I'm John Batchel with Professor Emily Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania. Her new work is the Iliad.

By Homer, 2,700 years ago, and today, rendered in dynamic pentameter English, it's a joy to speak of these matters, even though everybody knows the ending.

The ending has some surprises to me, because Achilles, having lost Patroclus, insists upon a funeral

pyre, and there's violence in the funeral pyre, the 12 young men, boys, that Achilles has taken captive.

He destroys on the funeral power, along with dogs, everything.

He throws in to the funeral power for Petrochalus.

But then it would appear that Achilles is accepting death on its own.

I can't tell. Professor, I, forgive me, I started

reading this psychologically, and I know I shouldn't do that, but it's too tempting. What is

Achilles coming to terms with when he goes from the funeral pyre to the funeral games?

I think he's coming to terms with the possibility that you can't be an ultimate winner.

I mean, there are always going to be winners and losers, and that in fact, in some way,

all mortals are losers.

Even somebody who's the son of a goddess, as he is himself, he's still lost terrible things.

He's lost both honor to Agamemnon, which I think by this point in the poem starts to seem relatively trivial,

but he's also lost the dearest person he ever had, the person who was his family, his dearest friend,

with whom he spent the last 10 years most of his life.

He's lost him, and yet he also then has to somehow go on.

And I think there's a sort of gradual process towards figuring out how can he go on after those

terrible losses. And one stage in that, as you say, is both the funeral, so rituals of shared

lamentation, shared expressions of grief, are a kind of

solution to can you, must you grieve forever? You can, if you can grieve together, maybe it doesn't

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