It is the ninth year of the Trojan War. Greek and Trojan armies have been camped facing each other on the same plain, fighting the same war, for nine summers. Then Agamemnon — the Greek king — takes a captured woman from his greatest fighter, Achilles. Achilles withdraws from the war. The gods take sides. The death of one warrior, and then another, and then another, will follow.
Homer's Iliad is one of the foundational texts of Western literature, composed in Ancient Greek around 750 BCE. It is not really about the whole Trojan War — only fifty-one days of it. But across those days it tells everything: pride, anger, friendship, grief, and the question of what a short and beautiful life is worth.
Storica adapts the poem to B1 — narrative past tense, dialogue between Achilles, Hector, Patroclus, Priam, Helen, the gods, and the foot soldiers — across twenty-five readable chapters. The famous final scene, when Priam goes to Achilles's tent to ask for his son's body, lands as hard in B1 as it does in the Greek.
Where the Odyssey is an A2 adventure full of monsters, the Iliad is the harder of the two — closer to a war novel than a quest. Battlefield vocabulary, longer dialogue scenes, and the first appearance of a real concept of grief on the page. B1 is the right level: you handle past tense, you handle dialogue between characters who hate each other, and your vocabulary is broad enough to cover armour, council, lament, and wound.
Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Iliad was originally written in Ancient Greek, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B1. Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Iliad is rated B1, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
Use this code in the app for 30% off your first year of Storica Pro.