Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles, the accursed wrath which put countless griefs on the Achaeans, and hurled down to Hades many strong souls of heroes, and made the men themselves prey for dogs and for all the birds, and the will of Zeus was being fulfilled,

The poem’s first word is mēnin, “wrath,” and its object is a sentence that runs five lines without a stop. Everything in it is cost: griefs past counting, souls sent down, bodies left for dogs and birds. Line 3 and line 4 split a man in two. His psychē, the breath of life, goes to Hades. “He himself,” autous, is the body on the ground. Homer’s self is the body; the psyche is the shade that leaves it. Ancient readers argued over line 5. The old notes in the Venice manuscript report that the scholar Zenodotus read oiōnoisi te daita, “a feast for the birds,” where our text has pasi, “all,” and that Aristarchus rejected it because Homer uses dais only for a meal of men. And whose plan is “the will of Zeus”? An ancient note on this line quotes the lost epic Cypria: Zeus made the war to lighten an Earth weighed down by people. Inside the Iliad the plan is nearer to hand. Later in this book Zeus promises Thetis that the Achaeans will lose until her son is honored.