Michael Silk's volume offers a prevalent assessment of The Iliad both for the Homeric specialist and general reader. His starting point is the relationship between Homer's world (the eighth century BC) and the remote heroic age in which the events of the punitive Greek expedition against Troy were set. He deals with the poem's historical context, composition, and extensive influence, and stresses the coherence and inter-relations of such apparently separate aspects of the poem as its style, character-portrayal and ideology.