Homer's mighty epic, the Iliad, is the first work of western literature
and one of the defining masterpieces of our culture. The purpose of
this new line-by-line commentary is to help as wide an audience as
possible to understand and appreciate the poem through the best of
recent scholarship on the man and his work.
Peter Jones has
selected three of the most widely used translations on which to base
his commentary, those of E.V. Rieu (revised and updated by Peter
Jones), Martin Hammond, and Richmond Lattimore.
There is a useful
introduction to the whole work and separate short introductions to each
book of the Iliad. Each passage selected for comment is given a
line-reference and quoted from all three translations.