The Iliad is not an Achilleid, although Achilles is the most important character in the epic. One of the most striking features of the poem is the way in which it embraces the action of the whole Trojan War by retrospective and prospective references, rather than by narrating the events in full. In this, as is evident from ancient testimony, the Iliad was markedly different from the ‘cyclic’ epics (see esp. Hor. Ars P. 136–7). The human characters refer to the abduction of Helen, the initial embassy to the Trojans, the mustering at Aulis, the earlier campaigns and clashes; the prophecies and comments of the gods, particularly Zeus and Thetis, anticipate the doom of Achilles and the ultimate fall of Troy, also grimly foreshadowed in other ways. In an important passage which seems to be deliberately reserved for a late stage in the poem, Homer himself looks back to the origin of the whole conflict, the judgement of Paris which aroused the implacable anger of Athena and Hera against Troy.

Although it is theoretically possible (and has been asserted) that the Iliad followed the Odyssey, or that the two poems were composed quite independently, with no influence from one to the other, majority opinion ancient and modern puts the Odyssey later, and assumes it to be in important respects a successor, even a sequel, to the Iliad. This position can be maintained in two main forms: those who believe in a single master-poet as the creator of both epics may assign the Iliad to Homer's youth, the Odyssey to his riper years (a position memorably expressed by Longinus); those who follow the ancient separatists can regard the Odyssey as a rival work, composed by a poet who immensely admired the Iliad but whose own poetic and moral concerns lay elsewhere. This view is now much more common. It may be difficult, however, in a tradition which involved so much use of conventional themes and formulaic material, to decide firmly in favour of common or separate authorship. Whichever view one prefers, the important point seems to be that the Odyssey is later, and that it is conceived as a poem on the same scale as the Iliad, but differing strikingly in content and ethos.

Pictures and spaces, like literary texts, tell a story. This chapter, together with the Survey's envoi, tackles a range of these stories. At our first two sites we focus on painted landscapes in suburban villas (the Villa ‘Farnesina’, and the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, near Rome). The next two, the famous but now mostly lost Horti Sallustiani and Porticus of Pompey, open a window onto the political and civic role of peri-urban Roman landscape gardens. Rounding off the survey, a stroll around the parkland of the emperor Hadrian's villa near Tibur (modern Tivoli) uses the contemporary site to reflect on villa visits then and now.