The Iliad

Watch how often Homer turns away from the killing. A spear goes through a man's throat and the poem pauses to remember the poplar he once felled by a riverbank, the field his father worked, the young wife who will keep his house for nothing now. Those similes are the secret engine of the West's first war poem: every death on the plain of Troy is set against the ordinary life it cancels. The first word the poem sings is rage, the wrath of Achilles, who quits the fight when his commander humiliates him and lets his own side bleed to make the point. What drags him back is not honour or Greece but grief, the loss of the one man he loved. And Homer keeps his greatest scene for last, when old King Priam crosses the enemy camp in the dark to kneel before the man who killed his son and kiss the hands that did it. They weep together over different dead men, and the rage that began the poem finally goes still.