Every Named Killing in the Iliad

The cast of the Iliad is mostly a casualty list. Of the 341 named figures on the map of the poem, well over a hundred exist for one sentence: a name, a father, and the spear that ends them. The map draws each of those sentences as a hostile line between two figures. Read the lines as a ledger — who killed whom, in which book — and you get the chart below: 105 named killings, 101 named dead, every one of them a line on the map with the passage behind it.

The shape is the poem’s. Nothing dies in Books I–III: the quarrel, the catalogue of ships, and a duel that ends in a rescue. Then Book IV opens the fighting with Echepolos, “the first Trojan slain in the battle,” and Book V — Diomedes’ day — is the bloodiest on the map with 23 named dead. The three long days of fighting (Books V–VIII, XI–XVII, XX–XXII) show as three stacks; the embassy, the night raid, the funeral games and the ransom are the quiet rows between. Books I, II, III, IX, XVIII, XIX, XXIII, XXIV have no named killing at all, on the map or in the text. Book XX is empty on the map only — the dashed squares are what the text has there.

The killers with the longest lists are not the ones the title promises. Diomedes has 12 named kills, Agamemnon 11, Hector 10, and Achilles — the wrath the poem opens with — has 2: Hector, and Asteropaios in the river. That is partly Homer, who keeps Achilles out of the fighting until Book XX, and partly the map, which read Books XX and XXI thinly. The next section is honest about which is which. Odysseus, who is a thinker in the Odyssey, is a killer here: seven named men, five of them in one rush in Book XI.

Trojans die at more than twice the Achaian rate, and the imbalance is not a sign the poem takes sides. It is the mechanics of an epic told around Achaian heroes: the men who get a name and a father in the moment of dying are mostly the men the heroes kill. The 3 “other” dead are the Thracian king Rhesos, slaughtered asleep in Book X, and two men who fall outside either army in the stories the poem tells about itself.

What the map missed

This story is built from one reading of the poem by software, and that reading has a known gap. The deep parse of 7 September recorded Books XVI and XX–XXI thinly: Patroklos’ rampage in Achilles’ armor and Achilles’ own in the river are the two densest killing passages in the poem, and on the map they are almost empty. The dashed squares in the first chart are 25 named deaths we checked by hand against the text and found missing — Dolon in the night raid, eight of Patroklos’ victims, and 16 men Achilles kills in Books XX and XXI, Lykaon among them. With those alone, Achilles moves from 2 named kills to near the top of the list, which is where every reader knows he belongs. The list of what is missing is not complete either; it is what a reader of the poem would notice first.

We are leaving the gap visible rather than patching the numbers, because the gap is the point of the exercise. A map you can check is only worth something if it shows you where it is wrong. The Iliad will be re-parsed on the extraction pipeline that ships larger outputs per chunk, and this page’s dataset is regenerated from the map, so the dashed squares should fill in rather than be drawn over.

Three men named Thoon

Homer reuses names. The map does not know that, so it folds the namesakes into one figure — which means one figure on the map dies several times. Pulled apart by book, the ledger makes the point the map cannot:

Three different Thoons die in three different books, to three different Achaians. Two Peisandroi: one begs Agamemnon for ransom and is refused in Book XI, one fights Menelaos with an axe in Book XIII. Two Hypsenors on opposite sides: a Trojan priest’s son in Book V, an Achaian in Book XIII. The map’s character page names the folds it knows about; these are three more.

When a god does the killing

The gods wound, rescue, mislead and foretell throughout, but on the map only one god kills a named man outright: Ares kills Periphas in Book V. Apollo’s hand in Patroklos’ death is on the map as a blow from behind, not a killing — the spear is Hector’s. That reading matches the poem, which is careful about who gets credit.

Deaths the poem only remembers

8 killings on the map happened before the war or far from it, told in the stories the characters tell: young Nestor’s cattle-raid kills, Tydeus at Thebes, Patroklos as a boy over a game of dice. They are kept out of the charts above and listed here, because they are on the map and a ledger should say where its numbers stop.

The ledger

Every named killing on the map, in the order the poem tells them. Select a figure on the interactive map to see the passage behind any line.

How this was counted

The map is a deep parse of the Lang, Leaf and Myers translation, the public-domain prose Iliad that keeps the Greek spellings (Aias, Achaians, Patroklos). A killing is a hostile line on the map whose description says one named figure killed another; lines that only wound, threaten, spare or ransom are left out, and the book comes from the quote the line carries. Three corrections were made by hand and are marked in the ledger’s notes: one line the map drew backwards, four men the map filed with the wrong army, and the two deaths the map records only as Zeus’s foretelling — Patroklos and Hector. Ranked by named kills alone, Diomedes, Agamemnon and Hector lead; the map’s own page on the Iliad puts the same three first.