We discover that this greatest of all war epics is in fact an antiwar epic not through any systematic exposition or declaration, but through a striking accumulation of detail. First, there is the fact that the entire conflict is waged for the sake of a symbol, Helen, rather than any objective purpose or moral necessity. Capricious gods—acting through their ciphers, the ruling elites—stir the masses of ordinary people into a positive desire to kill and be killed. The gods must continually prime these men for battle through high-sounding rhetoric, through oracles and omens and promises of glory and success. Yet the impulse to wage war defies any logic or reason external to the war itself. When left to their own intuitions, the common soldiers declare that their only desire is to abandon the campaign and set sail for home. At the gates of Troy we thus find ourselves in an ethical void in which violence serves as its own justifier. “You must fight on,” the gods command, “for if you make peace you will offend the dead.” It is slaughter, in other words, that necessitates more slaughter. Against the desire of the gods to maximize destruction is the suffering of the innocent, as when the aging King Priam gives the following grim account of what war can only mean for the vast majority of human beings:
Pity me too!—
still in my senses, true, but a harrowed, broken man
marked out by doom—past the threshold of age . . .
and Father Zeus will waste me with a hideous fate,
and after I’ve lived to look on so much horror!
my sons laid low, my daughters dragged away
and the treasure-chambers looted, helpless babies
hurled to the earth in the red barbarity of war . . .
my sons’ wives hauled off by the Argives’ bloody hands!
And I, I last of all—the dogs before my doors
Will eat me raw . . . (22.68–78).1
The victims of war, Priam bears witness, are not the soldiers, whose deaths will be celebrated with songs and wreaths, but women, children, and the elderly. This, of course, comes as no new fact to anyone. But Priam’s words are particularly penetrating and revelatory, for Priam is a Trojan, a foe of Homer’s people. The foundational text in the Greek self-understanding subversively invites us to contemplate how violence bears on the weakest members of society and even on the enemy. It is as though the Hebrew Bible included descriptions of how YHWH’s holy wars might have felt for a Philistine child.
Most subversive of all, however, is the way in which the Iliad plays havoc with the underlying assumption of what would later be known as the “just war” tradition, namely, the assumption of reason. All just war theories rest upon the idea that violence can somehow be contained within established rules of prudence and proportionality. But if violence serves as its own justifier, and if the suffering of the innocent is not enough to deter an initial act of aggression, there is no possible limit that can be placed on any war waged for “a just cause.”
In Homer, this truth emerges through the unraveling of a treaty offering a modicum of ethical constraint within the conflict. Early in the poem the Greeks and Trojans make a pact allowing both sides to collect and burn their dead without hindrance or threat of attack. The agreement, while not affecting the actual prosecution of the war, seeks to place the struggle within the framework of social and religious convention. It aims to humanize and dignify the bloodshed through shared values of reason and restraint. Unfortunately, maintaining one’s reason while drenched in human blood is a tenuous affair. As the war intensifies, the combatants kill with increasing savagery until at last they are seen gleefully mutilating dead corpses. “Go tell them from me,/ you Trojans, tell the loving father and mother/ of lofty Ilioneus to start the dirges in the halls!” cries Peneleos to the Trojans while holding up the fallen soldier’s eyeball on the point of his spear (14.86–88).
When the Greek hero Patroclus is slain at the end of Book Sixteen the unstoppable drift toward total war, in which no rules or conventions apply, is finally realized. The two sides engage in a battle of unprecedented fury and destruction for the entirely irrational purpose of seizing Patroclus’s dead body—the Trojans to further mutilate it and then feed it to wild dogs, the Greeks to prevent this humiliation at whatever cost. The idea that war might somehow be mediated by reasonable agreements and religious scruples, such as those governing the burial of the dead, has been reduced to a shambles by the internal dynamics of war and the logic of violence itself.
Once this fact of war is understood, all of our long-cherished rationalizations for violence are quickly exposed as mere enervating chimeras. As goes the venerable Patroclus, so goes the tradition of just warfare. The failure of the tradition is not that it is abstractly or theoretically false, but that it ignores what actually happens when humans engage in violence. Philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil had a clearer view of the human animal. In “The Iliad, Poem of Might,” her celebrated essay written at the onset of World War II, she saw that an excessive use of violence is almost never a political ideal, yet its temptation almost always proves irresistible—against all reason or moral restraint. “A moderate use of might, by which man may escape being caught in the machinery of its vicious cycle, would demand a more than human virtue, one no less rare than a constant dignity in weakness,” she wrote. As a consequence, “war wipes out every conception of a goal, even all thoughts concerning the goals of war.”2 Such a moral and spiritual void will, of course, be filled by politicians, militarists, and theologians with symbols and myths, but Weil understood that there is ultimately only one impulse strong enough to sustain wars among nations: the insatiable demand for power at any cost.
II
These insights are, I realize, difficult to grasp within the present national echo chamber of war enthusiasm, but they can be tested against the weight of history. Let us consider how prophetic Weil’s thoughts about force proved in a war that most people agree was fought for a just cause if ever there was one.3
On September 11, 1944, Allied forces conducted a bombing raid on the city of Darmstadt, Germany. The incendiary bombs used in the attack came together in a conflagration so intense it created a firestorm nearly one mile high. At its center, the temperature was approximately 2000° F, and it sucked the oxygen out of the air with the force of a hurricane. People hiding in underground shelters died primarily from suffocation. People fleeing through the streets found that the surfaces of the roads had melted, creating a trap of molten asphalt that stuck to their feet and then hands as they tried to break free. They died screaming on their hands and knees, the fire turning them into so many human candles. Almost twelve thousand noncombatants were killed that night in Darmstadt alone. Yet Darmstadt was only one city among many in a relentless Allied campaign. Anne-Lies Schmidt described the aftermath of a similar attack on Hamburg, code named “Operation Gomorrah,” more than one year before:
Women and children were so charred as to be unrecognizable; those that had died through lack of oxygen were half charred and recognizable. Their brains tumbled from their burst temples and their insides from the soft parts under their ribs. How terribly must these people have died. The smallest children lay like fried eels on the pavement. Even in death they showed signs of how they must have suffered—their hands and arms stretched out as if to protect themselves from the pitiless heat.4
That single raid on Hamburg killed approximately forty thousand civilians, including both of Schmidt’s parents. In total, it is estimated that more than half a million German civilians were killed as a direct result of British and American bombing. What must be absolutely clear about these deaths is the well-documented but largely ignored fact that they were absolutely intentional. These were not unfortunate casualties in a campaign against German military targets: from as early as July, 1943, on, they were the targets. The saturation bombing of German cities did not include the burning of children as an unavoidable “double