"The Unbearable Truth of War"

This review (of the one-man show An Iliad) won me over immediately by its references to Simone Weil:

While translations abound, dramatizations of the Iliad are fairly uncommon. Of course the poem has inspired countless plays—Aeschylus, for instance, called his tragedies “scraps from Homer’s banquet.” But these typically focus on a single episode, like the Greeks’ efforts to persuade Achilles to return to battle in Book 9. The entirety of Homer’s text runs to over 15,600 lines and would take about 24 hours to recite from beginning to end; it also has hundreds of characters—men, women, gods, demigods, a crying baby, and two immortal, talking horses, among others.

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