The Iliad 1989 (plaster) 2016 (bronze)

Quotes to accompany the sculptures from The Iliad or The poem of force
by Simone Weil, 1940, Cahiers du Sud (Translation: Mary McCarthy)

#1 The centaur
"The true hero, the true subject of the Iliad is force... 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 imagines it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to... To define force - it is that x that turns anybody who is subject to it into a thing... Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us..."

#2 Hector
"The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:

All around his black hair
Was spread, in the dust his whole head lay...

No comforting fiction intervenes, no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero's head no washed-out halo of patriotism descends."

#3 Andromache
"... still more poignant - so painful is the contrast - is the sudden evocation... of another world: the far-away, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family...

She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace
To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing
A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.
Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths...

... Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths."

#4 Niobe
" ... 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:

But the thought of eating came to her, when she was tired of tears.

Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does; for it possesses... the power of life and death."

#5 Thersites
"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to the 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... Thersites pays dear for the perfectly reasonable comments he makes...

He hit him with his sceptre on back and shoulders,
So that he doubled over, and a great tear welled up,
And a bloody welt appeared on his back...

#6 Achilles
"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 man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element... 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."

#7 and #8 Patroclus
"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... To respect life in somebody else when you have had to castrate yourself of all yearning for it demands a truly heart-breaking exertion of the powers of generosity. It is impossible to imagine any of Homer's warriors being capable of such exertion, unless it is that warrior who dwells in everybody and who throughout the Iliad commits no cruel or brutal act."

#9 Human love
"The wantonness of the conqueror... the despair of the soldier... 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... Sometimes it is in the course of inner deliberations... At other times, it is in a moment of love - and there is hardly any form of pure love known to humanity of which the Iliad does not treat... The love of the son for the parents, of father for son, of mother for son:

Thetis answered, shedding tears,
'You were born to me for a short life, my child, as you say...'

... brotherly love:

My three brothers whom the same mother bore for me,              
So dear...

Conjugal love, condemned to sorrow, is of an astonishing purity:

Better for me
Losing you, to go under the earth. No other comfort
Will remain...
Only grief, only sorrow...

The most beautiful friendship of all, the friendship between comrades at arms:

But Achilles
Wept, dreaming of the beloved comrade...

But the purest triumph of love... is the friendship that floods the hearts of mortal enemies:

...Then Dardanian Priam fell to admiring Achilles
And in his turn Dardanian Priam was admired by Achilles."

#10 The city
"The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience - the destruction of a city... 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... Such is the spirit of the only true epic the Occident possesses... nothing the peoples of Europe have produced is worth the first known poem that appeared among them. Perhaps they will rediscover the epic genius when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, not to scorn the unfortunate. How soon this will happen is another question."