The Iliad by Homer is an extended narrative that occupies 15,693 lines. In most hardcover editions, one page contains 23 to 25 lines. It makes up approximately 600 pages. If you read the book with a speed of 250 words per minute, you will finish it in ten hours.
How many pages is The Iliad? It depends on the edition and font size. For example, Barnes & Noble published it on 560 pages. Penguin Classics has fit the poem into 704 pages, as the paperback format is usually smaller. Still, the poem is written in verses, so it is better to count in this unit of measure.
There are 15,693 verses in the epic poem. One dactylic hexameter verse contains about 15 syllables. In most publications, one verse is equal to one line. The lines are relatively long in comparison with lyric poetry. Mind that this fact will influence your reading speed. Provided that you read it in translation to your native language, you can spend roughly ten hours reading the entire text.
Concerning the reading difficulty, it is not too complicated. The hardest thing is the Homeric language, which is full of epithets replacing real names. In addition, the characters are so numerous that you may need to make notes during the first reading to memorize who is who. Apart from this, the plot is engaging and almost always linear. You will definitely find the characters that you’ll sympathize with, and the cultural details are always given in the introduction and footnotes.
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