Poem of Force?

Simone Weil was a brilliant French intellectual, political activist, and mystic who died at 34 in 1943.  She was a freakishly precocious student who mastered ancient Greek by age 12 and went on to learn Sanskrit.  She wrote the essay "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" in 1939.  It is hard, given her intense involvement in left-wing political causes, her Jewish background, and her service in the Spanish Civil War, to think that she was not reacting at least in part to the increasingly sinister political situation in Europe.  This is a deeply emotional, non-scholarly response to the Iliad.  Here is the opening of her essay (the whole essay is posted on UB Learns):  "The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to."  Whether you agree with her analysis or not, she captures vividly the relentlessness of the Iliad's unflinching contemplation of mortality. 

Matt's citation of the attack on Sumner by Brooks is certainly apt; it is parallel not only in the role of honor in motivating the attack, but also in the public, political setting (council of the Greeks, the U.S. Senate), and in the far-reaching effects of the antagonism.  Brooks's attack was so violent, the news coverage so inflammatory, and the public reaction so fierce, that it is thought to have helped accelerate the tensions leading to the Civil War. 

Here is a link to an outstanding account of contemporary combat-- it is an article in The Telegraph excerpted from journalist Sebastian Junger's book War.  Despite the differences in modes of warfare between the ancient Greeks and the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the behaviors of the warriors and the psychology of war are uncannily alike. 

2/9/2012

In my class on the American Civil War, we discussed the attack on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. After delivering a speech insulting the South, Charles Sumner was beat to near death by Brooks. In his defense when tried, Brooks stated that he was protecting the honor of  not only his state but of his family. I find this event is similar to situation in Book 1 of the Iliad when Achilles' honor is threatened by Agamemnon; although Preston Brooks didn't have Athena come down and stop him. It is interesting to see in later periods how people still hold self-honor to be one of the most important things in their lives.

Thanks for your entry, Beshoy. You raise very good points.  The extent of divine manipulation of the humans in the Iliad is a crucial point, and you should  try to follow that track through the rest of the poem.  This question is important in all of the poems we'll read, but more important for the Iliad than for any of the others.  (There is an  article about the role of Thetis, and how that explains the fate of Achilles, posted on the UBLearns website).  But you should keep track of how the gods intervene at various stages in the Iliad-- when do they intervene directly in the action?  What can they do, and what can't they do?  Are they agents of Fate?  Subject to Fate?  Is Homer consistent in his idea of what gods are? 

the iliad

  It was interesting in Book five when the battle troy became a family feud among the gods. Athena helps Diomedes by riding with him in the chariot and wounding Ares. It seems that the gods and the mortals have the same destructive human characteristics. the battle for troy becomes a contest of the favored side among the gods shown especially when Athena empowers Diomedes with heroic strength that are unmatched in the battle field but still unable to compare to the power of Achilles. Athena also convinced the archer Panderus to attack Menelaus. Zeus accepted the plea of Achilles’s mother. It seems that the mortals are puppets in which the gods can toy with any way they want with or without their consent.  

Thetis answered him then, letting the tears fall.  "Ah me,
my child. Your birth was bitterness.  Why did I raise you?
If only you could sit by your ships untroubled, not weeping,
since indeed your lifetime is to be short, of no length.
Now it has befallen that your life must be brief and bitter
beyond all men's.  To a bad destiny I bore you in my chambers.
But I will go to cloud-dark Olympos and ask this
thing of Zeus who delights in the thunder.  Perhaps he will do it.
Do you therefore continuing to sit by your swift ships
be angry at the Achaians and stay away from all fighting."
Iliad 1.413-22  (tr. Lattimore)
 

I saw something that touched my heart today at the Buffalo Greyhound Terminal on Ellicott Street as I was putting my daughter on the bus back to college. A dreary grey day, drenching rain, dark and rather lonely inside the terminal although it was 8 a.m. A soldier in uniform, with a fresh buzz-cut, was in line ahead of my daughter.  He looked fit and had a trusting, friendly face with shining grey eyes; he was extremely polite.  He had 2 pieces of luggage: a huge army-issue duffel bag and a smaller, but obviously very heavy backpack.  In the front pocket of the backpack the heads of two small brown, rather worn stuffed animals poked out, not looking ready for the trip to Afghanistan.  Were they his totem animals from toddlerhood?  Did his younger brother or sister tuck them into his pack when they said good-bye?  Gift from a girlfriend?