After the Iliad

The companion epic — Homer's own sequel, in spirit if not in strict chronology. Where the Iliad is about the cost of glory, the Odyssey is about the cost of survival. Read it after the Iliad and the contrast is devastating: Achilles chose death and eternal fame; Odysseus chose life and got twenty years of suffering trying to get home. The two poems together form a complete argument about what it means to be a hero.

The Aeneid is the Roman response to Homer and a deliberate rewriting of his work. Book 2, which follows naturally after the Iliad, has Aeneas narrate the fall of Troy, supplying the ending that Homer withholds, since the Iliad closes with the funeral of Hector, before the city falls. The Aeneid is more than a sequel. Virgil uses Homer's framework to ask whether Roman imperial power is worth the human cost. The Fagles translation is the recommended edition.

Ovid retells the Trojan War in Books 12 and 13 of the Metamorphoses with characteristic wit and compression, and with a deliberate, ironic distance from Homer's heroic values. Book 13 contains the debate between Ajax and Odysseus over Achilles' armor, one of the most brilliant rhetorical set pieces in Latin literature. Ovid consciously rewrites Homer and draws attention to the fact. The Charles Martin translation is an excellent edition.

Letters written in the voices of mythological women — including Briseis writing to Achilles from Agamemnon's tent. The Briseis letter is extraordinary: it gives the Iliad's most conspicuously silent character a complete interior life, and in doing so reframes the entire poem from her perspective. Anyone interested in the women Homer marginalizes should read this alongside Haynes.

An unfinished 1st century AD epic about Achilles' childhood — the years before the Iliad begins. Statius covers the hero's upbringing by the centaur Chiron, his disguise as a girl on the island of Scyros, and his discovery by Odysseus. The ancient world's prequel to Homer, and a surprisingly tender portrait of the hero before the rage. Less well known than it deserves to be.