stylistic:tone
Influence on arts and culture

The Iliad was a standard work of great importance already in Classical Greece and remained so throughout the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. Subjects from the Trojan War were a favourite among ancient Greek dramatists. Aeschylus ' trilogy, the Oresteia, comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, follows the story of Agamemnon after his return from the war. Homer also came to be of great influence in European culture with the resurgence of interest in Greek antiquity during the Renaissance, and it remains the first and most influential work of the Western canon. In its full form, the text made its return to Italy and Western Europe beginning in the 15th century, primarily through translations into Latin and the vernacular languages.

Prior to this reintroduction, however, a shortened Latin version of the poem, known as the Ilias Latina, was very widely studied and read as a basic school text. Publius Baebius Italicus, a Roman Senator, is credited with a translation of the Iliad in the decade 60 A.D.-70 A.D. The work is known as Homerus Latinus and was formerly attributed to Pindarus Thebaeus. The West tended to view Homer as unreliable, as they believed they possessed much more down-to-earth and realistic eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War written by Dares and Dictys Cretensis, who were supposedly present at the events. These late antique forged accounts formed the basis of several eminently popular medieval chivalric romances, most notably those of Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne.

These in turn spawned many others in various European languages, such as the first printed English book, the 1473 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Other accounts read in the Middle Ages were antique Latin retellings such as the Excidium Troiae and works in the vernaculars such as the Icelandic Troy Saga. Even without Homer, the Trojan War story had remained central to Western European medieval literary culture and its sense of identity. Most nations and several royal houses traced their origins to heroes at the Trojan War; Britain was supposedly settled by the Trojan Brutus, for instance.

William Shakespeare used the plot of the Iliad as source material for his play Troilus and Cressida but focused on a medieval legend, the love story of Troilus, son of King Priam of Troy, and Cressida, daughter of the Trojan soothsayer Calchas. The play, often considered to be a comedy, reverses traditional views on events of the Trojan War and depicts Achilles as a coward, Ajax as a dull, unthinking mercenary, etc.

William Theed the elder made a bronze statue of Thetis as she brings Achilles his new armor forged by Hephaestus. It has been on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City since 2013.

Robert Browning 's poem Development discusses his childhood introduction to the matter of the Iliad and his delight in the epic, as well as contemporary debates about its authorship.

According to Suleyman al-Boustani, a 19th-century poet who made the first Arabic translation of the Iliad to Arabic, the epic may have been widely circulated in Syriac and Pahlavi translations during the early Middle Ages. Al-Boustani credits Theophilus of Edessa with the Syriac translation, which was supposedly (along with the Greek original) widely read or heard by the scholars of Baghdad in the prime of the Abbasid Caliphate, although those scholars never took the effort to translate it to the official language of the empire: Arabic. The Iliad was also the first full epic poem to be translated into Arabic from a foreign language, upon the publication of Al-Boustani's complete work in 1904.