Simone Weil has written that “The true hero, the true subject, the center of The Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.” There’s no question that Homer displays an excessive use of force on nearly every page of his work, but the governing intuition of the Iliad isn’t about force; it’s about the emergence of a Logos in history everywhere curbing, giving a purpose and direction to, man’s use of force. At the beginning of the Iliad, what determines a man’s honor or sense of worth (kleos) is booty (armor, horses, money, beautiful women—exactly what determines a person’s worth in our world today). But if a man’s honor is determined by what’s conferred on him by others, it can be taken away. The cause of Achilleus’ break from Agamemnon and the war effort in the opening book is precisely this flawed sense of honor—two cultures given too much to externals or possessions can’t escape the war into which that flawed sense of honor draws them. In Book IX, when Agamemnon offers tons of prizes to bribe Achilleus back into battle (the Greeks are losing without him), Achilleus says, “… such honor is a thing I need not; I think I’m honored already in Zeus’ ordinance.” At that point, even if Achilleus doesn’t completely realize it, we do: man by nature possesses some inherent, transcendent dignity that can’t be fully reckoned in material or earthly terms. The real nature of this dignity to man won’t be fully reckoned until Achilleus admits his failings (the only man in the Iliad to do so: he says he let everyone down), accepts his death, and, receiving a completely new and original set of armor fashioned by the gods, re-enters the war. The Iliad is one of the great naturally inspired founding works of Western Civilization, taking its place with the two divinely inspired works of our world, Genesis and Exodus, by establishing that there is something in man that breathes above time. He is unique among creatures because he’s most fully at home between two realms, even if being situated there makes him liable to mistakes and leaves him humbled at times and wondering about the Underworld beneath him and a divine order above and higher than his own.