Iliad or the Poem of Force
"The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" is a 24-page essay written in 1939 by Simone Weil. The essay is about Homer's epic poem the Iliad and contains reflections on the conclusions one can draw from the epic regarding the nature of force in human affairs.
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- Advice for anyone reading the Iliad: read Simone Weil's essay "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" first [1]. The essay was a profound experience on its own for me, in a way that came as a great relief in a world which seemed to lack all moral gravity. (Note, it was written in 1945.)
And it conveys better than anything why the epic was composed, why it survived to be written down (the Bronze Age Collapse and a whole dark age separated the era of the Trojan War from the era of Homer!) and why people have been reading it for almost three thousand years.
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-the-ilia...
- For French speakers, France culture has 2 series of podcasts on Weil:
* https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/serie-avoi...
* https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/serie-simo...
For English speakers, Enlightened By Love: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (5 hours): https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/2014/11/30/1msu5jd829w2...
I can also recommend the already mentioned "Philosophize This!" podcast
As for her writings, I enjoyed these short pieces:
* The Power of Words
* The Iliad, or the Poem of Force
* Écrits historiques et politiques (fr) https://cras31.info/IMG/pdf/simone_weil_-_ecrits_1_--_histor...
- Virgil also creates a shield symbolizing Rome's history in the Iliadic second half Book VIII of the Aeneid. Not that many people read the second half of the Aeneid because it's just not as good as the first half. A lot of classes leave it out. The first half is Virgil's adaption of the Odyssey and is a lot of fun. But like Romeo and Juliet after Mercutio gets killed off, once Dido gets lit (literally), the Aeneid gets boring fast. Like Mercutio, she's the best character.
The poem itself is Auden's 1952 reworking with the Cold War and nuclear annihilation as an implicit backdrop. It reminded me of Simon Weil's Iliad or the Poem of Force.
