I'm John Batsworth Professor Emily Wilson whose new work is the Iliad by Homer.

It's an audible book as well by Andrew McDonald's and I recommend the book to read

along with Audrey McDonald's reading because the actress and singer this opera singer, Audrey McConnell, 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 Aphrodite?

She's just one of those women is bad, 50 miles of 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, Aphrodite 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 Aries,

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 basic human instincts. They either lust in the case of

Aphrodite, she represents sexual desire and overwhelming

last or Aries 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 Aries 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. are 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.

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