I'm John Batchel with Professor Emily Wilson. Her new work is a translation into English

hyamic pantameter of the Iliad by Homer, and we're now looking at inside the story. We've been

outside in the historical Troy. We've talked about the translations.

Inside are characters that are vivid once you understand their relationships. I said this is like

a novel. And Professor, because I think like a novelist sometimes, I've paired these characters

for us to go through the dramatist persona.

And most important that everybody hears about is Helen.

Helen and Paris Alexander, the abduction of Paris.

But Helen was also related to Menelaus.

That was her husband back in Kean.

So the relationship of Paris and Helen, you obliged

me in your note-taking to pay great attention to it. And it is a rough relationship. Helen is an

ironic thinker when she's apart from Paris. What do we need to know about Paris? That fascinated me

that Helen understood him as her fate right now, but not forever. Absolutely, yes. I mean,

according to the legends, of course, Paris is not going to survive the Trojan War and Helen's going to be married after

someone else before eventually rejoining her ex-husband Manilaus back in Sparta, which is where

we find her in the Odyssey. Helen is an extraordinary character in the Iliad because she has this

perspective on the whole sequence of events of which she's apart. We see her weaving, which is the common

activity for elite women in the Homeric poems is they're always weaving. But Helen's weaving

is different because she's doing representational weaving of the sufferings of the Greeks and

Trojans suffered for her and for her. And so she has this awareness that she's like a poet. She's weaving something which is like the Iliad itself. She also points out to Pryam, her current father-in-law, who all the Greeks are. Priam seems to have not thought to find out who the enemy is for the last nine years that they've been beseeching the city. So all of a sudden, in book three of the Iliad,

he asked, Helen, who are these guys? You must know them because, in fact,

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