Reading the Iliad in the Light of Eternity

[Sci-2]

Reading the Iliad in the Light of Eternity

While they both acknowledged the “tiger at the gates,” Weil and Bespaloff apparently disagreed on what to do about it. Completed and published before Germany’s defeat of France, the former’s essay condemned war outright and implicitly advocated a pacifist stance toward Hitler. It is significant that McCarthy’s translation was later printed by a Quaker press. Bespaloff’s essay, on the other hand, revised after the occupation, made an implicit case for resistance, and served, whether its author intended it to or not, as a response to Weil’s pacifism. To condemn war, “or to absolve it, would be to condemn life itself,” Bespaloff wrote. “And life in the Iliad (as in the Bible or in War and Peace ) is essentially the thing that does not permit itself to be assessed, or measured, or condemned, or justified, at least not by the living.”

Weil and Bespaloff were finally concerned with something more than their own historical moment, however. In the Iliad they sought a significance to history’s entirety, a significance understood only in metaphysical or theological terms and informed by an anthropology grounded in a Judaeo-Christian Hellenism. Their appreciation of Homer’s poem, to find critical accompaniment in American letters, is of the kind intimated in Lionel Trilling’s observation:

“When we read how Hector in his farewell to Andromache picks up his infant son and the baby is frightened by the horsehair crest of his father’s helmet and Hector takes it off and laughs and puts it on the ground, or how Priam goes to the tent of Achilles to beg back from the slayer the body of his son, and the old man and the young man, both bereaved and both under the shadow of death, talk about death and fate, nothing can explain the power of such moments over us, or nothing short of a recapitulation of the moral history of the race.”

[maarsen]

I read the Iliad just a few months back and found it to be profoundly sad. Men fight and die, are honoured and then laid to rest with the living having to go on, haunted by the memories of the dead. Sometimes it is the living that suffer the most.

[Theda Baratheon]

Those two parts mentioned; (Hector visiting Andromache and Astyanax) and Priam pleading with Achilles are two of my favourite moments in the whole poem. The Hector/Andromache moment IS my favourite. Powerful, powerful stuff.