The Iliad Character Map

The cast of the Iliad is mostly a casualty list. Of the 493 named figures on this map, well over a hundred and fifty exist for a single sentence: a name, a father, and the spear that ends them. A character list treats those men the same as Hector, and cannot show you the one thing the poem is built from, which is who killed whom. This map charts the whole text from the public-domain Lang, Leaf and Myers translation — 493 figures and 1,000 relationships, each carrying a short quote from the poem, so you can check the line rather than take our word for it.

Read the hostile lines as a ledger and the poem rearranges itself. The map records 166 named killings: 151 named dead, 138 of them Trojans and their allies, 28 Achaians. Patroklos and Achilles have 24 named kills each — Patroklos nearly all of his in Book XVI, Achilles 23 of his in Books XX and XXI; Teukros the archer 15, Diomedes 14, Agamemnon 11, Odysseus and Hector 8, Telamonian Aias 7. The companion data story, Every Named Killing in the Iliad, charts all 166 by book and by killer, and lists the deaths the map still misses.

Search a name to jump to it. Solid lines are kinship, dashed lines are unions and allegiances, dotted lines are social ties, and selecting a figure dims everyone they are not connected to. The spellings are the translators’: Achaians rather than Greeks, Aias not Ajax, Aineias not Aeneas, Patroklos, Athene, Menelaos, and Paris appears as Alexandros. The map groups 243 Trojans and allies, 139 Achaians, 44 gods, and about 67 people from the stories the poem tells inside itself — Nestor’s Epeians, Tydeus at Thebes, Bellerophon’s line, the heroes of Kalydon.

Two honest notes. The counts surprise people: Achilles, not Hector, is the most-mentioned figure on this map (509 to 470) and the most-connected (87 lines to 68) — Hector leads for nineteen books and loses the lead in the three where Achilles fights. Priam has 19 children on the map. And the map was made by software reading the poem, so it can be wrong. It folds namesakes into one man (three Thoons and three Melanippoi each die to different spears), takes “Xanthos, son of Phainops,” a Trojan Diomedes kills, for the river god of the same name, keeps a one-mention duplicate of the lesser Aias beside “Oileus’ son Aias,” and leaves 45 of its 493 figures unconnected, most of them names from the catalogue. Every line carries its quote so you can catch that kind of thing.

Who’s who in The Iliad

The short version, for the reader who just needs the thread back. Every name here is on the map, with the passage that puts them there.

Hector

Son of Priam, 470 mentions and 68 connections — second on both counts to Achilles on this map. Eight named kills, Patroklos among them. His duel with Telamonian Aias ends in a draw and an exchange of gifts; his own death at Achilles’ hands is not a line on the map, only the taunt at the gates and the captured armor.

Achilles

“Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles Peleus’ son.” Twenty-four aliases on the map — Peleides, son of Peleus, fleet of foot, Aiakides — and 24 named kills, tied with Patroklos for the most: 12 in Book XX, and in the river in Book XXI Lykaon, Asteropaios and seven Paionians. Priam “kissed his hands, terrible, man-slaying, that slew many of Priam’s sons.”

Patroklos

Achilles’ comrade, 207 mentions and 47 connections. In Achilles’ armor he has 24 named kills on the map, every one of them in Book XVI — Pyraichmes, Sarpedon, Kebriones and the twenty men the poem lists in two breaths. Euphorbos wounds him first, Apollo strikes him from behind, Hector finishes him: three hostile lines to Patroklos, in that order.

Agamemnon

King of men, 66 connections — third on the map — and 11 named kills, among them two sons of Priam, Peisandros, who begs for ransom and is refused, and Koön, who wounds him first. Seizes Briseis from Achilles, which is the quarrel; sends the embassy; ends the poem awarding prizes at Patroklos’ games alongside the man he insulted.

Diomedes

Fourteen named kills: two sons of Priam in one chariot, Hector’s charioteer Eniopeus, the Thracian king Rhesos asleep. His most famous kill, Pandaros, is the one the map does not draw. Exchanges armor with Glaukos instead of fighting him, and with Odysseus hunts down the spy Dolon. His day is Book V.

Priam

King of Troy, 46 connections, 19 of his children on the map — Hector, Alexandros, Helenos, Deiphobos, Kassandra, Lykaon, Polydoros, Troilos among them. The last book is his: Hermes guides him through the Achaian camp to ransom Hector’s body from the man who killed him.

Zeus

Twenty-six aliases — Kronion, cloud-gatherer, father of gods and men — and 52 connections. Parent lines to Sarpedon, Herakles, Dardanos and Peirithoos among mortals, to Athene, Ares, Aphrodite, Artemis and Hermes, and one line up, to Kronos, whom he imprisoned beneath the earth. The map’s line to Sarpedon is Zeus warding off the Fates from his son, and then not.

Odysseus

Twenty-one aliases — of many devices, of many counsels — eight named kills, six of them in one rush in Book XI, and the poem’s enforcer: he beats Thersites for reviling Agamemnon, leads the embassy to Achilles, and with Diomedes hunts down Dolon in the night raid.

Aias and the lesser Aias

Telamonian Aias — 163 mentions, 46 connections, 24 aliases, seven named kills, the draw with Hector, half-brother of the archer Teukros — and “Oileus’ son Aias,” the lesser, his own figure on the map. The Latin name is Ajax. One stray duplicate, “Aias the less,” with a single mention, sits beside the real one.

Sarpedon & Glaukos

The Lykian allies. Sarpedon is the son of Zeus and of Laodameia — both parent lines are on the map. He kills Alkmaon at the wall and dies to Patroklos, “with a spear to the midriff” in the map’s words. Glaukos, son of Hippolochos, is the man who meets Diomedes as an enemy and trades armor with him instead; his line to Diomedes is drawn as that discovery.

Andromache & Astyanax

Hector’s wife, daughter of Eëtion, whom Achilles slew along with her seven brothers — both facts are lines on the map, and so is Artemis’ killing of her mother. Her son is Astyanax to the city and Skamandrios to his father. The map keeps him apart from the hunter Skamandrios whom Menelaos kills in Book V, and the infant does not die in the poem.

Paris, Helen & Menelaos

The triangle the war is about. Paris is Alexandros on the map, and Helen has a spouse line to him and another to Menelaos, “her former husband, for whose sake the war began.” Her line to Hector is drawn as kin — “My brother, even mine that am a dog” — and she has one to Priam as her father-in-law. Menelaos’ kill of Euphorbos over Patroklos’ body is on the map too.

Questions people ask about The Iliad

Read as data: Every Named Killing in the Iliad — the same map, charted.