This is John Batcher, conversation with Emily Wilson, the classicist in her new translation of the

Iliad. We come to the metaphors that come easily to the poet Homer about everything especially the gore of battle.

Emily here comments on how the frame for the battle is allegorical and metaphorical and filled with satisfying images

except when you get to it they're stabbing each other in the eyeball it's

glory and yet here's Emily Wilson to explain this tension in

the Iliad between combat and Emily talked to combat veterans who understand and corpses and mangled human beings.

More of this later.

I found it fascinating to hear from veterans partly because they had so much of a more

visceral I think understanding than many people of how important it is to sort of wrestle with

this question of what to do about the dead.

I mean, most of us don't encounter dead bodies in our daily lives, but people who've been in combat

may well have had this very shocking experience of his either an enemy corpse or a corpse of a comrade and we have

to decide in the midst of combat what to do about that.

I mean I also just wrestled in general about the ways that the Iliad represents all this violence so clearly and often so beautifully and it's exciting and thrilling and very often that there's this interplay of here's a beautiful simile which takes you to the natural

world or takes you to here's a lion, here's an animal, here's something happening in normal life and then here

we're back to the spear is going to go right

through the eyeball and then stab in the liver and then stab in the buttocks and it's all

extremely fast and extremely exciting and then often very beautiful and yet there's

so much pain.