I'm John Batsworth 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 insist upon a funeral pyre.

And there's violence in the funeral pyre.

The 12 young men, boys, that Kekhellis has taken captive.

He destroys on the funeral pyre,

along with dogs, everything. He throws in. is Achilles is accepting death on its own.

I can't tell, Professor, 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 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'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 or a kind of solution to can you must you grieve forever.

You can if you can grieve together maybe it doesn't have to last forever and then

also the sports which throughout the early had we've seen how the competitiveness of men who all

want to be the best and what happens if one one man wins and one man loses earlier in the

poem that's always been the answer to that is death.

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