Should You Read the Iliad or the Odyssey First?

If you simply want a first recommendation, the Odyssey is probably the easier entrance for most modern readers.

That does not make it the better poem, and it certainly does not make the Iliad homework to be completed first. The two epics are related, but they offer very different pleasures.

Read the Odyssey first if you want movement

The Odyssey changes scenery constantly. It has a missing king, a son looking for news of his father, a household under siege by suitors, storms, shipwrecks, monsters, witches, disguises, recognition scenes, lies, hospitality, revenge, and finally a homecoming.

Its structure is not simple, but its variety is immediately legible. A reader who knows almost nothing about Homer can usually tell what Odysseus wants: he wants to get home.

That strong narrative desire carries a first reader through a surprising amount of strangeness.

Read the Iliad first if you want intensity

The Iliad is narrower in time and larger in emotional scale. The Greeks have already been fighting at Troy for nine years when the poem begins. Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel. Achilles withdraws. Men die because of it. Patroclus dies. Achilles returns, kills Hector, abuses his body, and finally gives it back to Hector's father.

The poem contains long battle sequences, formal speeches, genealogies, repeated epithets, and a famous catalogue of ships. It asks for more patience at the beginning than the Odyssey often does.

What it gives in return is extraordinary concentration. Its real subjects include anger, status, mortality, friendship, grief, pity, and the terrifying fact that even the greatest warrior cannot bargain his way out of death.

For readers drawn to those questions, the Iliad may be the better place to begin precisely because it is less accommodating.

You do not need the Iliad to understand the Odyssey

The Odyssey takes place after Troy has fallen, but it does not assume that you have just finished the Iliad. Characters remember the war, tell stories about it, and refer to people and events outside the Iliad itself.

In fact, the Odyssey mentions the Trojan Horse, which the Iliad never reaches. The ancient Trojan War tradition was much larger than either surviving poem.

Reading the Iliad first will deepen some moments in the Odyssey, especially appearances or memories of Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax, Helen, Menelaus, and Nestor. It is enrichment, not an admission requirement.

A mildly compromised recommendation from Ulix

Ulix takes its name from Ulysses, the name by which Odysseus became familiar in Latin and later European tradition. Institutional neutrality is therefore already in some danger.

Bethany Hunt, who created Ulix, nevertheless prefers the Iliad.

This is probably the correct way to handle the question. The order matters less than discovering which poem gets its hooks into you.

If translation is the obstacle, remove it

A first encounter does not need to be an endurance test in translation history. Samuel Butler's public-domain prose versions are direct, readable, and a very reasonable first way into both epics. Alexander Pope and George Chapman are more conspicuously literary English performances, rewarding for different reasons but less transparent as starting points.

There is no prize for choosing the translation that makes you stop reading.

A simple decision rule

• Choose the Odyssey if you want travel, cunning, monsters, identity, storytelling, marriage, homecoming, and a more varied plot.
• Choose the Iliad if you want war, rage, mortality, friendship, grief, honor, pity, and a poem that stays almost painfully close to death.
• If both sound good, read whichever one you are more curious about now. Then read the other.

The Greeks did not leave us two versions of the same epic. They left us two radically different answers to what heroic life looks like.