I'm John Batchewitts Professor Emily Wilson, whose new work is The Iliad by Homer.

It's an audible book as well by Audrey MacDonald, and I recommend the book to read along with Audrey McDonald's reading, because the actress and singer, this opera singer, Audrey

McDonnell, has a range of voices to give you to understand their depths of motive in these

characters as they come to their moments. And Aphrodite, every time she appeared, something bad was

going to happen. what are we understanding about

afrodite she's just she's just one of those women is bad 50 miles a bad road is that how to think

about her i mean all gods are bad if you're a human who gets in their way right i mean affidati is

very dangerous to helen but she's also helped Helen

and got her in a position of power. I mean, so in book five, we have two gods, very unusually,

gods are on the battlefield in book five, and those gods are Aphrodite and Ares, the gods who are

presented as the most borderline ridiculous among the gods themselves.

And I think that's partly because those gods are the closest to representing what has seen as baser human instincts.

They either lust in the case of Aphrodite, she represents sexual desire and overwhelming lust,

or Ares who represents the overwhelming aggression and desire to kill.

And in a way, both of them are presented as potentially ridiculous, because both of them get wounded and then go crying to their mom and dad back in Olympus in a way that seems, in a certain

sense, pathetic because mortal characters deal with

their wounds much more heroically than either Aphrodite or Ares do. And yet we also are shown

that these are deities who have their own spheres of influence and there's no way you should

disrespect Aphrodite. I mean, Hector and Paris have an argument in which Paris says, I think, in a quite reasonable way,

everyone's given different gifts by the gods.

If you're given gifts by the gods, he's being given sexiness by Aphrodite.

You don't get to throw that away.

...