Homer is original this morning and nothing is as old as today's newspaper

'Homer is original this morning, and nothing is perhaps so old as today's newspaper.' (Charles Péguy)

Nothing is so old as the merciless massacre of thousands of men, women and children currently taking place in Gaza. The British newspapers spare us this by ignoring the Arab deaths and instead tell us about the survivors of the Hamas attack in Israel. The Romanian press is better.

Nothing is more Homeric than the behaviour of Hamas and the IDF. In Book 4 of the Iliad Agamemnon says of the Trojans, 

“They’ve ground the truce under their heels . . . they’ll pay for their misdeed in lives, in wives and children! For this I know well in my heart and soul: the day must come when holy Ilion [Troy] is given to fire and word, and Priam perishes, good lance though he was, with all his people.”

This is how wars were in Homer, in the Old Testament and in medieval Europe. The Thirty Years' War was like this. The 'civilised' wars between standing armies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were replaced in 1939-45 by a reversion by Germany and other countries to the way wars had formerly been conducted. 

Terrorism and state terrorism are part of the human condition.