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:

Homer's Iliad describes Greek and Trojan soldiers offering rewards of wealth to enemies who have defeated them on the battlefield in exchange for mercy, but this is not always accepted.

The two terms may not have originally been distinguished ; though in Homer's poems nectar is usually the drink and ambrosia the food of the gods ; it was with ambrosia Hera " cleansed all defilement from her lovely flesh ", and with ambrosia Athena prepared Penelope in her sleep, so that when she appeared for the final time before her suitors, the effects of years had been stripped away and they were inflamed with passion at the sight of her.

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.

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 ancient Greece, the earliest mention of oratorical skill occurs in Homer's Iliad, where heroes like Achilles, Hektor, and Odysseus were honored for their ability to advise and exhort their peers and followers ( the Laos or army ) in wise and appropriate action.

During the first three seasons, Homer's design for some close-up shots included small lines which were meant to be eyebrows.

They were very brave and skilled warriors commanded by Achilles, as described in Homer's Iliad.

According to Homer's Iliad, the Myrmidons were the fiercest warriors in all of Greece.

The mythic theme was an ancient one, for Homer's listeners were expected to know the allusion, when Penelope reveals to the still-disguised Odysseus her anguish of a night:

Although not mentioned in Homer's Epic, Achaemenides is significant ; his stranding and subsequent rescue by Aeneas ' fleet make him the only known member of Odysseus ' crew to survive the return journey to Ithaca ( as every ship besides the flagship was destroyed by the Laestrygonian giants, and those besides Odysseus on the last ship were drowned after his men devoured Helios ' sacred cattle ).

They were among the company of heroes that hunted the Calydonian Boar, another mythic theme that was already well-known to Homer's listeners.

The Camenae were later identified with the Greek Muses ; in his translation of Homer's Odyssey, Livius Andronicus rendered the Greek word Mousa as Camena.

During this period he started his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into blank verse, and his versions ( published in 1791 ) were the most significant English renderings of these epic poems since those of Alexander Pope earlier in the century, although later critics have faulted Cowper's Homer for being too much in the mold of John Milton.

Before the invention of the Greek alphabet 2, 500 years ago, knowledge and stories were recited aloud, much like Homer's epic poems.

Erechtheus was mentioned in Homer's Iliad as a great king and ruler of Athens during the Archaic Period, and Erechtheus and the hero Erichthonius were often syncretized.

" Homer's women were no longer " dolls who flaunt their millinery " but " sturdy, fearless, fit wives and mothers of men " who are fully capable of enduring the forces and vagaries of nature along side their men.

For instance, while Thucydides considered the number of over 1, 000 Greek ships sent to Troy to be a poetic exaggeration, he uses Homer's catalog of ships to determine the approximate number of Greek soldiers who were present.

Because of these, Thespis is often called the " Father of Tragedy "; however, his importance is disputed, and Thespis is sometimes listed as late as 16th in the chronological order of Greek tragedians ; the statesman Solon, for example, is credited with creating poems in which characters speak with their own voice, and spoken performances of Homer's epics by rhapsodes were popular in festivals prior to 534 BC.

Meddahs were generally traveling artists whose route took them from one large city to another, such along the towns of the spice road ; the tradition supposedly goes back to Homer's time.

Mycenaeans were buried in a sitting position, and some of the nobility underwent mummification, whereas Homer's Achilles and Patroclus were not buried but cremated, in Iron-Age fashion, and honoured with a gold urn, instead of gold masks.

When chariots were owned by individuals within a society, it tended to give rise to a warrior class of specialists and a feudal system ( an example of which can be seen in Homer's The Iliad ).

Parlichev was the first Bulgarian translator of Homer's Iliad, though critics were highly critical of his style and choice of dialect.

In 1616 George Chapman completed his monumental translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse, which were the first ever complete translations of either poem, both central to the Western Canon, into the English language.