Homer’s Iliad is a rap battle

The Anger of Achilles by Jacques-Louis David (1819). Kimbell Art Museum

Homer’s Iliad is one of the foundational stories of European civilisation. The Iliad is a long poem – an epic – thought to have first been put down in writing in the eighth century BC, though the story is set several hundred years before, perhaps as early as the 12th or 13th century BC.

It explores a few crucial violent weeks within a much longer war between an alliance of Greek city-states and the city of Troy over Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.