence, from a Calabrian Greek lodged in Boccaccio's house. After that the chain runs through London: Chapman's thunder, Pope's subscription rolls, and Butler's plain prose, which is the Iliad this library carries.

## Sources

- N. G. Wilson (1992). From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Duckworth.
- L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson (2013). Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Oxford University Press, 4th ed..

Confidence grades: attested (named in the medieval record or settled in scholarship), probable (standard view with real uncertainty), disputed (scholars disagree).