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This lecture offers a new reckoning of time in Homer’s Iliad by drawing upon queer theorizations about temporality, which distinguish normative “straight time” that is structured by reproductive heterosexuality and looks towards a future associated with children from “queer time” that is shaped by different logics and either disallows the future altogether or imagines a radically unfamiliar future. It argues that the Iliad constructs a straight temporality of patrilineal continuity as a valued norm, but stages its failure in the context of war and features instead a non-normative temporality associated with Helen and Paris’ transgressive union and with Achilleus’ choice to fight and ultimately die young for Patroklos’ sake. Rather than moving in a linear way from a past linked with the father to a future defined through the son, the Iliad collapses time in the violent present and dwells in its jouissance, while identifying that present as the source of alternative, perhaps utopian futurities of kleos and postmortem companionship.