Simone weil essay on iliad

Biography[ edit ] Weil with her father Weil at age Her mother was Saolomea Weil and her father Bernard was a medical doctor. Weil was a healthy baby for her first six months, until she had a severe attack of appendicitis —thereafter she struggled with poor health throughout her life.

If you take a pretty girl who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo as war booty and refuse to have her ransomed, Apollo will rain plague on your troops.

If an arrow or a spear were thrown at you in battle, more often than not, it would land on your nipple or thereabout. Or alternatively, it would pierce your helmet and splatter your brain. Real men eat red meat, specifically: The most valuable booty are in no particular order: Lesbians are particularly prized.

There is nothing more glorious for a warrior than to sack enemy cities, plunder their wealth, kill all their men, bed their pretty women and enslave their children.

The only men who matter are warriors, but if you are a woman, the range of roles that you could play is rather more diverse. All the major conflicts in the story are triggered by women, or specifically by their sexuality: Zeus is not above being manipulated by Hera, and Ares the God of War actually got whacked on the head by Athena.

What I find most surprising about the Iliad is the amount of graphic, X-rated violence that it contains. The violence is not the biblical slaying and smiting, but something much more voyeuristically gory: But the big spear's point still stuck in the eye socket The Iliad is assumed to be the written version of a much older oral poem, and such characters might represent collective memories of real Bronze Age warriors, but by Zeus, hundreds of pages of them being hacked, cleaved and skewered to death almost did me in.

Iliad - Wikipedia

Now, what is the purpose of such meticulously catalogued carnage? Was Homer trying to present War with all its attendant horrors to shock his audience into pacifism? Or was the old guy just trying to write an 8th century BCE equivalent of a blockbuster action-adventure movie with enough gore to satisfy his young male demographic?

The Iliad both celebrates and laments the warrior spirit: The Greek gods are blissfully free of any human notion of morality which makes the problem of theodicy much more simpler to solve than in the Judeo-Christian model. The Olympian gods do not move in mysterious ways: Well, it happened that just before the battle was about to begin, Hera seduced him and subsequently put him to sleep with the help of Hypnos, whom she bribed with one of the Graces.

A perfectly logical and very human explanation.

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The story gets much more interesting in the last five books. This was a time when war was as elemental as they come:Simone Weil, a brilliant young teacher, philosopher, and social activist, wrote the essay, The ‘Iliad’ or the Poem of Force at France at the beginning of World War II.

Her profound meditation on the nature of violence provides a remarkably vivid and accessible testament of the Greek epic’s continuing relevance to our lausannecongress2018.coms: 1. Download-Theses Mercredi 10 juin It is a Sunday like any other and to paraphrase John Cage quoted in Molly Nesbit’s essay ‘The Tempest’ on Grabriel Orozco, from her recent book Midnight: The Tempest Essays (p.

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Sunday is a day, as much for art as it is for life, for people to keep on washing dishes, to keep on brushing their teeth, to keep on getting sleepy. 2 Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” in Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (New York: New York Review Books, ), For Weil, the.

Seventy-five years ago, as the Nazis were methodically implementing their conquest of Europe, the French philosopher/mystic Simone Weil published a long essay titled “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” In her perceptive take on Homer’s poem, she describes force as “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad.,” and defines it as “that x .

«The ‘Iliad’ is arguably the most influential work in the whole of Western literature. No discussion of it is more precious than the passionate, profound, and penetrating essay of Simone Weil, who uses the Greek epic to illuminate the human condition and the tragic theme of destruction and war.