L'iliade
The Iliad opens with a single command to the goddess: sing of the rage of Achilles. That rage, sparked when Agamemnon steals the warrior's war prize Briseis, becomes the engine of catastrophe. Achilles withdraws from battle, and the Trojans surge forward under Hector's leadership. The Greeks bleed. Their ships burn. Only when his beloved Patroclus falls to Hector does Achilles return, and his vengeance is absolute. He kills Hector, drags his body behind a chariot, and only the intervention of the gods allows Priam to ransom his son's broken form. This is not a poem about glory. It is about what war costs: the bodies piled on the plain, the women who become prizes, the fathers who bury sons. Homer does not flinch. The gods watch and scheme and intervene, but they cannot spare mortals from their choices or their deaths. The Iliad endures because it understands that heroism and horror are inseparable, that honor can destroy as surely as cowardice, and that grief is the only inheritance left for those who survive.
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“…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible”
— Homer
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.””
— Homer
“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.””
— Homer
“Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.””
— Homer
“Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.””
— Homer
“We men are wretched things.””
— Homer
“Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.””
— Homer
“Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall””
— Homer
“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.””
— Homer
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Homer. L'iliade. Lex, lex-books.com/book/l-iliade-c43bfead-b82f-4ac9-92fa-01eb6714eea1.Homer (n.d.). L'iliade. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/l-iliade-c43bfead-b82f-4ac9-92fa-01eb6714eea1Homer. L'iliade. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/l-iliade-c43bfead-b82f-4ac9-92fa-01eb6714eea1.
