This is John Batchel, conversation with Professor Emily Wilson, her new translation,

The Iliad by Homer. The professor reflects on the backstory that exists for the Iliad,

the backstory in other poems, talking about Zeus and Zeus's temperament and creating Achilles and creating

Helen, wonderful speculation. The story itself we have then has been argued about for thousands of

years. Here's Emily Wilson talking about backstory, Iliad.

Much more of this coming up soon enough.

Yes, I mean, we know quite a lot from the ancient commentaries on Homer about other versions of stories that are hinted at in the Iliad,

and also about texts that exist only in either summaries

or a few fragmentary comments, such as the Cypria, a poem which apparently started with

the plan of Zeus to reduce the human population, where Zeus is mad that there are so many

human beings causing so much mischief on planet Earth.

And so he wants to kill off as many people as possible.

So he comes up with the scheme to do that, which means the birth of Helen and the birth of Achilles.

Once those characters exist, then the Trojan War will ensue and a huge number of people will get wiped out.

So the plan of Zeus that's alluded to at the start of the Iliad is perhaps that plan that we hear about more in the Cypriot of which we only have the beginning and some summary comments. I mean, there's also a lot of debate about to what extent did these poems exist at the same time as the Iliad

and the Odyssey were they composed later to what extent were there fixed versions of any of these