menoitides reblogged
“[The Iliad] is remarkable for the way that its preoccupation with mortality and the human conditions extends even to the enemy. The killing of Hektor by the central figure of the Iliad, Achilles, is a great victory for the Greeks, and yet the camera immediately shifts, as we witness the gut-wrenching reactions of Hektor’s mother, father, and wife to his death. Similarly, the Iliad ends not with the funeral of Achilles, who is doomed to die very soon, but instead with the funeral of Hektor. Achilles’ own short life and imminent death resonate throughout the laments that are sung for his deadliest enemy. In the words of Simone Weil, who was struck by the equity of compassion with which the suffering of the Greeks and Trojans is narrated: “The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience - the destruction of the 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.””
— from The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy, by Casey Dué
