The Odyssey vs the Iliad: is it a sequel, and do you need to read the Iliad first?

Somebody in the group chat has just said “wait, do I have to read the other one first?” and everyone has gone quiet, because none of you is completely sure how the two of them connect. Short answer: no, you don't, and the reason why is more interesting than the answer. They are not two halves of one series at all; they are two completely different kinds of story that happen to share a cast.

• ✅The Iliad is a war story about a few weeks. It does not contain the wooden horse and it does not contain the fall of Troy. It ends with a funeral.
• ✅The Odyssey starts ten years after that war ended— and twenty years after Odysseus left home.
• ✅Its first four books are not about Odysseus at all. They are about his son.
• ✅The two heroes are opposites on purpose. Achilles chooses a short glorious life. Odysseus keeps choosing to survive.

There is one more difference worth having in your head before you start, because it changes how you read everything: only one of these poems has a narrator you are supposed to doubt. The Iliad is told to you. Four whole books of the Odyssey (Books 9 through 12: the cyclops, Circe, the dead, the sirens) are told to you by Odysseus, at a dinner, to people he needs a favour from, and he is the most accomplished liar in either book.

Or skip the reading order entirely: arrive in Ithaca as the stranger nobody recognises and decide how much of the truth to hand over. Role-play The Odyssey →

🚪 Where the story actually starts

Almost everyone assumes the Odyssey opens on a beach with a fleet sailing home, and it opens in a living room instead.

Book 1 finds a young man named Telemachus sitting among a crowd of house guests who have been eating his father's food, drinking his father's wine and courting his mother for years, and who are not leaving. He has never met his father. He was a baby when Odysseus sailed. The war ended a decade ago and other men came home; his did not, and the island has quietly moved on to deciding who gets the house.

That is the situation the poem drops you into: a domestic occupation rather than an adventure. Twenty years have passed since Odysseus left, and the poem says so out loud in the reunion scene: Penelope is the woman who could “keep away from her husband when he had come back to her after twenty years of absence.” (Butler's 1900 prose calls him Ulysses and calls Athena Minerva; same people, Latin names.)

The arithmetic is worth doing once, because it explains the whole emotional situation. Ten years of war, then ten years of getting home. The son was a baby at the start and is a grown man by Book 1. The dog that recognises Odysseus in Book 17 was a puppy he trained before he sailed and is now dying on a dung heap. Nobody in this story is waiting for a hero to come back; they are living in the aftermath of someone who did not, and have organised their lives around it.

🐎 What Troy has to do with it

Here is the thing that surprises people: the Iliad does not contain the famous parts. No wooden horse. No burning city. No death of Achilles. It covers a stretch of a few weeks in the tenth year of the siege, it is mostly an argument between two Greek leaders that gets a lot of people killed, and it ends with the funeral of Hector while Troy is still standing. You can read all twenty-four books of it, in Greek with facing English, at the Perseus Digital Library, which is also the fastest way to check any claim on this page.

That surprises people because the phrase “the Iliad and the Odyssey” makes them sound like two halves of one shelf. In practice they overlap for about a paragraph. The Iliad stops with Troy intact and Achilles alive; the Odyssey starts a decade after the city fell. Everything in the gap (the horse, the sack, the deaths of Achilles and Ajax, the murder of Agamemnon on his first night home) happens off-page in both, and reaches you as gossip, songs and arguments told by people with reasons to shade them.

The horse is somewhere else entirely: in later poems, in Virgil's Aeneid, and, in fragments, inside the Odyssey itself, where it comes up the way war stories come up at dinner: told by a bard, told by Helen, told by Menelaus, each time slightly differently. Nolan's film reaches into the Aeneid to borrow Sinon, the man who talks Troy into wheeling the horse inside, precisely because the Odyssey doesn't stage that scene.

⚔️ Two completely different kinds of hero

The Iliad's hero is Achilles, who is offered the explicit choice between a long forgettable life at home and a short one that people will sing about, and takes the song. The Odyssey's hero is a man who is offered actual immortality by a goddess on an island with no responsibilities, and turns it down to go back to a middle-aged wife on a rocky island with a goat problem.

Homer knows exactly what he is doing, because he stages a meeting between them. In Book 11 Odysseus goes down to the land of the dead and finds Achilles there, and pays him the compliment the Iliad was built to earn: you were the most admired man alive, and now you are a prince among the dead, so don't take dying so hard.

Say not a word in death's favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

That is one poem's hero telling the other poem's hero that he got it wrong. The whole value system of the Iliad, die young and be famous forever, gets audited by the man who chose to keep going, and it does not survive the audit. Then Achilles immediately asks about his son, which is the Odyssey's answer in miniature: the thing that turns out to matter is who is still alive at home.

Notice what makes Odysseus good at his job, too. Where Achilles is the strongest man on the field, Odysseus is the one who talks, and his signature moves are a disguise, a false name and a plan. The Greek word for it is mētis, cunning intelligence, and the poem treats it as excellence rather than as cheating.

The gods scale down with the story. The Iliad's are a second army, picking sides and wounding each other; the Odyssey has essentially two who matter, and both are interested in one household. Athena spends the poem disguised as ordinary people giving practical advice. Poseidon spends it drowning ships, because Odysseus blinded his son the cyclops and then shouted his own name across the water so the giant could tell his father who to curse.

And the difference in scale is the reason people who bounce off one often love the other. The Iliad asks what a life is worth when everybody dies anyway. The Odyssey asks a question you can answer on a Tuesday: what do you owe the people who kept your seat warm?

📚 So: read it first, or not?

Not first. If you only ever read one of them, read this one: it is the more approachable poem, the more modern-feeling story, and the one the film is adapting. The practical reading order is Odyssey, then Iliad, then, if the world of it has hold of you, Virgil's Aeneidfor the losing side's version.

• ✅You saw the film and want the book. Go straight to the Odyssey. It is self-contained by design, because it was performed to audiences who already knew the war, so it explains itself constantly.
• ✅You want the war. Read the Iliad. But know that you are reading a different genre: closer to a tragedy than an adventure, and it stops before the parts you think you are waiting for.
• ✅You want both, in the best order. Odyssey first, Iliad second. Going backwards makes the Book 11 meeting with Achilles land like a punch instead of a footnote.

And if the film is your entry point, you are already meeting it in the poem's own order. The film opens in Ithaca with Telemachus, keeps the voyage as the past, and lets the war arrive as memory, which is exactly the structure Homer chose, for exactly the same reason. Neither of them thinks the interesting question is what happened at Troy. Both think it is what a man does with having been there.

One last practical thing, because it is the question underneath the question. People asking “do I need the Iliad?” are usually asking “am I going to be lost?” You will not be. The poem was performed to audiences who knew the war by heart, which paradoxically makes it the friendliest of the two to a newcomer: it re-explains everything constantly, because a bard cannot assume which night of the story you wandered in on. The names arrive with their fathers and their islands attached, every time. It is built to be joined late.

The fastest way to feel the difference is to be in it. Show up in Ithaca as Telemachus and try to hold a room full of grown men who are eating your inheritance, or arrive as the stranger nobody recognises and decide how much of the truth to hand over first.

Speaking of the son who has to grow up in four books: Telemachus and the coming-of-age story hiding inside the epic.