This is John Bachelor. Also for my conversation with Professor Wilson, her new translation of the Iliad,

returned to the lamentations of the women of Troy and the professor underlines that in this poem as it comes to a conclusion

we're reminded that the women will lose everything they lose their husbands

their brothers their sons they lose sons, they lose their children, they lose their freedom, all of it.

And that the end of the story is the beginning of slavery for the women who are lamenting their losses. The Iliad is about loss, it's

about death, and as the professor teaches, coming to terms with death. This much later in the day.

Professor Emily Wilson, the Iliad.

I mean I think it's both modern and very very ancient. I mean the tradition of women singing lament goes back way before this poem was composed.

It's a very very ancient poetic genre and the Iliad interweaves the type of poetry that's about

celebrating mythical warriors achievements with this different kind of poetry of

women lamenting the dead.

I mean, I said before that one of the big things women do is weave clothes for men,

but the other big thing that women do in Homer is weave for the dead.

The ones who are left at the end of a war after the men have killed

each other are these women.

As you say, most of them will be enslaved, and those who won't, like Helen, have this

ambiguous future ahead of them. The poem ends not with a ceasefire but with

a humanitarian pause where Achilles has granted 12 days for the Trojans to hold the funeral for Hector, Tamara Forces.

And in the context of those, of that funeral, is the second big funeral in those last two

books.

We have the funeral for Petroctors, book ended with the funeral for Hector, which ends, of course,

Petrolclus doesn't have women to lament for him apart from Bresseus, but Hector has all the women of Troy grieving for him and grieving also for their own future where they won't have either their children, their husbands, their homes or their freedom anymore.

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