Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all the more tragic because there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. 'And here I sit in Troy,' says Achilles to Priam, 'afflicting you and your children.' Not 'protecting Greece', not even 'winning glory', not called by any vocation to afflict Priam, but just doing it because that is the way things come about. We are in a different world here from Virgil's . There the suffering has meaning, and is the price of a high resolve. Here there is just the suffering. Perhaps this was in Goethe's mind when he said, 'The lesson of the is that on this earth we must enact Hell.' Only the style--the unwearying, unmoved, angelic speech of Homer--makes it endurable. Without that the would be a poem beside which the grimmest modern realism is child's play.