In Greek mythology, Achilles (, Akhilleus, ) was a Greek hero of the Trojan War, the central character and the greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad.

He is a character in Greek mythology and is mentioned in Homer's Iliad, and receives full treatment in Roman mythology as the legendary founder of what would become Ancient Rome, most extensively in Virgil's Aeneid.

He is a significant figure in Homer's Iliad and is also mentioned in the Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.

He plays an important role in Homer's Iliad and in the Epic Cycle, a series of epic poems about the Trojan War.

In Homer's Iliad he is described as of great stature, colossal frame and strongest of all the Achaeans.

In Homer's Iliad, when Alcmene was about to give birth to Heracles, Zeus announced to all the gods that on that day a child, descended from Zeus himself, would be born who would rule all those around him.

The Achaeans (, Akhaioí ) is one of the collective names used for the Greeks in Homer's Iliad ( used 598 times ) and Odyssey.

In Homer's Iliad, the horses of the Myrmidons graze on wild celery that grows in the marshes of Troy, and in Odyssey, there is mention of the meadows of violet and wild celery surrounding the cave of Calypso.

Cerberus featured in many prominent works of Greek and Roman literature, most famously in Virgil's Aeneid, Peisandros of Rhodes ' epic poem the Labours of Hercules, the story of Orpheus in Plato's Symposium, and in Homer's Iliad, which is the only known reference to one of Heracles ' labours which first appeared in a literary source.

The premier examples of its use are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.

The other Strife is presumably she who appears in Homer's Iliad Book IV ; equated with Enyo as sister of Ares and so presumably daughter of Zeus and Hera:

* Homer's Iliad at Gutenberg ( there are many different translations at Gutenberg )

His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid reflect actual historical events.

" Samuel Butler argues, based on literary observations, that a young Sicilian woman wrote the Odyssey ( but not the Iliad ), an idea further pursued by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter and Andrew Dalby in Rediscovering Homer.

From Homer's Odyssey, the Iliad, and some Attic vase paintings, we know that Hephaestus was born of the union of Zeus and Hera.

* 68 – Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide, after quoting Homer's Iliad, thus ending the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and starting the civil year known as the Year of the Four Emperors.

The importance of this can be seen throughout Greek mythology — in particular, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

A report by the Greek writer Dio Chrysostom ( c. 40-c. 120 CE ) about Homer's poetry being sung even in India seems to imply that the Iliad had been translated into Sanskrit.

Minos appears in Greek literature as the king of Knossos as early as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

After the Bible, the next best preserved ancient work is Homer's Iliad, with 650 copies originating about 1, 000 years after the original copy.

In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus crawls beneath two shoots of olive that grow from a single stock, and in the Iliad, ( XVII. 53ff ) is a metaphoric description of a lone olive tree in the mountains, by a spring ; the Greeks observed that the olive rarely thrives at a distance from the sea, which in Greece invariably means up mountain slopes.

Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's Iliad and other works in the Epic Cycle.

Examples of epic poems are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, the Nibelungenlied, Luís de Camões ' Os Lusíadas, the Cantar de Mio Cid, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, Valmiki's Ramayana, Ferdowsi's Shahnama, Nizami ( or Nezami )' s Khamse ( Five Books ), and the Epic of King Gesar.

In the seventh century BC, Hesiod, both in his Theogony ( briefly, without naming Pandora outright, line 570 ) and in Works and Days, gives the earliest literary version of the Pandora story ; however, there is an older mention of jars or urns containing blessings and evils bestowed upon mankind in Homer's Iliad:

He is also mentioned in Homer's Iliad ; Book 2 describes his exile on the island of Lemnos, his wound by snake-bite, and his eventual recall by the Greeks.

In his letters, he describes reading the Aeneid whilst on vacation in Malvern in 1851, and being moved to tears by the beauty of Homer's poetry.

The noble sentiment of line 1 seems to be original yet the vocabulary is entirely Homeric and, though lines 5 – 7 are adapted from Homer's Iliad ( 13. 130 – 33 ), there is an important difference: Homer describes the advance of one side in close formation, whereas Tyrtaeus describes two sides meeting in the hoplite style of fighting.

Ekphrasis may be encountered as early as the days of Aphthonius ' Progymnasmata, his textbook of style, in Virgil's Aeneid when he describes what Aeneas sees engraved on the doors of Carthage's temple of Juno, or Homer's going to great lengths in the Iliad, Book 18, describing the Shield of Achilles, exactly how Hephaestus made it as well as its completed shape.

Homer's mention of potnia theron is thought to refer to Artemis and Walter Burkert describes this mention as " a well established formula ".

In fact, Homer's Odyssey describes a steward drawing wine from a krater at a banquet and then running to and fro pouring the wine into guests ' drinking cups.

the landscape of Greek history broadens widely, and rather abruptly, in the eighth century B.C., the age of Homer's `` rosy-fingered Dawn ''.

This theory of Homer's influence on Beowulf remained very prevalent in the 1920s, but started to die out in the following decade when a handful of critics stated that the two works were merely “ comparative literature ” although Greek was known in contemporary England.

At this time, Homer's poems were used as textbooks for the study of Greek.

In Greek mythology, Circe (; Greek Κίρκη Kírkē " falcon ") is a minor goddess of magic ( or sometimes a nymph, witch, enchantress or sorceress ), described in Homer's Odyssey as " The loveliest of all immortals ".

Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds.

In late antiquity, knowledge of Greek declined in Latin-speaking western Europe and, along with it, knowledge of Homer's poems.

While they may be very different in subject matter, Theogony and Works and Days share a distinctive language, metre and prosody that subtly distinguish them from Homer's work and from the Shield of Heracles ( see Hesiod's Greek below ).

Andronicus also translated Homer's Greek epic the Odyssey into an old type of Latin verse called Saturnian.

Odysseus ( or ; Greek:, Odusseus ), also known by the Roman name Ulysses (; ), was the perhaps fictional Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey.

The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably through Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey.

In the Homeric epics, the Greeks of prehistory are viewed as the ancestors of the early classical civilization of Homer's own time, while the Mycenaean pantheon included many of the divinities ( e. g. Zeus, Poseidon and Hades ) attested in later Greek religion.

* c. 1279 BC — Troy VI, speculated to be the city mentioned in Homer's Iliad, is presumed to have been destroyed by Greek armies.

Sirens are found in many Greek stories, particularly in Homer's Odyssey.

Before the Greek Dark Ages, Thessaly was known as Aeolia, and appears thus in Homer's Odyssey.