Weil on the Iliad

Since I have been working my way into the Iliad, (μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος /οὐλομένην….), I thought I’d reread Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad: or The Poem of Force.” I think now as I did when I first read it that hers is an eminently satisfying view of the poem, whether one agrees with her or not, and one of the most complete readings of a literary work I’ve ever read.

            Weil says the poem’s hero and subject is force, power, might—which she defines as “that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway.” Force does this literally by killing, but also by enslaving—the slave becomes a thing, and so does the person about to be killed who is utterly in the power of another. What force does to its wielder is convince him that his power has no limit, therefore insuring that power will shift to the other side when he oversteps. This “geometrical rigor” in the shift of power back and forth, says Weil, “was the main subject of Greek thought.” Her reading thus accounts for the to and fro in the Iliad’s battles and the curious sense readers have that Homer doesn’t take sides. She points to the materialistic description of battle, where men are described as blood and bone, with “no comforting fiction, no consoling immortality, no faint halo of patriotic glory;” while, on the other hand, “whatever is not war…the Iliad wraps in poetry.” For there are counterforces to might in the poem in all the forms of love, especially conjugal love, the love of parents for children, and the love of brothers-in-arms.

            The famous similes in the poem, according to Weil, compare warriors to violent forces of nature, OR to frightened animals, trees, water, sand or anything in nature affected by those violent forces, depending on whether the object of the simile is wielding force or being subjected to it. She identifies a tone of regret and even bitterness in the poem, as well as a valuing of precious things precisely because they will perish. The poem, she decides, is a miraculous object, hopeful in that it assigns to the gods all the malice and caprice—“war is their true business.” She concludes that the Iliad teaches that “nothing is sheltered from fate,” that we must never “admire might, hate the enemy, or despise sufferers.”

            When I say I find hers a complete reading I don’t mean only that it gives a framework for understanding so much in the poem—the back and forth of battle, the very brutal description of battle scenes, the similes, the way the gods are depicted, and so on. The final element is that Weil’s essay is finally and unblushingly grounded in history, written in 1939 at the beginning of the war by a Jewish intellectual Frenchwoman when it had already become obvious that the Nazis would not be stopped by any considerations of humanity but would continue to do what they wished because they could. Weil’s essay has often been seen as pacifist, I think just because it is anti-war, which is not the same thing.