Book 4

1. How is the decision-making at the beginning of the book characteristic of the way the gods interact elsewhere in the poem?
2. Pandarus breaks the truce by shooting Menelaus with an arrow. How is this fact relevant to the status of archery in the Iliad?
3. What is the significance of the two similes that describe the wounding of Menelaus?
4. How do the different responses to Agamemnon's harangues help to characterize the various heroes?

Book 5

1. What are the significant features of an aristeia? Who else has them? What aspects of Diomedes' are significant?
2. How is it that Diomedes is able to battle against the gods? What is significant about the identities of the gods against whom he fights?

Book 6

1. What is the significance of the meeting of Glaukus and Diomedes? How is G's reference to Lycurgus ironically appropriate?
2. How important is xenia?
3. How is the relationship between Hector and Paris developed inBook 6?
4. How is Hector's character presented in relationship to the three women? Remember that this is his final visit to Troy and that the same three women will mourn his corpse in Book 24?
5. How does Hector answer the request of Andromache that he fight from within the walls?
6. What is the significance of the scene with Hector's son?

Book 7

1. Note the humanity of Hector's proposal before the duel with Ajax. What changes does this attitude undergo in the course of the poem?
2. What is the status of Nestor in Book 7? In the poem as a whole? What is the basis of his wisdom? What does the high regard in which he is held say about the Homeric Greek view of history?

Book 8.

1. Zeus's threat to the other gods obviously reveals a contentious dimension to the picture of divine harmony seen elsewhere. What is the relationship between these two portrayals? Are they two more or less incompatible aspects of the oral tradition, or two essentially compatible ones?
2. Contrast Hector's speech at the end of the book with his conversation with Andromache in Book 6. How do you account for the differences?

Book 9

1. How is Agamemnon's behavior at the beginning of the book in keeping with the way Homer represents him in the poem as a whole?
2. What is the substance of Agamemnon's offer to Achilles? What does he ask for in exchange? What is significant about the way in which Odysseus relays the offer to Achilles?
3. What is Achilles doing when the embassy arrives and what is its significance?
4. How does Achilles reply to Odysseus? How important is Agamemnon's offer to him?
5. What is the progression of threats Achilles makes?
6. What is the significance of the Meleager story that Phoenix tells? What is Achilles' response?

Book 10

1. How does the episode with Dolon fit in with the heroic idealogy of the Iliad? What does it say about Odysseus?
2. Scholars have sometimes thought that Book 10 was not a part of the original Iliad. In the light of oral-formulaic theory terms like "original Iliad" have been recognized as extremely problematic, if not meaningless. In what way is the book nevertheless unusual in the context of the Iliad?

Book 11

1. How does the aristeia of Agamemnon affect our estimation of his character? What is the significance of the appeal to the Muses at its beginning?
2. What is the significance of Paris's wounding of Diomedes?
3. What is significant about Achilles' conversation with Patroclus ? What are its consequences? What advice does Nestor have for Patroclus.