Achilles, Priam, and the Redemptive Power of Forgiveness

“For all the battle scenes, violent sex, and rage that fills the poem, the most memorable scenes in the poem are moments of love—especially loving moments of embrace.”

The most infamous poem from antiquity about the most infamous war in our collective memory opens with the words “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles.”

In the late 1800’s, most educated people believed the Trojan War—the very event at the heart of Homer’s epic—was a myth. That all changed when Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy and amateurish archeologist, discovered the ruins of a citadel he believed to be the city of Troy. He was ridiculed by the institutional and educational elite of his day; the discovery was too small to be the magnificent city described by Homer. But his discovery sparked intrigue, and successive waves of archeological digs later revealed the walled city unearthed by Schliemann was just a very small portion of a much larger walled fortress, and city, with all the archeological pedigree of the fabled city sacked by the Greeks.

After the Nazis triumphantly marched through Paris, Simone Weil published her magnificent essay L’Iliade ou le poème de la force. It is hard to know when Weil started reflecting on Homer’s masterpiece, but most agree that it was influenced by the traumatic experience of the French Republic in the spring and summer of 1940 when the supposedly most powerful nation in the world was overrun by the forces of darkness in under two months.

Weil wrote that the main subject of the Iliad was “force.” Force, she described—in a very Augustinian manner—was that which “makes the person subjected to it in a thing.” Hauntingly brilliant, Weil explains that force is the power that objectifies the person and strips them of their dignity, freedom, and subjectivity.