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Title: The Iliad, or The Poem of Force Author: Simone Weil Date: 1945 Language: en Topics: force, poetry, essays, review Source: Retrieved on 6th December 2020 from http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=2B8EADE7846DF424C0522D9F3FFC0348
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad 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, the Iliad could
appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of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, the Iliad is the purest and the
loveliest of mirrors.
To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it
into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the
most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and
the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the
Iliad never wearies of showing us:
The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:
The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted.
No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality;
and on the hero’s head no washedout halo of patriotism descends.
Still more poignant — so painful is the contrast — is the sudden
evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the faraway,
precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which
each man counts more than anything else to those about him.
Far from hot baths he was indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all
the lliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then
and now, takes place far from hot baths.
Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form — the force that
kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising
in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e.,
that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill,
or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the
creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In
whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone.
From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing
by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too
in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he
is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet — he is a thing. An
extraordinary entity this — a thing that has a soul. And as for the
soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what
it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence,
how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it?
It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of
necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence
is not done.
A man stands disarmed and naked with a weapon pointing at him; this
person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him. Just a
minute ago, he was thinking, acting, hoping:
Soon, however, he grasps the fact that the weapon which is pointing at
him will not be diverted; and now, still breathing, he is simply matter;
still thinking, he can think no longer:
If a stranger, completely disabled, disarmed, strengthless, throws
himself on the mercy of a warrior, he is not, by this very act,
condemned to death; but a moment of impatience on the warrior’s part
will suffice to relieve him of his life. In any case, his flesh has lost
that very important property which in the laboratory distinguishes
living flesh from dead — the galvanic response. If you give a frog’s leg
an electric shock, it twitches. If you confront a human being with the
touch or sight of something horrible or terrifying, this bundle of
muscles, nerves, and flesh likewise twitches.
Alone of all living things, the suppliant we have just described neither
quivers nor trembles. He has lost the right to do so.
As his lips advance to touch the object that is for him of all things
most charged with horror, they do not draw back on his teeth — they
cannot:
The sight of a human being pushed to such an extreme of suffering chills
us like the sight of a dead body:
But this feeling lasts only a moment. Soon the very presence of the
suffering creature is forgotten:
It was not insensibility that made Achilles with a single movement of
his hand push away the old man who had been clinging to his knees;
Priam’s words, recalling his own old father, had moved him to tears. It
was merely a question of his being as free in his attitudes and
movements as if, clasping his knees, there were not a suppliant but an
inert object. Anybody who is in our vicinity exercises a certain power
over us by his very presence, and a power that belongs to him alone,
that is, the power of halting, repressing, modifying each movement that
our body sketches out. If we step aside for a passer-by on the road, it
is not the same thing as stepping aside to avoid a billboard; alone in
our rooms, we get up, walk about, sit down again quite differently from
the way we do when we have a visitor. But this indefinable influence
that the presence of another human being has on us is not exercised by
men whom a moment of impatience can deprive of life, who can die before
even thought has a chance to pass sentence on them. In their presence,
people move about as if they were not there; they, on their side,
running the risk of being reduced to nothing in a single instant,
imitate nothingness in their own persons. Pushed, they fall. Fallen,
they lie where they are, unless chance gives somebody the idea of
raising them up again. But supposing that at long last they have been
picked up, honored with cordial remarks, they still do not venture to
take this resurrection seriously; they dare not express a wish lest an
irritated voice return them forever to silence:
At least a suppliant, once his prayer is answered, becomes a human being
again, like everybody else. But there are other, more unfortunate
creatures who have become things for the rest of their lives. Their days
hold no pastimes, no free spaces, no room in them for any impulse of
their own.
It is not that their life is harder than other men’s nor that they
occupy a lower place in the social hierarchy; no, they are another human
species, a compromise between a man and a corpse. The idea of a person’s
being a thing is a logical contradiction. Yet what is impossible in
logic becomes true in life, and the contradiction lodged within the soul
tears it to shreds. This thing is constantly aspiring to be a man or a
woman, and never achieving it — here, surely, is death but death strung
out over a whole lifetime; here, surely is life, but life that death
congeals before abolishing.
This strange fate awaits the virgin, the priest’s daughter:
It awaits the young wife, the young mother, the prince’s bride:
It awaits the baby, heir to the royal scepter:
In the mother’s eyes, such a fate is, for her child, as terrible as
death; the husband would rather die than see his wife reduced to it; all
the plagues of heaven are invoked by the father against the army that
subjects his daughter to it. Yet the victims themselves are beyond all
this. Curses, feelings of rebellion, comparisons, reflections on the
future and the past, are obliterated from the mind of the captive; and
memory itself barely lingers on. Fidelity to his city and his dead is
not the slave’s privilege.
And what does it take to make the slave weep? The misfortune of his
master, his oppressor, despoiler, pillager, of the man who laid waste
his town and killed his dear ones under his very eye .... This man
suffers or dies; then the slave’s tears come. And really why not? This
is for him the only occasion on which tears are permitted, are, indeed,
required. A slave will always cry whenever he can do so with impunity —
his situation keeps tears on tap for him.
Since the slave has no license to express anything except what is
pleasing to his master, it follows that the only emotion that can touch
or enliven him a little, that can reach him in the desolation of his
life, is the emotion of love for his master.
There is no place else to send the gift of love; all other outlets are
barred, just as, with the horse in harness, bit, shafts, reins bar every
way but one. And if, by some miracle, in the slave’s breast a hope is
born, the hope of becoming, some day, through somebody’s influence,
someone once again, how far won’t these captives go to show love and
thankfulness, even though these emotions are addressed to the very men
who should, considering the very recent past, still reek with horror for
them:
To lose more than the slave does is impossible, for he loses his whole
inner life. A fragment of it he may get back if he sees the possibility
of changing his fate, but this is his only hope. Such is the empire of
force, as extensive as the empire of nature. Nature, too, when vital
needs are at stake, can erase the whole inner life, even the grief of a
mother:
Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny
that extreme hunger does; for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power
of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule
of inert matter.
The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart
of a city than a man lost in the desert.
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as
it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
The truth is, nobody really possesses it. The human race is not divided
up, in the Iliad, into conquered persons, slaves, suppliants, on the one
hand, and conquerors and chiefs on the other. In this poem there is not
a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to
force. The common soldier in the Iliad is free and has the right to bear
arms; nevertheless he is subject to the indignity of orders and abuse:
Thersites pays dear for the perfectly reasonable comments he makes,
comments not at all different, moreover, from those made by Achilles:
Achilles himself, that proud hero, the undefeated, is shown us at the
outset of the poem, weeping with humiliation and helpless grief — the
woman he wanted for his bride has been taken from under his nose, and he
has not dared to oppose it:
What has happened is that Agamemnon has deliberately humiliated
Achilles, to show that he himself is the master:
But a few days pass and now the supreme commander is weeping in his
turn. He must humble himself, he must plead, and have, moreover, the
added misery of doing it all in vain.
In the same way, there is not a single one of the combatants who is
spared the shameful experience of fear. The heroes quake like everybody
else. It only needs a challenge from Hector to throw the whole Greek
force into consternation--except for Achilles and his men, and they did
not happen to be present:
But once Ajax comes forward and offers himself, fear quickly changes
sides:
Two days later, it is Ajax’s turn to be terrified:
Even to Achilles the moment comes; he too must shake and stammer with
fear, though it is a river that has this effect on him, not a man. But,
with the exception of Achilles, every man in the Iliad tastes a moment
of defeat in battle. Victory is less a matter of valor than of blind
destiny, which is symbolized in the poem by Zeus’s golden scales:
By its very blindness, destiny establishes a kind of justice. Blind also
is she who decrees to warriors punishment in kind. He that takes the
sword, will perish by the sword. The Iliad formulated the principle long
before the Gospels did, and in almost the same terms:
Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer
violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes.
The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are
the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in
common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species:
the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice
versa. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a
non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing
has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny
interval that is reflection.
Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice
or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly. We see
their sword bury itself in the breast of a disarmed enemy who is in the
very act of pleading at their knees. We see them triumph over a dying
man by describing to him the outrages his corpse will endure. We see
Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of
Patroclus as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.
These men, wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the
consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them — they too
will bow the neck in their turn. If you can make an old man fall silent,
tremble, obey, with a single word of your own, why should it occur to
you that the curses of this old man, who is after all a priest, will
have their own importance in the gods’ eyes? Why should you refrain from
taking Achilles’ girl away from him if you know that neither he nor she
can do anything but obey you? Achilles rejoices over the sight of the
Greeks fleeing in misery and confusion.
What could possibly suggest to him that this rout, which will last
exactly as long as he wants it to and end when his mood indicates it,
that this very rout will be the cause of his friend’s death, and, for
that matter, of his own? Thus it happens that those who have force on
loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.
But at the time their own destruction seems impossible to them. For they
do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited
quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a
kind of balance between unequal amounts of force. Since other people do
not impose on their movements that halt, that interval of hesitation,
wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity, they
conclude that destiny has given complete license to them, and none at
all to their inferiors. And at this point they exceed the measure of the
force that is actually at their disposal. Inevitably they exceed it,
since they are not aware that it is limited. And now we see them
committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them.
Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel. But in any case there
they are, exposed, open to misfortune; gone is the armor of power that
formerly protected their naked souls; nothing, no shield, stands between
them and tears.
This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates
automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of
Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic. Under the name of Nemesis, it
functions as the mainspring of Aeschylus’s tragedies. To the
Pythagoreans, to Socrates and Plato, it was the jumping-off point of
speculation upon the nature of man and the universe. Wherever Hellenism
has penetrated, we find the idea of it familiar. In Oriental countries
which are steeped in Buddhism, it is perhaps this Greek idea that bas
lived on under the name of Kharma. The Occident, however, has lost it,
and no longer even has a word to express it in any of its languages:
conceptions of limit, measure, equilibrium, which ought to determine the
conduct of life are, in the West, restricted to a servile function in
the vocabulary of technics. We are only geometricians of matter; the
Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in their apprenticeship to
virtue.
The progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of
seesaw. The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though,
only a few hours before, he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to
treat victory as a transitory thing. At the end of the first day of
combat described in the Iliad, the victorious Greeks were in a position
to obtain the object of all their efforts, i.e., Helen and her riches —
assuming of course as Homer did, that the Greeks had reason to believe
that Helen was in Troy. Actually, the Egyptian priests, who ought to
have known, affirmed later on to Herodotus that she was in Egypt. In any
case, that evening the Greeks are no longer interested in her or her
possessions:
What they want is, in fact, everything. For booty, all the riches of
Troy; for their bonfires, all the palaces, temples, houses; for slaves,
all the women and children; for corpses, all the men. They forget one
detail, that everything is not within their power, for they are not in
Troy. Perhaps they will be there tomorrow; perhaps not. Hector, the same
day, makes the same mistake:
At this moment what would he not give to turn aside those horrors which
he believes to be inevitable? But at this moment nothing he could give
would be of any use. The next day but one, however, the Greeks have run
away miserably, and Agamemnon himself is in favor of putting to the sea
again.
And now Hector, by making a very few concessions, could readily secure
the enemy’s departure; yet now he is even unwilling to let them go
empty-handed:
His wish is granted; the Greeks stay; and the next day they reduce
Hector and his men to a pitiable condition:
In the course of the afternoon, Hector regains the ascendancy, withdraws
again, then puts the Greeks to flight, then is repulsed by Patroclus,
who has come in with his fresh troops.
Patroclus, pressing his advantage, ends by finding himself exposed,
wounded and without armor, to the sword of Hector.
And finally that evening the victorious Hector hears the prudent counsel
of Polydamas and repudiates it sharply:
The next day Hector is lost. Achilles has harried him across the field
and is about to kill him. He has always been the stronger of the two in
combat; how much the more so now, after several weeks of rest, ardent
for vengeance and victory, against an exhausted enemy? And Hector stands
alone, before the walls of Troy, absolutely alone, alone to wait for
death and to steady his soul to face it:
Not a jot of the grief and ignominy that fall to the unfortunate is
Hector spared. Alone, stripped of the prestige of force, he discovers
that the courage that kept him from taking to the shelter of the walls
is not enough to save him from flight:
Wounded to death, he enhances his conqueror’s triumph by vain
supplications:
But the auditors of the Iliad knew that the death of Hector would be but
a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles but a brief joy to
the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the
Achaeans.
THUS violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It comes to seem
just as external to its employer as to its victim. And from this springs
the idea of a destiny before which executioner and victim stand equally
innocent, before which conquered and conqueror are brothers in the same
distress. The conquered brings misfortune to the conqueror, and vice
versa:
A moderate use of force, which alone would enable man to escape being
enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which is as
rare as dignity in weakness.
Moreover, moderation itself is not without its perils, since prestige,
from which force derives at least three quarters of its strength, rests
principally upon that marvelous indifference that the strong feel toward
the weak, an indifference so contagious that it infects the very people
who are the objects of it. Yet ordinarily excess is not arrived at
through prudence or politic considerations. On the contrary, man dashes
to it as to an irresistible temptation. The voice of reason is
occasionally heard in the mouths of the characters in the Iliad.
Thersites’ speeches are reasonable to the highest degree; so are the
speeches of the angry Achilles:
But words of reason drop into the void. If they come from an inferior,
he is punished and shuts up; if from a chief, his actions betray them.
And failing everything else, there is always a god handy to advise him
to be unreasonable. In the end, the very idea of wanting to escape the
role fate has allotted one — the business of killing and dying —
disappears from the mind:
Already these warriors, like Craonne’s so much later, felt themselves to
be “condemned men.”
It was the simplest trap that pitched them into this situation. At the
outset, at the embarkation, their hearts are light, as hearts always are
if you have a large force on your side and nothing but space to oppose
you. Their weapons are in their hands; the enemy is absent. Unless your
spirit has been conquered in advance by the reputation of the enemy, you
always feel yourself to be much stronger than anybody who is not there.
An absent man does not impose the yoke of necessity. To the spirits of
those embarking no necessity yet presents itself; consequently they go
off as though to a game, as though on holiday from the confinement of
daily life.
But the first contact of war does not immediately destroy the illusion
that war is a game. War’s necessity is terrible, altogether different in
kind from the necessity of peace. So terrible is it that the human
spirit will not submit to it so long as it can possibly escape; and
whenever it can escape it takes refuge in long days empty of necessity,
days of play, of revery, days arbitrary and unreal. Danger then becomes
an abstraction; the lives you destroy are like toys broken by a child,
and quite as incapable of feeling; heroism is but a theatrical gesture
and smirched with boastfulness. This becomes doubly true if a momentary
access of vitality comes to reinforce the divine hand that wards off
defeat and death. Then war is easy and basely, coarsely loved.
But with the majority of the combatants this state of mind does not
persist. Soon there comes a day when fear, or defeat, or the death of
beloved comrades touches the warrior’s spirit, and it crumbles in the
hand of necessity. At that moment war is no more a game or a dream; now
at last the warrior cannot doubt the reality of its existence. And this
reality, which he perceives, is hard, much too hard to be borne, for it
enfolds death. Once you acknowledge death to be a practical possibility,
the thought of it becomes unendurable, except in flashes. True enough,
all men are fated to die; true enough also, a soldier may grow old in
battles; yet for those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war,
the relation between death and the future is different than for other
men. For other men death appears as a limit set in advance on the
future; for the soldier death is the future, the future his profession
assigns him. Yet the idea of man’s having death for a future is
abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the
possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts
cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. The
mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time;
but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on
days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence.
Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for
thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way.
Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its
own “war aims.” It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an
end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it
inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.
Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the
presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The
mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so
much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself
violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question,
intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own
specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they were easy
to bear; actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer
of the resources which might serve to extricate him.
Nevertheless, the soul that is enslaved to war cries out for
deliverance, but deliverance itself appears to it in an extreme and
tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction. Any other solution, more
moderate, more reasonable in character, would expose the mind to
suffering so naked, so violent that it could not be borne, even as
memory. Terror, grief, exhaustion, slaughter, the annihilation of
comrades — is it credible that these things should not continually tear
at the soul, if the intoxication of force had not intervened to drown
them? The idea that an unlimited effort should bring in only a limited
profit or no profit at all is terribly painful.
But actually what is Helen to Ulysses? What indeed is Troy, full of
riches that will not compensate him for Ithaca’s ruin? For the Greeks,
Troy and Helen are in reality mere sources of blood and tears; to master
them is to master frightful memories. If the existence of an enemy has
made a soul destroy in itself the thing nature put there, then the only
remedy the soul can imagine is the destruction of the enemy. At the same
time the death of dearly loved comrades arouses a spirit of somber
emulation, a rivalry in death:
It is the same despair that drives him on toward death, on the one hand,
and slaughter on the other:
The man possessed by this twofold need for death belongs, so long as he
has not become something still different, to a different race from the
race of the living.
What echo can the timid hopes of life strike in such a heart? How can it
hear the defeated begging for another sight of the light of day? The
threatened life has already been relieved of nearly all its consequence
by a single, simple distinction: it is now unarmed; its adversary
possesses a weapon.
Furthermore, how can a man who has rooted out of himself the notion that
the light of day is sweet to the eyes respect such a notion when it
makes its appearance in some futile and humble lament?
What a reception this feeble hope gets!
To respect life in somebody else when you have had to castrate yourself
of all yearning for it demands a truly heartbreaking exertion of the
powers of generosity. It is impossible to imagine any of Homer’s
warriors being capable of such an exertion, unless it is that warrior
who dwells, in a peculiar way, at the very center of the poem-! mean
Patroclus, who “knew hew to be sweet to everybody,” and who throughout
the Iliad commits no cruel or brutal act. But then how many men do we
know, in several thousand years of human history, who would have
displayed such god-like generosity? Two or three? — even this is
doubtful. Lacking this generosity, the conquering soldier is like a
scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he, like the slave, becomes a
thing, though his manner of doing so is different--over him too, words
are as powerless as over matter itself. And both, at the touch of force,
experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb.
Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting a man into a thing
is a double one, and in its application double-edged. To the same
degree, though in different fashions, those who use it and those who
endure it are turned to stone. This property of force achieves its
maximum eflectiveness during the clash of arms, in battle, when the tide
of the day has turned, and everything is rushing toward a decision. It
is not the planning man, the man of strategy, the man acting on the
resolution taken, who wins or loses a battle; battles are fought and
decided by men deprived of these faculties, men who have undergone a
transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert matter,
which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure
momentum.
Herein lies the last secret of war, a secret revealed by the Iliad in
its similes, which liken the warriors either to fire, flood, wind, wild
beasts, or God knows what blind cause of disaster, or else to frightened
animals, trees, water, sand, to anything in nature that is set into
motion by the violence of external forces. Greeks and Trojans, from one
day to the next, sometimes even from one hour to the next, experience,
turn and turn about, one or the other of these transmutations:
The art of war is simply the art of producing such transformations, and
its equipment, its processes, even the casualties it inflicts on the
enemy, are only means directed toward this end — its true object is the
warrior’s soul. Yet these transformations are always a mystery; the gods
are their authors, the gods who kindle men’s imagination. But however
caused, this petrifactive quality of force, two-fold always, is
essential to its nature; and a soul which has entered the province of
force will not escape this except by a miracle. Such miracles are rare
and of brief duration.
THE wantonness of the conqueror that knows no respect for any creature
or thing that is at its mercy or is imagined to be so, the despair of
the soldier that drives him on to destruction, the obliteration of the
slave or the conquered man, the wholesale slaughter — all these elements
combine in the Iliad to make a picture of uniform horror, of which force
is the sole hero. A monotonous desolation would result were it not for
those few luminous moments, scattered here and there throughout the
poem, those brief, celestial moments in which man possesses his soul.
The soul that awakes then, to live for an instant only and be lost
almost at once in force’s vast kingdom, awakes pure and whole; it
contains no ambiguities, nothing complicated or turbid; it has no room
for anything but courage and love. Sometimes it is in the course of
inner deliberations that a man finds his soul: he meets it, like Hector
before Troy, as he tries to face destiny on his own terms, without the
help of gods or men. At other times, it is in a moment of love that men
discover their souls — and there is hardly any form of pure love known
to humanity of which the Iliad does not treat. The tradition of
hospitality persists, even through several generations, to dispel the
blindness of combat.
The love of the son for the parents, of father for son, of mother for
son, is continually described, in a manner as touching as it is curt:
Even brotherly love:
Conjugal love, condemned to sorrow, is of an astonishing purity. Imaging
the humiliations of slavery which await a beloved wife, the husband
passes over the one indignity which even in anticipation would stain
their tenderness. What could be simpler than the words spoken by his
wife to the man about to die?
Not less touching are the words expressed to a dead husband:
The most beautiful friendship of all, the friendship between
comrades-at-arms, is the final theme of The Epic:
But the purest triumph of love, the crowning grace of war, is the
friendship that floods the hearts of mortal enemies. Before it a
murdered son or a murdered friend no longer cries out for vengeance.
Before it--even more miraculous — the distance between benefactor and
suppliant, between victor and vanquished, shrinks to nothing:
These moments of grace are rare in the Iliad, but they are enough to
make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and
will kill again.
However, such a heaping-up of violent deeds would have a frigid effect,
were it not for the note of incurable bitterness that continually makes
itself heard, though often only a single word marks its presence, often
a mere stroke of the verse, or a run-on line. It is in this that the
Iliad is absolutely unique, in this bitterness that proceeds from
tenderness and that spreads over the whole human race, impartial as
sunlight. Never does the tone lose its coloring of bitterness; yet never
does the bitterness drop into lamentation. Justice and love, which have
hardly any place in this study of extremes and of unjust acts of
violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light without ever
becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent. Nothing
precious is scorned, whether or not death is its destiny; everyone’s
unhappiness is laid bare without dissimulation or disdain; no man is set
above or below the condition common to all men; whatever is destroyed is
regretted. Victors and vanquished are brought equally near us; under the
same head, both are seen as counterparts of the poet, and the listener
as well. If there is any difference, it is that the enemy’s misfortunes
are possibly more sharply felt.
And what accents echo the fate of the lad Achilles sold at Lemnos!
And the fate of Euphorbus, who saw only a single day of war.
When Hector is lamented:
In these few words, chastity appears, dirtied by force, and childhood,
delivered to the sword. The fountain at the gates of Troy becomes an
object of poignant nostalgia when Hector runs by, seeking to elude his
doom:
The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity
the human race can experience — the destruction of a city. This calamity
could not tear more at the heart had the poet been born in Troy. But the
tone is not different when the Achaeans are dying, far from home.
Insofar as this other life, the life of the living, seems calm and full,
the brief evocations of the world of peace are felt as pain:
Whatever is not war, whatever war destroys or threatens, the Iliad wraps
in poetry; the realities of war, never. No reticence veils the step from
life to death:
The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised; neither
victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated.
Almost always, fate and the gods decide the changing lot of battle.
Within the limits fixed by fate, the gods determine with sovereign
authority victory and defeat. It is always they who provoke those fits
of madness, those treacheries, which are forever blocking peace; war is
their true business; their only motives, caprice and malice. As for the
warriors, victors or vanquished, those comparisons which liken them to
beasts or things can inspire neither admiration nor contempt, but only
regret that men are capable of being so transformed.
There may be, unknown to us, other expressions of the extraordinary
sense of equity which breathes through the Iliad; certainly it has not
been imitated. One is barely aware that the poet is a Greek and not a
Trojan. The tone of the poem furnishes a direct clue to the origin of
its oldest portions; history perhaps will never be able to tell us more.
If one believes with Thucydides that eighty years after the fall of
Troy, the Achaeans in their turn were conquered, one may ask whether
these songs, with their rare references to iron, are not the songs of a
conquered people, of whom a few went into exile. Obliged to live and
die, “very far from the homeland,” like the Greeks who fell before Troy,
having lost their cities like the Trojans, they saw their own image both
in the conquerors, who had been their fathers, and in the conquered,
whose misery was like their own. They could still see the Trojan war
over that brief span of years in its true light, unglossed by pride or
shame. They could look at it as conquered and as conquerors
simultaneously, and so perceive what neither conqueror nor conquered
ever saw, for both were blinded. Of course, this is mere fancy; one can
see such distant times only in fancy’s light.
In any case, this poem is a miracle. Its bitterness is the only
justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjections of the human
spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter. This
subjection is the common lot, although each spirit will bear it
differently, in proportion to its own virtue. No one in the Iliad is
spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by
virtue of this fact regarded with contempt. Whoever, within his own soul
and in human relations, escapes the dominion of force is loved but loved
sorrowfully because of the threat of destruction that constantly hangs
over him.
Such is the spirit of the only true epic the Occident possesses. The
Odyssey seems merely a good imitation, now of the Iliad, now of Oriental
poems; the Aeneid is an imitation which, however brilliant, is
disfigured by frigidity, bombast, and bad taste. The chansons de geste,
lacking the sense of equity, could not attain greatness: in the Chanson
de Roland, the death of an enemy does not come home to either author or
reader in the same way as does the death of Roland.
Attic tragedy, or at any rate the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is
the true continuation of the epic. The conception of justice enlightens
it, without ever directly intervening in it ; here force appears in its
coldness and hardness, always attended by effects from whose fatality
neither those who use it nor those who suffer it can escape; here the
shame of the coerced spirit is neither disguised, nor enveloped in
facile pity, nor held up to scorn; here more than one spirit bruised and
degraded by misfortune is offered for our admiration. The Gospels are
the last marvelous expression of the Greek genius, as the Iliad is the
first : here the Greek spirit reveals itself not only in the injunction
given mankind to seek above all other goods, “the kingdom and justice of
our Heavenly Father,” but also in the fact that human suffering is laid
bare, and we see it in a being who is at once divine and human. The
accounts of the Passion show that a divine spirit, incarnate, is changed
by misfortune, trembles before suffering and death, feels itself, in the
depths of its agony, to be cut off from man and God.
The sense of human misery gives the Gospels that accent of simplicity
that is the mark of the Greek genius, and that endows Greek tragedy and
the Iliad with all their value. Certain phrases have a ring strangely
reminiscent of the epic, and it is the Trojan lad dispatched to Hades,
though he does not wish to go, who comes to mind when Christ says to
Peter: “Another shall gird thee and carry thee whither thou wouldst
not.” This accent cannot be separated from the idea that inspired the
Gospels, for the sense of human misery is a pre-condition of justice and
love. He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and
necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as
fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance
separated from him by an abyss.
The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion
of several distinct species that cannot communicate.
Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to
respect it, is capable of love and justice.
The relations between destiny and the human soul, the extent to which
each soul creates its own destiny, the question of what elements in the
soul are transformed by merciless necessity as it tailors the soul to
fit the requirements of shifting fate, and of what elements can on the
other hand be preserved, through the exercise of virtue and through
grace — this whole question is fraught with temptations to falsehood,
temptations that are positively enhanced by pride, by shame, by hatred,
contempt, indifference, by the will to oblivion or to ignorance.
Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the
tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe
were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the
soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked
by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune’s image. The
Greeks, generally speaking, were endowed with spiritual force that
allowed them to avoid self-deception. The rewards of this were great;
they discovered how to achieve in all their acts the greatest lucidity,
purity, and simplicity. But the spirit that was transmitted from the
Iliad to the Gospels by way of the tragic poets never jumped the borders
of Greek civilization; once Greece was destroyed, nothing remained of
this spirit but pale reflections.
Both the Romans and the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt from
the misery that is the common human lot.
The Romans saw their country as the nation chosen by destiny to be
mistress of the world; with the Hebrews, it was their God who exalted
them and they retained their superior position just as long as they
obeyed Him. Strangers, enemies, conquered peoples, subjects, slaves,
were objects of contempt to the Romans; and the Romans had no epics, no
tragedies.
In Rome gladiatorial fights took the place of tragedy. With the Hebrews,
misfortune was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of
contempt; to them a vanquished enemy was abhorrent to God himself and
condemned to expiate all sorts of crimes — this is a view that makes
cruelty permissible and indeed indispensable. And no text of the Old
Testament strikes a note comparable to the note heard in the Greek epic,
unless it be certain parts of the book of Job.
Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews
have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their
masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody
had a crime he wanted to justify.
Furthermore, the spirit of the Gospels was not handed down in a pure
state from one Christian generation to the next. To undergo suffering
and death joyfully was from the very beginning considered a sign of
grace in the Christian martyrs — as though grace could do more for a
human being than it could for Christ. Those who believe that God
himself, once he became man, could not face the harshness of destiny
without a long tremor of anguish, should have understood that the only
people who can give the impression of having risen to a higher plane,
who seem superior to ordinary human misery, are the people who resort to
the aids of illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to conceal the harshness
of destiny from their own eyes. The man who does not wear the armor of
the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very
soul.
Grace can prevent this touch from corrupting him, but it cannot spare
him the wound. Having forgotten it too well, Christian tradition can
only rarely recover that simplicity that renders so poignant every
sentence in the story of the Passion.
On the other hand, the practice of forcible proselytization threw a veil
over the effects of force on the souls of those who used it.
In spite of the brief intoxication induced at the time of the
Renaissance by the discovery of Greek literature, there has been, during
the course of twenty centuries, no revival of the Greek genius.
Something of it was seen in Villon, in Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere,
and — just once — in Racine. The bones of human suffering are exposed in
L’Ecole des Femmes and in Phedre, love being the context — a strange
century indeed, which took the opposite view from that of the epic
period, and would only acknowledge human suffering in the context of
love, while it insisted on swathing with glory the effects of force in
war and in politics. To the list of writers given above, a few other
names might be added. But nothing the peoples of Europe have produced is
worth the first known poem that appeared among them. Perhaps they will
yet rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge
from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to
scorn the unfortunate. How soon this will happen is another question.