This was a major technological advance that revolutionized the production of farming and work tools, household objects, jewelry, cult objects-and weapons of war.īronze is harder than copper, harder indeed than iron, and bronze-pointed spears set on wooden shafts, bronze-tipped arrows, and bronze slashing and thrusting swords were objects of enormous utility, prestige, and value. The epic tradition that culminated in the poem, then, had roots deep in the Bronze Age, so-called because societies at this time either made or traded objects made of the copper-tin alloy that constitutes bronze. Unauthorized use is prohibited.īy best estimate, The Iliad was composed around 750-700 B.C., but this final composition followed at least five centuries of oral storytelling by generations of poets before Homer. How Hector came to wear it and the consequences of his doing so, accounts for one of the most dramatic themes in the entire epic. And, improbably, the two heroes also briefly share a spectacular set of armor.

Hector in his turn has slain Achilles’ closest comrade, Patroclus. Achilles’ devastation of the Trojan army and its allies claimed the lives of Hector’s own brothers and brothers-in-law. Both men are young and honorable in their different ways, and both men, as the epic takes pains to show, want desperately to live.įor both, their final confrontation is highly personal. Both are the outstanding warriors of their respective armies. Hector is the son of the king and queen of Troy.

Both are noble Achilles is the son of a goddess and the king of Thessaly. Of these, the climactic battle to which all the epic action has been driving is the ferocious duel between the Greek Achilles and the Trojan Hector.ĭespite their very different personalities, the two men share general traits. As an epic poem about the Trojan War, that momentous clash of two great armies around the city of Troy, Homer’s Iliad describes many acts of combat.

Marvel the iliad