Homer was so inspired when he saw Brad Pitt in Troy that he decided to write this 24-book epic poem about it in 700 BCE. He took some blockbuster-making themes like war, wrath, lust, and fate, brought them to life with a crew of famous Greek and Trojan warriors—Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Paris, Odysseus, and all their buddies. He showed them at war with each other and the gods over Helen, who got snatched from her Greek husband by the Trojan lady's man Paris, and boom: one horse later, the Trojan war is a book.
This, along with The Odyssey, is one of the most important texts in the western literary tradition. It's the epic on which all other western epics—from Virgil's Aeneid, to John Milton's Paradise Lost, to Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene—are based.
Some questions for you:
(1) What are some of the fundamental elements that the The Iliad has in common with other works of this genre? Think about structure (where does the poem begin and end, for instance), as well as characterization and broader themes.
(2) Think about The Iliad in relation to epics produced in different cultural contexts. Just two among dozens of examples are The Epic of Gilgamesh (from the golden years of Mesopotamia) and the Ramayana (a Hindu epic starring demigods, ten-headed demons, and flying monkeys. No, really). Can we find similarities and patterns in epic literature, even when it's produced out of different cultural contexts and from distant historical moments? Does this suggest that there is some deep underlying "structure" to epic as a category of literature?