The poem’s inciting event is a quarrel between Agamemnon and his best warrior Achilles.
The war was spurred when Paris of Troy fell in love with and abducted Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, who is the younger brother of the Achaean commander Agamemnon. The Achaeans and Trojans have been fighting the Trojan War for 10 years.
Chapter divisions exist in the source text, but the chapter titles are Fagles’s invention. His is not a line-by-line translation but what he calls a “modern English Homer” (x). Fagles explains in his translator’s note that he sought a middle ground between the oral performance features that characterize Homer (e.g., repetition and formulae) and the modern English reader’s expectations for variety. The Academy of American Poets awarded Fagles the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for this work in 1991. This study guide refers to the 1990 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition translated by Robert Fagles.
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