To the Romantics, for instance, both the Iliad and the Odyssey were the work of a single great poet. The genesis of the Iliad remains a mystery and, for nearly two thousand years (most scholarship is happy to date the work at around 800BCE) the debates have continued, broadly mirroring the academic currents of the time. For Weil, waiting for an exit visa with a battered copy of the Iliad in her rucksack in case she was arrested, Homer’s great epic – now available in a gripping and muscular new translation by Peter Green – seemed to be completely of the moment. That Troy was destined to be sacked seemed inevitable, and that the Gods were dispensing justice that was fickle at best and arbitrary at worst, equally so. There were broken truces, a city under siege, and failed attempts to appease one man’s wrath.

Published in the winter of 1940, during the first months of the Nazi occupation of France, and available in English since 1945 as translated by Mary McCarthy, the analogies between the Iliad and the situation in Europe were, for Weil, striking and chilling. Weil’s essay ‘ L’Iliade, ou le poème de la force’ – ‘The Iliad, or the poem of force’ – is as urgent as it is partial. For others, who perceived that force lies at the centre of human history, it remains ‘the purest and loveliest of mirrors’. The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is force … at all times the human sprit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle …įor those who thought that human progress could eliminate force, she wrote, the Iliad was an historical document. In 1939, the French writer, philosopher and political activist Simone Weil, wrote the following:

The iliad translation