ILIUM

DAN SIMMONS

This novel is dedicated to Wabash College—its men, its faculty, and its legacy

Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does straight its resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other Worlds, and other Seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green Thought in a green Shade.

—Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden”


  Of possessions

cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting,

and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses,

but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted

nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.

—Achilles in Homer’s The Iliad,

Book IX, 405–409


A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.

—Caliban in Robert Browning’s

“Caliban upon Setebos”

Acknowledgments

While many translations of the Iliad were referred to in preparation for the writing of this novel, I would specifically like to acknowledge the following translators—Robert Fagles, Richmond Lattimore, Alexander Pope, George Chapman, Robert Fitzgerald, and Allen Mandelbaum. The beauty of their translations is manifold and their talent is beyond this writer’s comprehension.

For ancillary poetry or imaginative Iliad -related prose which helped shape this volume, I would especially like to acknowledge the work of W. H. Auden, Robert Browning, Robert Graves, Christopher Logue, Robert Lowell, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.



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