Martin Mueller is Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of "Children of Oedipus and Other Essays on the Imitation of greek Tragedy, 1500-1800". Together with Ahuvia Kahane, he edited The Chicago Homer, a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek (http://www.library.northwestern.edu/homer).

• Preface1. Introduction2. The Plot of the Iliad 3. Fighting in the Iliad 4. The Similes5. The Gods 6. Homeric Repetitions 7. The Composition of the Iliad8. The Life of the Iliad Bibliography Index

'Mueller deserves full praise for treating one of the most influential and jealously guarded texts in Western culture with an enlivening and communicative intelligence' - Critical Quaterly. 'It is the best single work on the poem that I know... Mueller has a genius for explaining important and subtle aspects of Homer with a clarity that should make the study available even to readers who know very little about Homer' - George De F. Lord, Yale University.