the poetry of pain and all the high places of the hills are clear, and the shoulders out-jutting,
andthe deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from the heavens
and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart of the shepherd;
such in their numbers blazed the watchfires the Trojans were burning
between the waters of Xanthos and the ships, before Ilion.
A thousand fires were burning there in the plain, and beside each
one sat fifty men in the flare of the blazing firelight.
And standing each beside his chariot, champing white barley
and oats, the horses waited for the dawn to mount to her high place.
(8. 553–65)War moves rhythmically, it has its formal patterns. Here the rhythm is of pause, as
the mood of watchfulness, waiting, and quiet approaches the majestic.
Among war’s movements, however, perhaps the most important overarching
principle is not the pause or rest, but its very converse: what we might, following
the French philosopher Simone Weil, call ‘force’. Weil, writing during the Nazi
occupation, developed a notion of sweeping power in Homer’s epic, in which
violence operates on and through individuals, transfiguring them as it mutilates the
landscapes of peace, driving the action, in effect restructuring all elements in the
radius of war. Here is Weil, in her essay on theIliad:
The true hero, the true subject, the center of theIliad, 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 relations with 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. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing
of the past, theIliadcould appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of
recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of
human history, theIliadis the purest and the loveliest of mirrors....To define force—it is
thatxthat turns anybody who is subjected to it into athing.^17
These opening lines establish the essay’s generating idea: the hero and centre and
subject of theIliadarenotapersonorevenanemotion(suchasanger),but
rather the enormous principle that she calls force. Such a configuration helps to
re-frame the discussion from a characterological one, in which we consider the
motivations and experiences of this or that character, to a format in which war
is the one and only constant in the narrative, with its all-encompassing, often
hideously transformative effects on people, places, relationships, and culture. What
makes the idea of force particularly illuminating in Weil’s account is its quality of
linkage and unification across seemingly fixed boundaries: it connects the past (of
Homer, himself imagining a war 400 years in the past) with the present (of fascism,
and a war ravenously under way at the moment); internally, it brings together the
(^17) Simone Weil,The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle
Hill, 1956), 3.