SRI AUROBINDO

ILION

An Epic In Quantitative Hexameters

CONTENTS

Pre-Content

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.