This is John Bachelor, a conversation at great length with Professor Emily Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania,

a classicist whose new translation of the Iliad makes it all very available. It's in iambic pentameter in English so easy to read if you're accustomed to the Shakespeare's

rhythms. At the same time the Iliad is a surprise, always, reminded pieces of it

that through decades you forget and then you come back to them.

In this particular instance, the professor discusses Paris, whom I find difficult to like,

and Helen, who defies Paris but cannot defy the gods, Aphrodite, elbows are way in, makes demands, you cannot turn

aside the gods.

Mrs Helen's frustration, Helen's Frustration,

Pheins, Paris's weakness,

it appears to me,

and Aphrodite's bullheadedness.

Here's Professor Wilson.

Absolutely yes I mean according to the legends of course Paris is going to

Paris is not going to survive the Trojan War and Helen's going to be married after someone else before eventually re-joining her ex-husband Menelaeus back in Sparta, which is where we find her in the Odyssey.

Helen is an extraordinary character in the Iliad because she has this perspective on the whole sequence of events of which she's apart.

We see her weaving, which is the common activity for elite women in the

her numeric poems is they're always weaving but Helen's weaving is different

because she's doing representational weaving of the the sufferings of the Greeks and Trojans suffered for her and so she has this

awareness that she's like a poet she's weaving something which is like the Iliad

itself she also points out to Priam, her current father-in-law, who all the

Greeks are. Priam seems to have not thought to find out who the enemy is for the

last nine years that they've been besieging the city.

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