Word: iliad
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...ILIAD...
...poem of force," French Philosopher Simone Weil once called the Iliad in what must be regarded as howling Gallic understatement. On Homer's blood-drenched plains of Troy, spears cleave through a man's tongue and shatter his teeth or pierce an eye socket. Swords sever heads. Armies mow down opposing ranks like "a line of reapers formed, who cut a swath/ in barley or wheat." Death spreads across the pages like a pool of ink-"numbing darkness," "unending night." Awesome griefs are recorded. Hair gets torn, ashes smeared. But when a mourning fast is proposed, the answer...
...there ever a poem more dedicated to machismo? By the time of Aristotle, about 900 years later, the Greek definition of virtue had evolved into the good and the beautiful. In the Iliad, virtue meant pride in battle, warrior's honor, heroics in the primitive sense. For all their groans, the Greeks relished war. Helen's face was hardly required to launch a thousand ships. To both sides, for nine years "warfare seemed/ lovelier than return, lovelier than sailing/ in the decked ships to their own native land...
OTHER NOTEWORTHY articles include a two-part series in the New Yorker (Dec. 2 and Dec. 9) on Multinational Corporations by Richard Barnet and Ronald Miller; an excellent review of Robert Fitzgerald's new translation of the Iliad by D.S. Carne-Ross in the New York Review of Books (Dec. 12); and a fascinating article by Roger Morris in the Columbia Journalism Review (November/December) on the unfair coverage of Allende's Chile in the mass media...
Legends surrounded his beginnings. His mother breast-fed him until he was past two. His father taught him to read before he was three, with the help of Pope's translation of the Iliad. It was as if DeVoto were his own tall tale, a product-in-exaggeration of the American frontier that he loved above all to write about until his death...