Iliad

The Iliad is a primary epic text, and this record states honestly what cannot be settled about it: no single year or even a settled range of composition is fixed, since the poem represents an oral tradition that only reached something like its known form over an extended period, and the year field is deliberately left unset rather than assigned a false date. As a primary text accessed here through the Perseus Digital Library's Greek text, it is authoritative for what a specific passage of the poem itself narrates, checkable directly against the Greek and its aligned translation, not for the historical accuracy of the events it describes. Use it to establish what a named episode of the Iliad itself says; a claim about the historical Trojan War or later cult practice around a figure named in it needs a separate archaeological or historical source.