Michael, the Greek line from Homer about Achilles’s desecration of Hector’s body and then your referring to the 1965 picture that appeared in the SF Chronicle as an allusion to that line resonated deeply in me. I saw that photo the morning it was published. At that moment I vowed I would never participate in the Vietnam War. I was studying to be a Catholic priest at the time (at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park), so the vow was no act of courage. It arose out of outrage that human life was being treated so callously. The outrage was made worse by the caption, which read: “The score goes up another notch.” War was a sport and humans were mere pawns in the power machinations of heads of state! That night a group of us seminarians went to Stanford to hear Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel speak. Our philosophy teacher had introduced us to his work and some of his writings, which I liked a lot. Heschel opened his talk by saying, “Look at this,” and he held up that front page photo. Needless to say, his commentary on it was probing and profound.
Thank you for making me aware of that allusion. I loved reading Homer in the seminary, and your commentary makes me want to return to the Iliad yet another time.