In the "best of the ancients" – the one who stared down his own death to return to the Battle of Troy – the classicist Grethlein recognizes an awareness of existential vulnerability that he, too, has gained through his own experience of illness. This leads him to read the "Iliad" as it has never been read before. In this deeply moving study, Grethlein weaves his own fate together with the great questions that Homer's epic has been asking us for thousands of years. This leads to the emergence of an unusual book that does not obey the laws of genre: it is both a personal narrative and an interpretation of Homer, a philosophical reflection and an emphatic plea to read the "Iliad" as a work that addresses the contingency to which all human life is subject.