Plot and Character in the Iliad

In this book, Luigi Battezzato argues that Homer's poem is a tightly woven narrative of motives, misreadings, and reversals. Bringing cognitive 'mind-reading' into dialogue with ancient scholia and close attention to the text, he shows how Achilles, Hector, and Zeus pursue honour and care – yet, through failures of communication, achieve the opposite. The book reframes Zeus's 'plan', the Embassy to Achilles, and Hector's fatal choices as examples of Aristotelian peripeteia, or reversal, grounded in human (and divine) fallibility rather than simple fate. Two chapters examine anger and gender, tracing how the poem stages women's constrained speech and how ancient critics policed it, while one of the appendices dismantles the modern myth of a Homeric 'heroic code'. Clear, compact, and argumentative, the book offers students, scholars, and curious readers a new way to follow the plot and to hear Homer's characters think. In order to ensure a wide readership, all Greek texts have been translated.