This was recognized by Simone Weil in an essay written long before she left her native France for wartime London, where she filled her brilliant notebooks with reflections on Greek literature and philosophy in the short time left to her to live. This classic (and prophetic) statement—L‘Iliade ou le Poème de la Force—presented her vision of Homer’s poem as an image of the modern world.
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad, is force. Force as man’s instrument, force as man’s master, force before which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul, in this poem, is shown always in its relation to force: swept away, blinded by the force it thinks it can direct, bent under the pressure of the force to which it is subjected. Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, now belonged to the past, have seen the poem as a historic document; those who can see that force, today as in the past, is at the center of all human history, find in the Iliad its most beautiful, its purest mirror.
She goes on to define what she means by force: “force is what makes the person subjected to it into a thing.” She wrote these words in 1939: the article was scheduled for publication in the Nouvelle Revue Française, but before it could be printed Paris was in the hands of the Nazis and her compatriots, like all Europe, were subjected to force and turned into things—corpses or slaves.
“Its most beautiful, its purest mirror . . .” The most marvelous lines in the Iliad owe their unearthly, poignant beauty to the presence of violence, held momentarily in reserve but brooding over the landscape. They are the lines that end Book 8 and describe the Trojans camped on the plain, awaiting the next dawn, which will launch them on their attack on the Greek fortification.
And so their spirits soared
as they took positions down the passageways of battle
all night long, and the watchfires blazed among them.
Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering
round the moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory
when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm ...
all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs
and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts
the boundless bright air and all the stars shine clear
and the shepherd’s heart exults—so many fires burned
between the ships and the Xanthus’ whirling rapids
set by the men of Troy, bright against their walls. (8.636-49)
These are surely the clearest hills, the most brilliant stars and the brightest fires in all poetry, and everyone who has waited to go into battle knows how true the lines are, how clear and memorable and lovely is every detail of the landscape the soldier fears he may be seeing for the last time.
THE TROJANS
The city, the polis, as the Greeks called it, was for them the matrix of civilization, the only form of ordered social life they could understand; it is the exclusive form assumed by ancient Greek culture from its beginning to its end. The city was small enough so that the citizens knew one another, participated in a communal life, shared the common joy of festivals, the sorrow of public bereavement, the keen excitement of competition, the common heritage of ancestral tombs and age-old sanctified places. The destruction of a city is a calamity all the more deeply felt because of the close cohesion of its inhabitants and their attachment, reinforced over generations from a mythical past, to its landmarks and buildings.
The first city we hear of in Greek literature is Troy. It is characteristic of the Iliad’s tragic viewpoint that this city, the literary prototype of all Greek cities, is to be destroyed. The poem ends before Troy falls, but we are left in no doubt about its fate. One of the deep sources of the tragic force of the Iliad is that the city of Troy is doomed, doomed to go down in fire and slaughter under the assault of the Achaeans, whose cities are far away and half-forgotten in the long siege, whose home for ten years has been the raw world of tent shelters and beached ships.
Homer’s Troy has been assigned a few traits that sound Oriental (or at any rate non-Greek)—Priam’s fifty sons, for example—but it is still recognizably a Greek polis. It is a site chosen with an eye to defensive capabilities, with a high eminence that serves as a citadel, a sacred area for the temples and palaces. It is near the junction of two rivers, and it depends on the produce of the surrounding plain, which is rich plowland and grows wheat. It is fortified against attackers: it is well-walled and well-built, it has steep ramparts and gates. These fortifications enclose a vision of civilized life, the splendors of wealth and peace. The city contains, for example, “Priam’s palace, that magnificent structure / built wide with porches and colonnades of polished stone” (6.289—90). It is at the gates of this palace that the Trojans hold their assemblies. The city has its hallowed landmarks: the Scaean and Dardanian Gates, the tombs of the royal ancestor Ilus in the plain, of old Aesyetes, and of Myrine; the oak tree by the Scaean Gates (6.283), the fig tree near the tomb of Ilus, and the hot and cold springs ...
where the wives of Troy and all their lovely daughters
would wash their glistening robes in the old days,
the days of peace before the sons of Achaea came ... (22.185-87)
And in the city are those riches the Achaeans dream of, of which they promise each other shares when the city falls, those riches which, even though the nine years’ war has reduced them to a level that Hector regards with dismay (18.334-38), are still enormous. We are given a glimpse of them in Book 6 when Hecuba goes into the royal storeroom to select an offering for Athena, and again in Book 24 when Priam assembles the ransom for Hector’s body.
But the wealth of Troy is apparent also from the fact that time after time Trojan warriors, menaced with death as they lose a fight, offer a rich ransom:
“Take us alive, Atrides, take a ransom worth our lives!
Vast treasures are piled up in Antimachus’ house,
bronze and gold and plenty of well-wrought iron—
father would give you anything, gladly, priceless ransom