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ILION AN EPIC IN QUANTITATIVE HEXAMETERS
ILION
AN EPIC IN QUANTITATIVE HEXAMETERS
SRI AUROBINDO
SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY 1957
Publishers : Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry
All Rights Reserved
First Edition — November, 1957
printed at: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press P Pondicherry INDIA
1043/56/1000
NOTE
The first glimpse of Ilion was given to the readers of Sri Aurobindo when a few opening passages of Book I, running to 381 lines, were published at the end of Collected Poems and Plays (1942). Together with some short poems they were meant to illustrate what Sri Aurobindo in his essay On Quantitative Metre, included in the same volume and appended in the present with an additional letter answering a criticism, had considered the true principles of Quantity in English. These passages may be said to have received final revision at Sri Aurobindo’s hands. The rest of Ilion—eight complete Books and fragments of a ninth—were found among his papers at various stages of revision.
The poem develops, in a new way, part of the story of Troy as continued by ancient poets from the point where Homer ends. Some authorities claim that the continuation is directly warranted by Homer himself: they take the last line of the Iliad to read, "Such were the funeral rites of Hector. And now there came an Amazon…" Ilion presupposes the arrival of the Amazon queen Penthesilea to Priam’s help after the slaying of Hector by Achilles and it deals with events on the last day of the siege of Troy.
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