I'm John Batchew with Professor Emily Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania. Her new work is the Iliad by Homer nearly 2,800, 2,700 years ago.

However, imagine this book being read by 2,700 years of scholars and students and how each century comes to it

with its own assumptions, modernity, each time.

And we now come to the battle scenes, which the professor has rendered into English with

great vividness.

At the same time, it's gory.

It's extremely gory.

Homer wanted you to know how each of these men died and why.

Professor, in translating the gore, I mentioned earlier from your notes.

You talked about the word spear.

The sounds of the battle, you also consulted men and women who have been in combat.

What did you learn from them about how to render the Greek into English?

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 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 stabbing the liver and then here we're back to the spear is going to go right through

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