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This volume stems from a project to re-read the Homeric poem, intended for the theatrical stage. Baricco dismantles and reassembles the Iliad, creating twenty-one monologues, corresponding to as many characters from the poem and to the character of a bard who recounts, in closing, the siege and fall of Troy. The author "foregoes" the gods and focuses on the figures who move on earth, on the battlefields, in the Achaean palaces, behind the walls of the besieged city. The central theme of this sequence of monologues is war, war as desire, destiny, fascination, condemnation. A combined theatrical and literary endeavor, from which emerges an intense sense of contemporaneity, revival, and urgency, both moral and civil.