Who Gets Named Most
Quick warning first. This is a full spoilers guide to the Iliad characters, so deaths and the ending are in it. I am using Samuel Butler’s prose translation, the free Project Gutenberg copy.
Here is the surprise from my count. Everyone says the Iliad is about Achilles. But in Butler’s text, the name Hector appears four hundred and ninety three times. Achilles appears four hundred and thirty five. Even Jove, the king of the gods, comes in below Hector, at four hundred and seventy five.
Hector is named in all twenty four books. Achilles is missing from book three completely. So this guide goes side by side, Achaeans first, then Troy, then the gods. Counts include the short summary printed at the top of each book.
Names To Learn First
Butler uses Roman names for the gods. Jove is the king of the gods, Juno is his wife, Minerva fights beside heroes, Venus is the mother of Aeneas, and Neptune, Vulcan, Mercury and Mars are all here too.
The Greeks are mostly called Achaeans, and sometimes Danaans or Argives. All three mean the same army.
The Trojan prince most people call Paris is usually Alexandrus in this translation. The book’s own summary for book three even says so. I count Alexandrus forty nine times and Paris twenty three. One more trap: there are two warriors named Ajax, and I will keep them apart.
The View From The Wall
The best character guide in the poem is a scene. In book three, Helen goes to the wall, and old King Priam asks her to name the Achaeans below.
Helen points out Agamemnon, son of Atreus, a good king and a brave soldier. She points out Ulysses, short but broad, a man of great craft from rocky Ithaca. She points out huge Ajax, the bulwark of the Achaeans, and Idomeneus of Crete.
Then she looks for her own brothers and cannot find them. The narrator tells us they are already dead, lying under the earth at home. She does not know.
Kings And Talkers
Agamemnon is the army’s king, and the man who starts the quarrel. In book six he will not even let Menelaus take a ransom. He says to spare no one, not even the child in the womb.
Later, in book nineteen, he says the madness was not his fault. He blames Jove, Fate and Folly. The poem lets you decide how far to believe him.
Menelaus is Helen’s husband, the wronged one. In book three Antenor says he spoke little but clearly.
Ulysses is the talker, and Antenor’s description of him is wonderful. He stood stiff, eyes on the ground, looking like a fool, until his words came like winter snow. Ajax is the opposite, a huge man Helen calls the bulwark of the Achaeans. The other Ajax commands the Locrians, and the catalogue calls him a little man in a linen breastplate.
Nestor is the old speaker from Pylos, whose words are sweeter than honey. In book one he tries to calm the quarrel, and both men keep arguing. Diomed, son of Tydeus, is the fighter of book five, who wounds Venus and Mars. In book six, he swaps armour with Glaucus, gold for bronze, and Butler says that is a hundred cattle for nine. Thersites is the ugliest man at Troy, and Ulysses beats him with a staff for mocking Agamemnon.
Achilles And Patroclus
Achilles is the son of Peleus and the goddess Thetis. In book nine he tells the embassy that his mother says he has two fates. If he stays he dies at Troy and is remembered. If he goes home, he lives long and is forgotten.
He still refuses Agamemnon’s gifts. Phoenix, the old man who trained him as a boy, weeps and begs. Ajax says Achilles is savage over one single girl.
Patroclus is the one who weeps. In book sixteen he weeps like a child running to its mother, and Achilles says so. He asks to wear the armour, and Achilles lets him, with a warning to turn back.
He does not. And the poem’s own summary says Euphorbus and Hector kill him. In book nineteen Briseis weeps over his body, and says Patroclus was kind to her, and had promised to make Achilles marry her.
The Women Achilles Made Widows
Here is the count I did not expect. Andromache is named only eight times in the whole poem. Hecuba is named eight times too. Helen gets forty four.
But Andromache gets one of the most famous scenes. At the gate in book six, she says Achilles killed her father and her seven brothers when he sacked Thebe, and she begs Hector to stay.
Briseis says nearly the same thing. In book nineteen, she says Achilles killed her husband, and her three brothers died the same day. So two women, one in Troy and one in the Achaean camp, lost their families to the same man.
The House Of Priam
Priam, Troy’s king, is an old man who tells Helen, in book three, that he blames the gods, not her. In book twenty four he tells Achilles he had fifty sons, nineteen from one mother.
Hecuba is his wife. While Diomed is terrorising the Trojans in book six, she carries the finest robe to the temple of Minerva, to ask for mercy.
Hector, their son, is the defender. He knows what is coming. In book six he tells Andromache the day will come when Troy is destroyed, but he grieves most for her. Then he takes off his plumed helmet, because it frightens their baby. The boy is named Scamandrius, but the people call him Astyanax.
In book twenty two he is tricked. Minerva, speaking as his brother Deiphobus, talks him into standing his ground against Achilles, after Hector has run three times round the city.
Paris, Helen, Allies
Alexandrus is the brother Hector keeps scolding. In book three he is called woman mad, and in book six Helen says he never could be depended on. And yet Hector tells him, you fight bravely.
Helen is the hardest to pin down. She weaves the battles into a purple web in book three. In book twenty four she says twenty years have passed since she left home, and that Hector, her brother in law, never spoke a cruel word to her. No one else in Troy was kind to her, she says.
Troy has allies too. Sarpedon is Jove’s own son. Glaucus is the man who traded his gold armour. Aeneas is the son of Venus, and she carries him off when Diomed wounds him in book five.
The Gods Choose Sides
In book twenty, the poem lists who joins which army. With the Achaeans come Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Mercury and Vulcan. With the Trojans come Mars, Apollo, Diana, Leto, the river Xanthus and Venus. Jove stays above, thundering.
In book twenty four, Mercury goes down in disguise as a young Myrmidon squire, to guide Priam to Achilles’ tent. And it is Achilles himself who says that Jove keeps two urns, one of evil gifts and one of good.
Who To Remember
If you remember only a few, remember these. Achilles, Hector, Patroclus, Agamemnon, Priam, Helen and Ulysses.
Pick up the rest as they come. Tell me in the comments which side you are on, and if this helped, subscribe and tap like. The day by day summary is a click away.
