“Hi James,

“I thought you might enjoy this.

“I like the chain of Power-Hubris-Nemesis in this review.”

-Sam

Ares is War, or more accurately the “force” that embodies lethal action in war.

The review of this essay by Simone Weil brings to mind the excellent book The War That Killed Achilles, Sorrow-of-the-People which was also written by a very insightful woman, in which she casts Achilles as a war protestor—and makes her case stick, just as Achilles did. In modern film, to see a character such as Achilles I would go to A Cross of Iron, in which James Coburn plays a tough Kraut sergeant on the Russian Front. Real war stories set aside the bullshit, which is to say the nationalism and cheerleading, and get down to what it is to be a man in combat, in the grip of war. The Thin Red Line, as more recent movies go, was good on this account as well, particularly the way the action follows the best soldier to his ultimate demise. The lesson that I think is stored within the Iliad, is that our slave-masters—Agamemnon, and every national war leader since—are where the evil lies, not in masculine War but in the feminine State, not with Ares, but with Athena, and that, toward this end those warriors who most closely personify Ares, must be emasculated by the mothering aspect of society.

It is no accident that the best female scholars see this more clearly than male scholars, who tend to get hung up on the artifice.