During the German occupation of Paris in World War II, Simone Weil, a French philosopher, published a small book (really only a pamphlet) titled, The Iliad; or, the Poem of Force. She said that The Iliad was a poem without a hero; the dominant figure in the war was force itself, brutal force, the force of bronze cutting into flesh, the force of fate overtaking a human life, the hopelessness of all the characters, great and small, in the face of events they did not and could not comprehend. —Charles Van Doren, The Joy of Reading
