Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad

Black Ships Before Troy is Rosemary Sutcliff's prose retelling of Homer's Iliad, and it is the version most homeschool families use to bring the Trojan War within reach of a middle-grade reader. Sutcliff, a celebrated historical novelist, compresses the epic into a continuous narrative that runs from the golden apple and the judgment of Paris through the death of Hector and the fall of Troy.

What Sutcliff does especially well is keep the story readable without flattening it. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the duel with Hector, Priam's night journey to beg for his son's body — the emotional weight of the original survives the compression. Her prose has a formal, slightly archaic cadence that reads aloud well, and families often use it as a read-aloud even when the student could manage it alone.

The book is normally placed in grades 5 through 8, either inside an ancient-Greece history unit or as the literature selection for the year. It is a standard stepping stone: students who read Sutcliff at eleven or twelve are considerably better prepared to meet a verse translation of Homer in high school, because they already know the cast, the sequence of events, and the shape of the quarrel that drives the plot.

Two things are worth knowing before you assign it. First, the Iliad is a war story, and Sutcliff does not soften the battlefield deaths; the violence is described plainly, though without dwelling. Second, this volume covers only the Iliad — the return voyage is told in her companion book, The Wanderings of Odysseus, and most families read the two back to back. Editions illustrated by Alan Lee are especially prized for his atmospheric paintings.

Published by Penguin Random House.