Natalie Haynes/ BBC:

One of two great epic poems by Homer to survive from ancient Greece, The Iliad unfolds across two months in the final year of the Trojan War. The Greeks – led by Agamemnon, and with Achilles as their greatest warrior – are still trying to capture the mighty city of Troy. The Trojans – led by Hector – have resisted for 10 years.
Into this mortal combat come an additional cast of gods and goddesses who take to the battlefield to intervene in the course of the war. And as the gods squabble and men battle, the women of Troy are limited to watching from the city walls, and hoping their loved ones come home.
Every generation finds The Iliad anew: it holds up a mirror to the times in which it is read, as well as the time in which it was created and the one in which it is set. Emily Wilson – the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English – has just published a new translation of The Iliad. She spoke to the classicist and writer Natalie Haynes, whose latest book Divine Might explores the stories of the Greek goddesses, about how The Iliad is a story of war, of honour and reputation, and of what it means to be a man.
How The Iliad is the original action film
Natalie Haynes: Your new book is a propulsive read quite separately from what an excellent translation I think it is. It is going to drag people through it, because it is an action movie, isn’t it, in parts, The Iliad? Things really happen, and they happen at speed.
Emily Wilson: A lot of things happen at speed. I mean, both material things and emotional things, and they’re happening really intensely and very fast all the time. And it’s often very, very noisy and very intense. And you have to feel all of that and want it to keep going, even though it’s horrible.
NH: So many characters die in combat – I wondered if it was painful after a while writing those sections, because a lot of the deaths are incredibly explicit. They’re incredibly violent. There’s no sense of the camera pulling away, it’s really close up. I’ve written before that there’s no winner in hand-to-hand combat, there’s just a survivor. But you really feel it in The Iliad, was it hard?
EW: It was hard. In a way, it felt like a beautiful kind of hard, because I think there’s always so much compassion as well. There’s a horrible kind of excitement. I felt I was sometimes in touch with really nasty parts of myself that were enjoying violence and relishing that, there’s a sort of visceral thrill of contemplating scenes of massacre, and I certainly felt that thrill and then I would think ‘what have I been doing, how am I buying into this?’
And yet at the same time, there’s so much compassion and you’re feeling the pain in a way that you don’t necessarily if it’s a Hollywood action movie, where the characters just exist to get blown up. I do think that’s quite the case with even the characters who exist only as one line, eg ‘then the spear goes through his liver’, but we might get the name of his father, or the name of his homeland.
The need for men to find immortal fame in a culture without a written language
NH: I wanted to quickly talk about the pursuit of glory and immortal fame. Because they seem so integral to this society, and to us, it’s really hard to find language that doesn’t make it sound essentially trivial. And you have to stop and remind yourself, and remind readers or listeners, that this is a society without records in the same way that we have now. This is your chance – if you become famous enough to be immortalised in song, this is what it means to live beyond your lifespan. There is something much more elemental about the search for fame in The Iliad than there is in in our world, for example.
EW: Yes, I think that’s right. I think that modern readers sometimes do have that tendency to trivialise the centrepiece quest of The Iliad, of that choice of the warriors to risk their lives for fame or the avoidance of shame, both in this lifetime and then afterwards, both having a legacy in the poem itself as a name and also a legacy on the landscape, in having a mound or a memorial. There’s a great passage where Hector talks about hoping to leave his mark on the landscape by having a funeral mound for one of his victims, and then somebody sailing past at some future point will say ‘that funeral mound was for somebody killed by great Hector’.
I think you’re absolutely right that it’s an imaginative leap that we have to make to be in the world of this poem. To understand that this really matters. And that also the poem is presenting it both as successful – I mean, this poem exists telling about these characters – and then also as unsuccessful, because we also know [the gods] Apollo and Poseidon will let all the rivers create environmental disaster and the plain of Troy will wash everything away. So they will win eternal fame through poetry, but not through any of the other means that they hope they’re winning it.
How The Iliad was about humans’ impact on the Earth
NH: The idea of The Iliad as a kind of apocalyptic environmental metaphor is something which I think is a relatively new way of looking at the poem. Even the idea of the Trojan War, at least in some of its versions, is that there are too many people and we’ve grown too heavy, and Gaia is groaning under the weight of us. And they have the Theban conflicts, and that gets rid of some people, but not enough. And so they bring on the Trojan War. Is it an early population anxiety metaphor?
EW: It very much is, yes, and we know from the ancient notes from the start of The Iliad, and from a poem that doesn’t survive entirely, The Cypria, that an early myth, the ‘plan of Zeus’ (referred to in the beginning of the Iliad), entailed the decimation of the human population because they’re a burden on the Earth.

I don’t think that’s the only way to read The Iliad now, but I do think that in earlier eras of reading The Iliad, people very often wanted to connect it to a specific war that was happening then. For instance, ‘is The Iliad like the English Civil War, or is The Iliad like Vietnam or is The Iliad like World War Two?’ I think when reading The Iliad in 2023, one could connect it to any one of the many conflicts and kinds of human violence that are happening around the globe, but I think it also really resonates with the idea that most of us are living in places that can’t be inhabited by humans for that much longer.

And so in that sense, we’re echoing the position of those living in both the Greek encampment and the Trojan city, there won’t be humans there for much longer after this poem ends.