The intended audience of the Odyssey would have known that its story follows the events of Homer’s other epic poem, the Iliad, a saga about the Trojan War. Just as the title of the Odyssey reflects the name of its protagonist, Odysseus, the title of the Iliad is a reference—in this case, to the ancient Greek name for the city-state of Troy, called Ilium. 

The Iliad focuses on the last two months of the siege of the walled and heavily defended city of Troy, which has been going on for 10 years when the poem begins. The Greek forces, which sailed to Troy and are camped on the beach in front of its walls, are led by King Agamemnon and include the superhuman warrior Achilles. After Achilles and Agamemnon fall out over status and war loot, Achilles proclaims himself too enraged to continue fighting. His mother, the goddess Thetis, convinces Zeus to sideline the gods allied with the Greeks—Athena, Poseidon, and Hera—to make it clear how crucial Achilles is to Greek martial success. This enables Hector, Troy’s crown prince and greatest warrior, to break through the Greek camp and light one of their ships on fire with the support of the gods who favor Troy, Apollo and Ares. When Achilles still refuses to fight, his lover, Patroclus, puts on Achilles’s distinctive armor and charges into battle, where Hector kills him, believing he is Achilles. Achilles’s rage and grief grow to monstrous proportions, and he finally reenters the battle to exact revenge. After killing Hector, Achilles drags his corpse around the walls of the city until it is no longer recognizable as human. Only the intervention of the gods ends this horrific display, allowing the Trojan King Priam to reclaim his son’s body for burial. 

Many of this epic’s events are referenced in the Odyssey, and several characters appear in both poems. For instance, the war in Troy began after Helen, the singularly attractive wife of Agamemnon’s younger brother King Menelaus, either ran off with or was kidnapped by Paris, Hector’s younger brother. In the Odyssey, Telemachus visits the now returned Helen, who seems to accept her place at Menelaus’s side and who uses her beauty to bewitch banquet guests into peaceful contemplation and amiability. In contrast, Odysseus encounters Agamemnon as a shade in Hades, where the once-great leader warns Odysseus about dangerous homecomings: When Agamemnon returned, his wife and her newfound lover murdered him. 

In contrast, what the Odyssey holds up as the climactic end of the siege of Troy, and as the most emblematic evidence of Odysseus’s deceptive and strategic mind at work—the Trojan Horse—is not mentioned in the Iliad at all. Where the Odyssey highlights distinctly human ingenuity in the face of supernatural, divine, and otherwise implacable forces, the Iliad centers questions of honor, the conflict between ephemeral human life and the immortality of fame. One way to summarize the difference between the two works is to consider the central driver of their main heroes. Achilles opens the Iliad by pondering a choice he made as a young man: Offered either a short life of glory or a long life of obscurity, he chose to burn bright. However, when Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld in the Odyssey, the dead warrior rues his choice, confessing that he would happily live as the lowliest of enslaved men. This underscores what fuels Odysseus: the desire to survive at all costs and to return to domestic life with his wife, Penelope.