Homer
The Iliad
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 40 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
Nine years into a siege, the best fighter on the winning side is insulted by his own commander and withdraws. Men die for weeks because of it. His friend borrows his armour and is killed; he returns, kills the man responsible, and drags the body round the walls until the dead man's father comes to beg for it.
Why Gustave Doré
Doré never illustrated Homer, which is the gap this cycle exists to fill. Everything he needed was already in his hands: massed figures in armour, gods intervening from cloud, single combat staged as tableau, and a willingness to make violence formal rather than kinetic.
His Orlando Furioso is a dry run for it — the same armoured chaos organised into legible plates.
What to look for
Gods at the edges. The Iliad's divine machinery is constant and half-seen, and the plates keep it where Homer keeps it: present, enormous, and not quite the subject.
