The Iliad or the Poem of Force

Weil's work was first published in 1940 under the title L'Iliade ou le poème de la force in Les Cahiers du Sud.

Yet in the last few pages of her essay Weil states that the influence of love is always at work in the epic, in the ever present bitter tone that "proceeds from tenderness": "Justice and love, which have hardly any place in this study of extremes and of unjust acts of violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent."

At the end of her essay Weil discusses the sense of equity in which the suffering of combatants from both sides, Trojan and Greek, of whatever rank or degree of heroism, are treated in the same bitter and unscornful way.

But since the Gospels Weil finds that very few authors have begun to approach this sense of universal compassion, though she picks out Shakespeare, Villon, Molière, Cervantes and Racine as coming nearer than most in some of their work.

[2] The Atlantic Monthly has written that, along with Rachel Bespaloff's On the Iliad, Weil's essay "remains the twentieth century's most beloved, tortured, and profound responses to the world's greatest and most disturbing poem.

Whereas previously the Iliad had often been regarded as a stirring tale of heroic deeds, after the essay it could be seen as an accurate and compassionate depiction of how both victors and victims are harmed by the use of force.