Three thousand years after Achilles stalked the walls of Troy, his shadow still falls across our stages, pages, and screens. The Iliad has never stopped being rewritten.
From Rome to the Middle Ages
Already in Roman times, a shortened Latin version—the Ilias Latina—was a staple school text. Medieval Europe often distrusted Homer but devoured supposed eyewitness accounts of Troy by Dares and Dictys. These spawned chivalric romances in many languages, helping kingdoms and dynasties trace their legendary origins back to Trojan heroes.
Shakespeare, opera, and modern poetry
On the English stage, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida takes the Trojan material and turns it inside out, portraying Achilles as a coward and Ajax as a blunt mercenary while focusing on a doomed love story. In the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s opera King Priam and Christopher Logue’s experimental War Music reimagined the epic with modern psychological and theatrical energy.
Poets like Patrick Shaw-Stewart and Simone Weil turned to the Iliad to make sense of World War I and World War II, seeing in it a "poem of force" that shows how war reduces human beings to objects.
Retellings for new audiences
Today, the Trojan War fuels graphic novels like Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze, films such as Troy, and science‑fiction homages like Dan Simmons’s Ilium. Novelists including Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker, and Emily Hauser retell the story through sidelined characters—lovers, captives, seers—often highlighting women’s experiences and questioning heroic violence.
Even psychiatry has turned back to Troy: Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America read the epics through the lens of combat trauma and moral injury, using ancient warriors to illuminate modern veterans’ struggles.
The settings change—from Bronze Age battlements to Broadway, from hexameters to Hollywood—but the same questions beat underneath: What does war do to people? What is glory worth? And how do we live with what we have seen and done?