The Iliad or the Poem of Force

Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” runs twenty-four pages and was completed in 1939. It explores Homer’s epic and draws conclusions about how force operates in human life. The essay first appeared in 1940 under the French title *L’Iliade ou le poème de la force* in the journal *Les Cahiers du Sud*, which has been called the only notable literary magazine available in the French free zone at the time. An English translation by Mary McCarthy came out in 1945 in the New York–based journal *Politics*. Since then, the essay has been reprinted many times. As of 2007, it remained the only one of Weil’s writings on ancient Greek literature regularly assigned in university Classics courses.

Weil opens her essay by stating that the true hero, subject, and center of the *Iliad* is force—force used by humans, force that enslaves them, force before which the body recoils. Throughout the poem, she argues, the human spirit is shown as altered by its encounters with force: swept away, blinded by the force it thought it could control, and deformed by the force it endures. She defines force as that which turns anyone subjected to it into a thing—at worst, a corpse. Even when no physical harm occurs, the emotional and psychological violence of being forced to submit, as seen in slaves and supplicants, is a form of this transformation. Force is dangerous not only to the victim but also to the person wielding it, because it intoxicates and numbs reason and pity. It can turn its possessor into an unthinking automaton driven by rage or lust. The *Iliad* suggests that no one truly controls force: even Achilles and Agamemnon suffer when the force of events turns against them. Using force in moderation is the only way to escape its ill effects, but such restraint is rare and offers only a temporary reprieve.

Weil gives several reasons for considering the *Iliad* unsurpassed in the Western canon. She praises its honesty about war’s realities. The poem covers many kinds of human love—between parents and children, siblings, comrades, and lovers—but these moments are brief, serving as counterpoints to the relentless tragedy and violence. In the essay’s final pages, Weil argues that love’s influence is always present in the epic, in the bitter tone that “proceeds from tenderness.” She writes that justice and love, though barely visible in the study of extremes and unjust violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light, appearing only as a kind of accent. At the end, she discusses the poem’s equity: the suffering of combatants on both sides—Trojan and Greek, regardless of rank or heroism—is treated with the same bitter, scornless tone. Weil claims this equity was never matched in any other Western work, though it was partly passed down through Attic tragedies, especially those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and then to the Gospels. Since the Gospels, she finds very few authors have approached this universal compassion, though she names Shakespeare, Villon, Molière, Cervantes, and Racine as coming closer than most in some of their work.

The *New York Review of Books* calls the essay one of Weil’s most celebrated works. *The Atlantic Monthly* has written that, along with Rachel Bespaloff’s *On the Iliad*, Weil’s essay “remains the twentieth century’s most beloved, tortured, and profound responses to the world’s greatest and most disturbing poem.” Simone Petrement, a friend of Weil, noted that the essay showed a new way to view the *Iliad*: previously seen as a stirring tale of heroic deeds, it could now be understood as an accurate, compassionate depiction of how force harms both victors and victims. Weil translated several extracts from the epic herself, taking over half an hour per line, and Petrement records that she captured the sympathy and compassion of Homer’s work better than any earlier translator. Elizabeth Hardwick described the essay as “one of the most moving and original literary essays ever written.” The title of the first chapter of Piero Boitani’s *A New Sublime: Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics*—“The Poem of Strength and Pity”—echoes Weil’s title, reflecting her lasting influence.