Achilles's Job is Beach (The Iliad, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Homer's Iliad, we welcome translator Emily Wilson to discuss Homer's life as an "author," the meaning of free will in the context of intervention from gods, and how the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus shapes the climax of the epic. 

Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern studies, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Iliad, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324102076. 

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

[Music]

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Homer's Iliad as we interview its translator, Emily Wilson. In Part One, we discuss what we know about Homer and what constituted authorship 3,000 years ago; we discuss the notion of Troy; the conflation of legend, myth, and history; we talk about Helen, Achilles, Hector, and the rest of the unforgettable characters we meet in the Iliad; and much more. Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to the Odyssey and the Iliad, she has published translations of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca. She has previously joined us on the Norton Library Podcast in two episodes devoted to her Norton Library Edition of Oedipus Tyrannus. It is so great to have her with us today. Emily Wilson, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Emily:] Thank you for having me.

[Mark:] I should say, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast. It's good to see you again.

[Emily:] Good to see you too, Mark.

[Mark:] And we are here today to talk about Homer's poem, The Iliad, which Emily has translated for the Norton Library. Emily, why don't we start by talking a little bit about Homer. What do we know, what don't we know, and what do we need to know about this author?

[Emily:] Well, I think one of the [Laughter] the first things to say is that this isn't really an author. When we say the – the word author implies somebody who, um, is making characters and stories up out of their own heads and then writing it down with a typewriter or a pen or a – or a – or a laptop if they're living as a modern 21st-century author. Homer was a poet, um, rather than an author, a maker. And in Antiquity, Homer was very often described as The Poet, because Homer was by far the most famous poet of all and influenced every other poet in the whole of the Greek and Roman tradition. Um, the Heroic poems were produced after several centuries in which the Greek-speaking world had had no reading and writing, it was completely illiterate culture. And during those centuries, traditional myths had developed about these – the heroes of old: the mythical Trojan War, characters like Achilles and, um, and Hector, and the various deities who were still worshiped in the, um, Greek-speaking world. So, and also during those centuries, a specific poetic form for telling those stories had developed, including formulaic, um, descriptions for each of the characters and the – the components of the world: like the well-balanced ships or the rosy fingered dawn. So, all of that was part of the heritage that the composer or composers of the Iliad and the Odyssey were drawing on. And then using the new in the 8th-century B.C.E. technology that suddenly hit the Greek-speaking world, which was writing, using that new technology, um, someone or someone's created these monumental written poems out of a long – much longer pre-existing oral tradition and created something that was much bigger than, much longer than could have been composed that could have – could have been performed on a single occasion. It's not, obviously the Iliad is too long for after dinner entertainment. [Laughter] It takes the audio book version of my Iliad translation, takes like 24 hours. So, it's – it's using this new tech to do something extraordinary with a pre-existing tradition.

[Mark:] So in terms of a single human being with biographical information, there's virtually nothing.

[Emily:] There's virtually nothing, there's a lot of legend. Um, so the later, um, Homeric Hymns, which were composed a little bit later than the Iliad and the Odyssey, they're called Homeric because they use the same language and were associated with Homer in Antiquity. They're definitely not from the exact same period, definitely not by the exact same person. The, um, the Hymn to Apollo includes, um, a line about: I am a blind singer, and I come from rocky Chios. And that was presumably put in there by, there was a guild that were of people associated with teaching the Homeric poems on the island of Chios, and they wanted to claim, “Homer belongs to us. Homer was – was our homeboy, and we – he came from Chios” And they could do – they could make – make that statement by putting that in that poem. Doesn't mean that there really was a blind individual from Chios. The blindness of Homer is a myth or, um, biographical legend that was consistently part of the stories about Homer in Antiquity. But I think part of what that blind, the idea of Homer as blind says, is there's an awareness of the Homeric poems as being based on oral poetics. And of course, an oral singer doesn't have to be able to see, whereas a write  – a poet who writes has to be able to see to do it. So, I think the blindness of Homer is primarily about just an – an acknowledgement of, “this is based on oral poetics, and it's primarily experienced as audio oral poetry,” even after there was reading and writing in Antiquity.

[Mark:] So if this is oral poetics, and as you mentioned the Iliad is too much of a whopper to perform all at once, can you give us a sense of what a performance would have been like?

[Emily:] Once these poems existed, they were – they were performed in all kinds of different contexts in the Greek-speaking world. So, it's not, there was one singular performance context, there were many performance contexts. We know that the tyrant Pisistratus, um, supposedly legislated to say the Homeric poems were the ones that were going to be, um, performed at the Panathenaea festival. So that, so these poems, at least sections of them, were part of ritual and festival performance contexts. They were part of competitive poetry slam performance contexts, where people called rhapsodes, meaning poetry performers, who would learn by heart existing, um, po – poems and then perform them you know with – with tons of gestures and dramatic emphasis, presumably because we know that people could get famous and get rich by doing this and getting good at doing it. So, they were performed both in very public kinds of contexts like at a festival, but then also in symposia, which is male elite drinking parties in Athens, people would have poetry performances as well as, um, women playing the flute and all of that as part of the – the entertainment. If you're going – going to have some glasses of wine with your f – or some cups of wine with your friends after dinner, you want some poetry, some songs, some music, some flute girls.

[Mark:] With your knowledge of the original text, can you identify how it was written with the oral tradition in mind? Is it written meant to be heard out loud?

[Emily:] It's certainly written to be heard out loud, and it's al – also, as I was trying to say about the oral – about the oral heritage that's behind these poems, it's these poems, both the Iliad and the Odyssey, are drawing on this pre-existing oral tradition. Which is part of why I say Homer isn't really an author, because so many of the phrases are clearly traditional phrases. And they're – they're phrases that are sort of patched in, um, such that Achilles is usually going to be “son of Peleus” or "swift-footed”. And he's going to be one or the other depending on the position of the name in the line, so it's going to make it scan. So, you – so part of what's difficult about oral poetry is composing a poem out loud; you have to be always thinking about the next word. It saves you some mental energy if you have several syllables that go along with each noun that you can then plug and play and be thinking about what are you going to say in the next line because you don't have to think about a new adjective for every noun. So, those kinds of things, both in terms of the formulaic things like, um, "swift-footed Achilles” or “the wine-dark sea”, but also in terms of, in slightly more macroscopic, um, terms there are particular components that go into a – an arming se – sequence or a banqueting sequence, where there are going to be particular things that happen in every arming sequence or in every, um, “guy is going to go out on the battlefield and slaughter a lot of people”—which is called an aristeia scene. It’s going to have particular components to it and there are there are going to be, um, sort of virtuosic displays of difference within similarity, which happens all the time in the Homeric poems, where we both know what what's going to happen and yet every – every guy who puts on armor puts on a slightly different set of armor. And then playing around with the traditional tropes which the – which, um, the Homeric poems do all the time. Maybe the most, um, maybe the funniest example of that in the Iliad is when the traditional trope of “person puts on armor to prepare for battle” is used for Hera putting on her sexy accessories in order to, um, seduce Zeus and distract him from battle so that she can have her way and get lots of, um, lots of the Trojans slaughtered. But the – the putting on of the – the sexy earrings and the sexy hairdo is all done within the formulaic tropes of “how do you put on your armor to prepare for battle.”

[Mark:] Fascinating. You refer to the Homeric poems, and are we just talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey?

[Emily:] Yes.

[Mark:] And what's the relationship between those two poems, both, I guess, with theme, composition, historically?

[Emily:] Great questions. I mean all of this – this whole section of this podcast is much debated by scholars [Laughter] and so I sort of feel like I have to tread a little bit carefully because I think there's so much that's unknown. I mean there are some people who are absolutely adamant that we know this, that, or the other about how these – these poems were composed. There are people who subscribe very firmly to, um, the idea that they are by different people, some who subscribe very firmly to the idea they're not. There are various theories such as the idea that maybe it's a sing – an oral poet who became literate, maybe it's somebody who dictated to a scribe. The – the actual tech for how did we get these written poems out of an oral tradition: much debated. And also, the relationship of the two poems to each other is also much debated. There are things that are different about the Odyssey and the Iliad, some of which are really obvious even if you read them in translation, like the – the whole world building is totally different. Right, the Iliad is set so claustrophobically and intensely on the battlefield, whereas the Odyssey has this much larger geographical and temporal scope. Um, in terms of language and vocabulary, there's a lot of words that are the same across the two poems but there's also quite a lot that are different because, of course, that given that there's far fewer battle sequences in the Odyssey and there's far more, um, getting a ship ready kind of sequences in the – in the Odyssey than there are in the Iliad, there are things which are – which are different in terms of their world building. I think they have to be read together, partly because their themes are matched together so well. Um, there are ways that the Iliad is about hospitality and homecoming, which you might think are the themes of the Odyssey, and then vice– vice versa; the Odyssey is also about grief and rage. You might think it's just about hospitality and homecoming if you haven't read them as complimentary texts. There are also ways that there's a – there's a scholarly rule called Monroe's Law, whereby they don't repeat each other. So, for instance, we have the only reference to the wooden horse, the Trojan horse, is in the Odyssey not in the Iliad—doesn't repeat in anything. In the Odyssey, we have a reference to a quarrel between – between Agamemnon and Odysseus as opposed to between Agamemnon and Achilles. There are ways they seem to be sort of answering each other. And so, some people argue that um, Pseudo-Longinus, who wrote On the Sublime, maybe was right that there – that the Odyssey was composed after the Iliad in a sort of response to it. But I think that's very speculative, I just don't feel like without having, you know, much better evidence than we – than we do of what exactly was happening at the time of composition, I don't think we can say definitively this is how they were composed or by whom. 

[Mark:] And I should point out: you also have a translated edition of the Odyssey for the Norton Library.

[Emily:] Mmhmm, yeah.

[Mark:] So, if people want to read these two in – in concert they're certainly...

[Emily:] Yes, these people should, yes.

[Mark:] ...they're certainly able to. So, in your introduction to the Iliad, you talk a little bit about Troy. And can you talk a little bit about the ratio between legend, history, and myth? What is Troy?

 [Emily:] Troy was for Greek-speaking people both a place that Greek-speaking people actually lived in Archaic Greece. So, the Archaic period when the Odyssey and the Iliad were produced, was a time of a lot of movement of Greek speakers all across the, um, Mediterranean world. So, there was a, uh, a city in that site at the time that the Iliad and the Odyssey were produced. There had also been previous cities on that same site. There was not, as far as we can tell, a singular Trojan War. There were probably several wars and several natural disaster-kinds-of-events that obliterated the – the various settlements on this site. And then it was rebuilt again and again. So, I think there – there was an awareness of, um, Greek speakers that this was a very important site that was rich because it's a big trading area. That in order to go from the Greek-speaking world to the Black Sea, you have to pass – pass across the coast of Troy. So, “Troy rich in gold,” it's rich in gold because it's a trading area and because it's also was a fertile piece of land. But it's also – it's primarily about its importance as a trading, um, location.

[Mark:] And the Trojan War, again, is this something that is just concocted as a legend or was there a Trojan War?

[Emily:] Well I guess I kind of – kind of said this already right, that there were multiple wars. There were several wars in the location of the Troad—the location of the site of Troy. Um, was there a single big war in which somebody called Achilles was very important? I'm pretty – I mean I don't think you can necessarily say that, right. What we know archaeologically is that this site was rebuilt and destroyed multiple times. That doesn't prove there was a single war, it proves there were multiple wars. 

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Emily:] Right. And – and archaeology is never going to tell you, “this is going to prove the legends.” And very often archaeology, um, doesn't quite fit the legends. And if you go in there—as the famous, um, archaeologist/destroyer Schliemann did in the 19th century—with your bulldozers, you're going to destroy a lot of archaeological evidence in your search for the earliest thing which has got to be the Trojan War, or in your search for the quote unquote, “Mask of Agamemnon”, um, which may – probably has nothing to do with Agamemnon. It – it just shows that this was an important site which also includes important burial grounds and important evidence for building of cities of different eras in this site. I have a colleague who excavated at Troy for several decades, and one of the funnier stories that he tells is about how, um, the archaeologist discovered these, um, sort of pits outside the city and they got all excited thinking this is Andromache's, um, bushing pools. And of course, it actually turned out those were Roman Imperial fishponds, where they were farming fish. [Laughter] So, the – the legend and the historical record don't always match up. I think it's important to know that Troy is a real place, but that doesn't mean that everything that's described in the Iliad and the Odyssey is factual. That's a category mistake, it's not – it's not like that.

[Mark:] But it still seems unusual that this one place would capture so much imagination, and this would be the center of the Western world when it comes to thinking about this one conflict. Should I not be surprised by this?

[Emily:] I mean I think Greek myth is very often place specific, right. I mean, that's one of the – the features of – of Ancient myth is that it's very often focused on stories that build up about particular places. Most of the – most of the heroes are associated with particular locations because of course all, um, like everyone wants a local hero, right. And so, if – if you're from Corinth or Argos or Tiryns or Ithaca, you want to have your local guy. And then also once the Greeks-speaking, um, locations began to have a – a more of a sense of shared identity across different, um, parts of the Greek-speaking world—in the era before there was such a thing as the Nation of Greece but when there was a sense of Greek speakers should – should – should band together against non-Greeks who are also called barbarians, the people who don't speak Greek—the – the – the, um, the Trojan War is a convenient way of thinking about the relationship between Greek speakers and non-Greek speakers. And so, I think the – the part of what the why – why are the Trojan War legends good to think with, is to do with that: that, um, it speaks to questions that were really live in the 7th century BCE in terms of what were, um, what did it mean to be – to be Greek as opposed to non-Greek. Constantly thinking about the relationship between the – the Greek-speaking world as a very diverse, um, world which can then either come together or fail to come together, as happens in the Iliad, and take on a place which is not – not supposed to be culturally Greek, and yet the people there have their own – their own ways, their own dignity, their own honor, their own ways – ways that parallel, um, what the Greeks do. So, they're myths that are good to think with, as well as myths that are layered onto a real geography that was part of the lived experience of people in – throughout Antiquity.

[Mark:] Can you talk just a little bit more about how Homer presents it in the – in the Iliad: in the sense of what's motivating the conflict here, are there good guys and bad guys, does his narrative perspective force us to side with one or the other?

[Emily:] Yeah, I mean, so I tend to avoid pronouns with Homer because...

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Emily:] ...you know, given what – what we've just said about...

[Mark:] Right.

[Emily:] ...we don't know if it was an individual or a group of individuals who got together to create this monumental thing. I feel like saying his perspective is actually going to be misleading, so we need to say things like...

[Mark:] Fair enough.

[Emily:] ... “the narrative perspective”, or “the po – does the poem shape the narrative in a particular way?” Um, one of the things that I think is so extraordinary about the Iliad as a – as a response to a much earlier existing mythical tradition, is that the narrative is so little focused on “us against them.” I mean you might expect a Greek poem about a mythical war in which the Greeks attacked a non-Greek city and were – and conquered it would be very militaristic and “rah, yay, we got those foreigners” kind of thing, which is not at all what the Iliad is, right? The Iliad presents, if anything the Trojans are more honorable. We focus especially on Hector, he's just as honorable as any – anyone on the Greek side. There's no – no suggestion that the Trojans are going to be defeated because they're bad or because they're villainous or because they're impious, if anything they're more pious than the Greek-speaking warriors are. Um, and – and yet there's also this whole question about how does conflict come into being. I think it's actually quite difficult to give a really simple answer to that because the poem is so multi-layered in its account of both what conflict is, how it comes into being, and whether there's any possibility for not an end to conflict. I don't think it imagines any – any world, including a divine world, in which conflict isn't essential, but it does suggest there could be pauses in conflict. Conflict seems like it's baked in or woven into the – to the way that living beings interact with each other. And it's partly because everyone wants to be the best and everyone's going to be the best in different ways. So, it's an irresolvable thing of how can you then eliminate conflict, how can you eliminate anger? Even if people are always aware conflict leads to destruction which leads to grief which leads to more rage, and this cycle will continue, it's not going – it's not ever going to end but there can be ways that it might pause.

[Mark:] And so this poem is not saying this is the way things were 3,000 years ago, it's saying these – this is the way things have always been and always will be.

[Emily:] I think it's – it's ambiguous about that in the sense that we do have several moments in the poem where we're reminded that the people in this poem are different from people nowadays. So, for instance, when Hector picks up a rock from the, um, from the – from the battleground to holds it, people nowadays could not, even two men nowadays couldn't pick up that rock. The – the characters in this poem are larger than normal, regular people-you-see-everyday kind of characters. And they're larger in their emotional and spiritual identities as well as in their physical identities. And there were also, um, sort of constantly references to the ways that the warriors within the poem want to be remembered. They – they're all, especially characters like Achilles and Hector, they’re seeking “kleos aphthiton”, eternal fame. They want to be memorialized in the Iliad itself. Um, and then the narrator also reminds us in an amazing passage in the middle of the poem that the desire for eternal memory might not come true. There might be ways that the gods could always turn it aside, that – that we're told in that that great passage about the – the wall that the Achaeans, the Greeks, spend a long time building in the middle of the poem, the gods are going to wash it all away. Apollo and Poseidon are going to redirect the rivers such that everything that's marked this landscape, the landscape outside Troy with the labors and suffering and deeds of the characters in the poem, that's all going to get erased. So, human memory making, whether it's through language or through landscape, is always going to be vulnerable to change caused by gods.

[Mark:] Yeah. Well, you mentioned that in the Iliad humans act differently than they do today. Uh, one of these would be in the way that they interact with gods.

[Emily:] Mmhmm.

[Mark:] Can you talk about the way that that relationship generally exists in the Iliad between humans and gods?

[Emily:] Yeah, I mean that's one of the most fascinating things about the poem is just the – the amount and the complexity of divine human interaction and also of divine divine interaction. Um, in contrast to the Odyssey, where Athena is a really important character, as – as are Poseidon and Zeus, but we don't have nearly as much, um, whole divine society insight as we do in the Iliad, where we get not just to see how gods interact with humans but also how do gods interact with each other how – how is conflict a feature of Olympian society as well as of Trojan and Greek encampment society. Um, when I talk to my undergrad students about the gods in the – both in the Homer and in tragedy, I feel like there's – we often have a set of conversations about if there are gods intervening does that mean humans have no free will. And there's always this double causation, right. It's when the gods intervene in the battlefield or in council in the Iliad, they never just possess the person so that now it's not me talking that's Athena talking. It never works like that. Gods interact with humans in ways that are very much like how humans interact with humans. So, gods interact by persuasion and by command, they never sort of possess you so that you – you don't have agency of your own. An obvious example is when in the first quarrel scene between Achilles and Agamemnon at the start of the Iliad, Achilles is furious with Agamemnon because Agamemnon's been dissing him and taking – threatening to take away the woman that he's enslaving to enslave her himself. And that's dishonorable for Achilles, and he's thinking of pulling out his sword and chopping off Agamemnon's head. And Athena, sent by Hera, swoops down, grabs him by the back of his – his hair, and no one sees – sees her except him, and she's – she tells him, "We consider this." And so, then he stops and thinks about it and decides, "Okay I'm not going to do that." And it's not that Athena has forced him not to do this; she's given him a divine word of advice. She's invited him to think again. And then typically that's how gods work in this poem; that they invite humans to think about something which they could also think about by themselves.

[Mark:] You can also picture a friend doing this, giving the same advice.

[Emily:] Friend could do the same thing, or else it could be just a – I mean in late Antiquity it was very, very common for readers of Homer to treat all of the divine apparatus as allegory. So, when Athena swoops down, that's just wisdom comes into – to Achilles’ head. And we could – we could talk about it in terms of his conscience. And maybe he's just realized that, actually, violence in the council is a bad idea and that's what wisdom says. Um, I think within the poem that's not how – how the Homeric poems set us up to – to think about these beings because they're fully fleshed out characters. Maybe not fleshed out but ambrosia’d out characters.

[Mark:] Emily, when we think of the Odyssey and the Iliad together, the Odyssey as a title is something we all know. We can all relate to what an Odyssey is. The Iliad seems something a little bit more mysterious and impenetrable. What is an Iliad and why is that the title of this work?

[Emily:] The Odyssey is called the Odyssey because of Odysseus. The Iliad is called the Iliad because of Ilion, which is just another name for Troy. Um so, it – it's just focused on the city and – and the conflict around the city. And in – in some ways, I mean one can – one can imagine that it – the tradition could have been something else, right. I mean there – there are poems called, um, the Accolade in Antiquity...

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Emily:] ... one could have called this poem that, but I think actually the – the fact that there are several different story lines braided together in the poem means that it's not just Achilles’ poem, it's not just Hector's poem, it's not just the poem about the plans of Zeus and the plans of Thetis; it's all three of those things intertwined with each other.

[Mark:] But that's interesting that one poem is centered on a person and the other is centered on a place.

[Emily:] Depending on, you know, when we think these titles came into being—which certainly is not as old as the poems themselves. That's not part of, again, Homer's not an author and didn't spend hours, um, with – with their agent talking about, [Laughter] “What am I going to call this thing?”

[Mark:] I wanted to ask you about a couple characters that we're going to meet in the Iliad. How does Homer characterize Helen?

[Emily:] In really mysterious ways. I mean, Helen is one of those characters where there's a lot of buildup of later expectation, s – such that by the time most modern people read the Iliad, they've probably heard that, um, Christopher Marlowe calls her the – the face – “the face that launched a thousand ships” and all of that, and you probably read the – the Maud Gonne poems by Yeats, and you have a sense of Helen as the terrible beauty and the – the figures of destruction. She's a really complicated figure in both the Homeric poems; one can argue about the degree to which it's the same character in the Odyssey versus the Iliad. Um, she's described repeatedly in, uh, by herself as “dog faced.” And in the Iliad, she repeatedly expresses regret about being there, I mean about being at Troy in the middle of the action. She's also presented in both the Odyssey and the Iliad as extraordinarily self-aware and aware of her own place within the narrative. Most elite female characters in the Homeric poems, um, spend most of their time weaving when they're awake, but Homer is unusual, I mean Helen is unusual in that what she weaves is the ponos—the sufferings and labors that are performed for the sake of her. So, she – she's weaving a version of the Odyssey –  of the Iliad itself but in tapestry form. And she's also presented as having this extraordinary perspective on both sides because she's the only character who's been on both sides: both on the Greek side and the Trojan side. So, in Book Three, there's what's known as the teichoscopia—the viewing from the wall—where the poet gives us this very narratively implausible thing that Priam has—the King of Troy—has never wondered once for the last nine years, um, “Who are these guys who suddenly shown up to besiege my city? I wonder who they all are, let me ask Helen because she'll know.” And so, then we get the introduction of these various characters through the voice of Helen. The end of Book Three also gives us, in a way, a – I mean this is a good example of how extraordinary the narrative technique of the Iliad is, such that it doesn't begin at the beginning of the Trojan War legends, doesn't end at the end, as I already said, doesn't have the Trojan Horse, doesn't have the fall of the city, doesn't have the original abduction or leaving of Menelaus but with par – of Helen with Paris—which is one of the prompts for the Trojan War—but we get a sort of review of that episode at the end of Book Three, where Paris, um, it gets scooped off the battlefield by Aphrodite, goddess of lust and sex and attractiveness, who – and Aphrodite then comes to summon Helen to take her to bed with Paris. And Helen doesn't want to go, but the goddess pressures her into it, threatens her. And we have this, I think very resonant half-line “the goddess led the way.” So, this also goes back to your earlier question of the relationship of gods to mortal. We're not shown that Helen has absolutely zero choice, but we're also shown that her choices are very limited if a very – if an – if an immortal Olympian deity is pressuring you to do something, you're either going to suffer a great deal by not doing it or you're going to get in line and do it.

[Mark:] And Emily, I don't want to let you get away without talking a little bit about Achilles. And you start your translation by describing Achilles's cataclysmic wrath. What do we need to know about Achilles, and can you also discuss his relationship with Patroclus?

[Emily:] Yes, so I mean we talked already a little bit about how the Odyssey is – is called the Odyssey by judicium. Um, it starts with the word “andra”—man—and in my translations I felt I can't have this – have the – the object of the sentence start the translation because English doesn't work like that because it's not a highly impacted language. Um, so I translate the first word of the Iliad “menin” as ca – as wrath, as you say. Um, the – there's so much to say about Achilles and Patroclus, um, so they, that first word “Menin...” so, the cataclysmic wrath of Achilles is described as different from normal, human anger which is usually called “kholos” in the poem. The normal kind of anger that warriors feel when they're dissed or when someone they love dies usually results in the kind of rage that then manifests in violence, but the menis of Achilles is figured as a different category because it's, that word “menis” which I translate as wrath, and wrathful for its cognates, um, is usually associated with deities not with human beings. So, the – the fact that Achilles has menis is a symptom of the fact that he's – he's the son of a sea goddess and his anger is like divine anger in several ways, including that it can operate at a distance just as – as Apollo's anger can kill people without the god having to touch them. Achilles’s anger is the wrath, is the same kind of thing where without him moving his swift feet, he causes the massacre of people on his own side. Um so, Achilles’s wrath is of two very – two very different stages within it in the poem. In the beginning, as we've already discussed a little bit, there's this conflict which is paradoxical also because it's not an us against them conflict, it's an us against us conflict, um, which is a quarrel between two Greek leaders: Achilles and Agamemnon. Achilles feels dishonored by Agamemnon's taking his prize woman away from him, and therefore for the first two thirds of the poem, he refuses to fight because the trust between Achilles and the rest of the Greeks has been violated. And Achilles in his rage, his wrath at Agamemnon, asks his goddess mother, Thetis, to ask Zeus to, um, to ensure that while Achilles doesn't move his swift feet while he's just sitting sulking doing the job of beach—like Ken and Barbie, he's like doing nothing and yet that's doing everything—that will mean that as many Greeks as possible will die in his absence. And that will again paradoxically restore his honor, which usually people get honor by killing people on the other side; Achilles gets honor by killing or causing the deaths of people on his own side. But then, of course, that – that prayer to have his own side be massacred is a good prayer only if he cares about zero people on his own side. Turns out that actually he cares about one person on his own side, which is – is his beloved companion, um, Patroclus who begs Achilles—once Hector the greatest Trojan Warrior is storming the fleet and is about to set fire to the ships that are the – the Greek's only possible way back home—Patroclus, who's Achilles’s second self, begs Achilles. And there's this amazing simile of Patroclus as a little girl tugging his mother's dress, begging to be picked up. Um, Achilles lets Patroclus wear his armor to go out sort of as – as him to drive Hector away from the – the ships. But because Patroclus has so much in common with Achilles, including his love of honor and his skill at massacre, Patroclus doesn't do what Achilles has advised him or told him: to turn back as soon as he's driven Hector away. Instead, he keeps on going, pushing ahead to the city and then inevitably but totally unbearably—it always makes me cry even though I've read it 10 million times—[Laughter] Patroclus gets killed, um, and then of course that devastates Achilles and his wrath turns into something, a different category of wrath, where it's not – it's no longer about Agamemnon. Agamemnon now is now kind of irrelevant for the for the final third of the poem. It's a wrath that's – that's transmogrified into both desire to obliterate Hector, who killed Patroclus, but also all of the Trojans, and maybe everybody. It becomes even more cataclysmic than it was to start with because there's this sense of this – this essential, personal grief and which is also tied up with Achilles’s awareness of his own mortality because he knows that if he returns to battle, he will soon be dead too. So, he's killing both in revenge for his second self, Patroclus, and also for his own mortality.

[Mark:] Emily Wilson, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast.

[Emily:] Thank you.

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of Homer's The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson, is available now in paperback and e-Book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

 [Music]