The Iliad

Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key plot points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.

Books 1-4

Reading Check

1. Why is Chryses at the Achaean camp?

2. What is the epithet most often applied to Achilles?

3. Who stops Achilles from killing Agamemnon?

4. Who agrees to fight Menelaus?

5. Why is Troy Zeus’s favorite city?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. The Iliad opens with “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles” (Line 1). How might this be an example of foreshadowing?

2. What role does honor play in this section of the story?

3. Why does Helen regret coming to Troy?

4. Why does Agamemnon declare Menelaus the winner of the duel?

Paired Resource

“Mythology for Dummies Cheat Sheet”

• Provides a helpful guide to the Greek gods
• What role do the gods seem to be playing in this war? What might this suggest about the relationship between the human and the divine?

“This Is How The Iliad Sounded When Its Original Readers Recited It”

• A brief article with audio recording
• Students can hear a short portion of the story read aloud in ancient Greek.
• As the article indicates, the sounds of the language convey “an appropriate dignity for the message they transmit.” How do the reader’s intonation and expression subtly represent the theme of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization?

Books 5-8

Reading Check

1. What is the effect of Athena’s removing the mist from Diomedes’s eyes?

2. On whose side is Ares?

3. Why does Astyanax cry when Hector reaches for him?

4. Who forbids the gods from interfering in the war?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. Why does Diomedes decide not to fight Glaucus?

2. Why does Helen think that Hector is the one “hit hardest by the fighting” (Book 6)?

3. What is the effect of Nestor’s taunting when Hector agrees to duel one of the Greeks?

Books 9-12

Reading Check

1. Who convinces Agamemnon that Achilles needs to return to battle?

2. Who goes with Diomedes to spy on the Trojans?

3. What does Zeus instruct Hector to do?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. When Odysseus entreats Achilles to return to battle, what does Achilles plan to do? Why?

2. What does Hector say when Polydamas urges him to stop fighting because a bird omen appears?

Books 13-16

Reading Check

1. Who sneaks into the Greek camp to lift the soldiers’ spirits?

2. Who wears Achilles’s armor into battle?

3. Who stops Patroclus from seizing Troy?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. After Nestor begs Zeus to let the Greeks keep fighting, what does the god’s thunderclap symbolize?

2. How does Patroclus contribute to his own death?

3. What does the death of Sarpedon, Zeus’s son, show about Zeus’s power?

Books 17-20

Reading Check

1. Who protects Patroclus’s body?

2. Who makes Achilles’s new armor?

3. What is the delay between Achilles’s being ready for battle and the actual battle itself?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. Why is Hector able to rouse the Trojan army after Patroclus’s death?

2. What has Achilles’s mother, Thetis, kept from him about her deal with Zeus?

3. What makes Achilles decide to kill Hector?

4. Why does Aeneas charge toward Achilles, and what happens?

Books 21-24

Reading Check

1. What geographical feature does Achilles fight?

2. Even though he considers it, why does Zeus ultimately decide not to save Hector?

3. What is Patroclus’s last request?

4. Who protects Hector’s corpse?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. How does Apollo buy time for the Trojans as Achilles goes on a killing spree?

2. Why does Hector decide to fight Achilles?

3. Who convinces Achilles to give Hector’s body to his father? How?

Paired Resource

“A Krater: Achilles and Ajax Playing Backgammon”

• A poem by Andrew Davis imagining Achilles and Ajax playing a simple game of chance
• Just before Priam arrives, Achilles oversees funeral games in honor of Patroclus, and the games themselves perhaps seen out of place in a long war. What commentary does this poem offer about the role of fate and mortality in The Iliad?

“No Second Troy”

• Poem by William Butler Yeats relating his long-time love Maud Gonne to Helen of Troy
• Yeats’s poem relates the legacy of the Trojan War and Helen of Troy to his own life. What does the poem suggest about the lasting effect of this myth?

Recommended Next Reads

Elektra

• A novel by Jennifer Saint telling the story of the Trojan War from the perspectives of Clytemnestra (Agamemnon’s wife), Cassandra (sister of Hector and Paris), and Elektra (daughter of Agamemnon)
• It closely parallels many of the epic’s major events.
• Touches on the themes of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization and Fragility of Human Life and Creations

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

• A YA retelling of the love story between Achilles and Patroclus
• Touches on the themes of Poetry as a Medium of Immortalization and Fragility of Human Life and Creations
• Song of Achilles on SuperSummary