Dwayne Betts on the Iliad

What happens when a poet who survived prison sits down with the world's oldest war story--and reads it in three sleepless, wandering days? In this second episode of the EconTalk Book Club on the Iliad, Dwayne Betts and EconTalk host Russ Roberts trade their impressions of the Iliad, discovering it's less about war than about fathers, friendship, and the stubborn dignity people find inside fates they can't escape. Betts connects Achilles's rage and grief to his own experience of incarceration and depression, while Roberts marvels at Homer's cinematic style and the strange tenderness between enemies. Together they unpack the shield of Achilles, the ransom of Hector's body, and how an ancient poem about war still cracks readers open today. It's a conversation about reading as communion--and how a 2,800-year-old story became, unexpectedly, a way of connecting to each other.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is June 23, 2026. This is the second installment of the Econ Talk Book Club on The Iliad by Homer. My guest today is poet and author Dwayne Betts. This is Dwayne's fifth appearance on the program. He was last here in June of 2024, talking about Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Dwayne, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  It is such a pleasure, although I gotta say that I recognize how unreachable Mike Munger's record now is for me. Although, hey, Harper just hit for the cycle, so maybe I could hit for the cycle. We need a version of the cycle for Econ Talk.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you could pass him on some limited time zone, like the June 2026 record of most appearances. It's a tie. Dwayne Betts has a one, and Mike Munger has none.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  And I have a New York Times article out that's worth talking about, too. But right now, we get to talk about The Iliad.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Okay. So, this happened, this conversation, the genesis of it is that you heard, or I mentioned to you in an email, that I was reading The Iliad for the first time, and that we were going to do a book club on it. You said you wanted to read it as well. So you, like me, have just read this epic poem for the first time. And let's start with your general impressions.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  I should say that I just wanted to experience reading.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  A book that I was deeply familiar with, with somebody else. And I wanted to experience doing it. Uh, when you said you hadn't read it, it felt like I was compelled to ask to read it with you because I also hadn't read it. But it was a bad decision from the start, Russ.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Why?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Because this is, I think we started talking at the beginning of June.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  I had a documentary premiere at Tribeca on June 8th. And then I had my first solo art exhibit on June 19th. I didn't start reading this actively until June 20th. Over the past three days.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Three days ago.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  I, I was on, I was on chapter, I was on book two. I was, I was on book nine when you asked me what my favorite passages were. But, but this what it felt like and, and this is actually why I'm so glad it happened this way. These days, we've all experienced what it means to binge watch a television show and get so immersed in it that it becomes a part of our daily lives.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  But actually, that, that used to be a familiar feeling that we got when we read back in the days when we were younger and we could really get deeply immersed. Now it's so difficult to do because even if you read a big book over six weeks, it's, it's six months, something about the book kind of, it disperses itself. It just sort of floats in your psyche. But I was deeply engaged for, for like hours and hours every day. I walked 20,000, 28,000 steps just today. Every one of those steps, I had the Elliot in my hand, I had the Kindle in my hand, I was weaving traffic. I felt like, you know, it was moments and, and, and actually it became embedded in my personal life. A friend of mine, uh, may rest in peace, this guy Melvin Davis, who, who was brilliant

• 3:57Speaker 01

  and who was a veteran. And he died over the weekend and so his, and, and, and it was one of those things where it eased his suffering and, and like his family knew and I knew. And I just had this kind of relationship with him that, that was rooted in storytelling. And so even me reading Elliot was also, um, me thinking about him. One of the last conversations. That we had was about a musket, which, which again, a musket as a, as a tool of war, but also bringing in the conversation about a musket when he was at a sick bed was, was, was kind of similar to the way in which you could sing these stories of the way in which our lives sometimes feel like this struggle for glory.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  You could sing that story and sing it in peace when somebody is, is on their way, um, you know, to another, to another, a, another version of their journey. So, um, it was, it was just beautiful. Actually felt like I'm, I'm still giddy in, in a kind of fever dream that has changed the way I think about, um, how you can understand life with a story that feels this old and this refreshingly new. Yeah, I, I, I really actually appreciated the opportunity.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Well, I'm glad to hear it. I, uh, it's 24 books, meaning 24 chapters. Uh, and to be clear, it's in the Fagels translation, which, which I read, uh, and there are many, many good translations or entertaining translations or moving translations. But, you know, it's about a five or 600 page book. And I just don't want anybody listening out there to think, oh my God, a 600 page poem. I'll never get through it, but you did it in three days. You are a poet, a little bit maybe unrepresentative, but I read it, I read the last third, uh, within the last week also.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  So I did a bit of a sprint of immersion and I knew, because this is the way Homer writes, and it is part of our civilization, part of our culture, the many of these stories. I knew what was going to happen. I, I knew the end of the story. I knew, and I, I'll, lay it out here again, very, uh, simply for those of you listening. This story is not about the Trojan War. It's a story about an episode in the 10th year of the war when Achilles, um,

• 6:26Speaker 00

  He's offended by Agamemnon. We talked about this in the first episode with Ido Chivroni. He's offended because Agamemnon wants to take away, takes away a woman he won in battle as a piece of triumph, of swag. It's grotesque. This is the way, this is the world they live in. And as a result of this, he sulks in his tent is the famous example. Achilles refuses to fight the Trojans. His commander Agamemnon and he are in a feud. And worse, Achilles asks through his mother, who is a goddess. Achilles is the offspring

• 7:10Speaker 00

  of a goddess and a great man, Pelias. He asks his mother to talk to Zeus and have Hector and the Trojans kill a lot of his comrades so that he will be desperately needed to re-enter the war. And it tragically backfires on him. We'll talk about it later, but probably, but his best friend, Patroclus, gets killed. And as a result, he comes back into the war and he kills Hector, who had killed Patroclus. Hector's the superstar superhero incredible

• 7:50Speaker 00

  warrior for the Trojans. The book ends with an extraordinary encounter of Priam, the father of Hector, the king of Troy, asking Achilles for the body of his son back. And we know this is going to happen. It's, and we know Achilles is going to die soon, although he does not die in this book. But a lot of the drama is, is just foreshadowed explicitly by Homer. So that's the story. Tell me what was positive and negative for you about this, this, the book and what surprised you?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  It surprised me that I wept at the end.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  And I did know what was gonna happen.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  And.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Unbelievably moving.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  I just, I just, that really surprised me. And then it was a, another point, it was a quote that I had read years ago about the Vietnam. It said, um, something to the effect that, um, you know, it was a world in which there seemed to be a lot of choices, but there were actually no choices. And, and I felt like it was a passage in there that I found deeply moving about the, the whole book felt like that. Like, uh, Homer does a wildly inventive job of creating this cast of characters who seem to have so many choices and yet still have none. And that tension is what drives you along. And it's so well done that even though I knew what would happen next,

• 9:20Speaker 01

  I still read it as if there was a choice about what would happen next. And, and it was something that, that was beautiful about the juxtaposition that was constantly happening with,

• 9:31Speaker 01

  it's like the things they carried, actually. It was like the whole book was an animation of, uh, other things they carried because.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  That's a, that's a book on Vietnam by, I think, is it Tim O'Brien?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It's by Tim O'Brien.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  The things they carry. Yeah, go ahead.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Because here, you, you never got introduced to characters as if all they were were soldiers. They, they had this, this, this life that extended outside of Troy that was always evoked with a kind of regret or kind of honor, but it always had a kind of, um, sorrow to it because you knew that these were essentially a string of elegies, a string of obituaries that you were hearing constantly throughout the book. But that, that I was surprised how taken aback I was by the ability for this seemingly kind of war story to explicate, like so many complicated ideas I have about friendship, about love, about trust, um, about anger and also about the ways in which you could be, man, I don't know if you've ever been in, in a situation like this,

• 10:29Speaker 01

  but you felt like it was, it was a foregone conclusion what you would do. You know, I, I remember when I went to prison, I went to prison when I was 16 years old. I absolutely felt like.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  You know, after I committed the crime, I literally felt like it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to prison, as if I've often told myself this metaphor that I drove myself. And like, surviving prison was not a foregone conclusion, but I felt like I got lost in a world where I had no choices, but somehow still ended up discovering choices. And that's kind of what the Iliad is for me. It's this world in which the characters seemingly have no choices, but still consistently animate what it means to make choices under the most dire constraints. And in some sense, the best of my time in prison was trying to emulate that process where you find a way to make a choice, even when it's a foregone conclusion. Like, even when you were railed against the

• 11:24Speaker 01

  gods, there's one scene where Achilles says, "Don't predict my death. I know I'm going to die, but I kind of still get to make this choice about what happens for the next few hours." You know, even to the, it was lovely.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Well, the, and by the way, listeners who don't know Dwayne, I forget you're not a household name in every listener. And you can go back, we'll link to them, the previous episodes that tells your story, which is an extraordinary story of your time in prison and afterwards, the things you've done since then are amazing. We're going to focus on the Iliad today. But the role the gods play in the book just gets richer and richer. When you start the book, you think, oh, wow, the gods kind of jerk people around now and then. But they're, they get a lot of airtime. And, you know, they're not just sort of like, oh, and by the way, Zeus did this, or Hera did that. They get increasingly involved.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  I just want to say one thing, because you mentioned about the characters. In the previous episode of The Club, when I talked with Ida Chivroni, he mentioned that there are something like a thousand characters. And for those of you who read Russian novels, that may sound very intimidating. Most of them appear, those names appear once. It'll say Achilles killed so and so. And I felt at times, you know, I felt at times that this book is a chronicle. It's sort of a history book at one level to let readers who couldn't have Google hear what happened to this person and that person. But, but in fact, there are about 10 characters, maybe a few more.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  But there's, there's a handful of extraordinary warriors on the Greek side. There's a handful of extraordinary warriors on the Trojan side. There's a couple of women. There's a few goddesses. So we might get to 20, but it's not, I don't, I don't want you listening out there to be intimidated.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And it's also interesting, like the way that the characters get introduced is almost, I was talking to a friend of mine last night and she was reading the letters of Virginia Woolf. And she said that in the letters, it always says, "Thank you for the letter you sent to me recounting the summer that you spent in France and how you were working on that new short story. It was such a beautiful story." And it ended up going to what Virginia Woolf wants to say. And I thought about how beautiful that is because oftentimes it's a, and she said it was a forum. It was, it was a structure. It was a constraint and, and it was a way to say, "I heard you."

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I actually think that Homer does that constantly. And sometimes he says, Agamemnon, Agamemnon says, "Hey, so Odysseus, I need to send you to Achilles and I want you to say exactly what I said. Say this." And then later, when Odysseus is in front of Achilles, he says the exact same thing, like, like word for word, the exact same speech. And it's something that's beautiful about that because it's these echoes that get created in the text that's almost like the, so, so even though it's a lot of characters, it's so many of these echoes that each time you've been taught how to read it, you, you begin to understand that these soldiers, their names aren't there to make you know them. Their names are there to make you understand that this war has huge ramifications on more

• 14:46Speaker 01

  than just the seven or eight central figures in the gods. It has huge ramifications. It even invokes their mothers and their fathers.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  And their kinfolks. And so that becomes for me a structural element that allowed me to truly like dance with the book. And I literally, I've read every word. I thought that I would get lost in skimming because I also knew the story, but I found that I just, I just wanted to read it.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  I did too.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I literally, I have friends of mine, man, who Who, who, who like, they didn't, my father actually didn't get a chance to live the life that I live. And, and, and I thought about how when I went to prison, I changed my name and everybody called me Shaheed. And then when I came home, my mom and my friends and my people called me Dwayne again. And now I have a world where some people call me Dwayne, some people call me Shaheed. But then I went to college and people called me Regenu. And I had to ask myself, why do I publish under Regenu Dwayne Betts? Why do I let people call me so many different names? And I realized that it's something about me trying to honor how I've had to walk through this world in different ways. But also, when I say Regenu Dwayne Betts, it is my father's name. And, and I feel like

• 15:51Speaker 01

  what I get to do is even in invoking his name, I get to give some honor to the possibility of his life. And so much of the Eliot is, is literally nestled in people's lives being cut short.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And, and, and a cruel, it, it's almost like this person was great at home. If only they hadn't chosen to come to Troy.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Where they'll be cut down, where they can't outrun death. You know, there's so many instances where the book just reminds you that invoking a name isn't about saying, remember who this individual person is, but that recognize this world of war, it's almost like the, um, a Make Gay poem, you know, uh, the diameter of a bomb. The, the, the literal text illuminates the world in which, you know, the suffering is the circle includes everybody and there's nobody that's left out. That's constantly the element, um, that's constantly an element of, I think, the, the story that I get from the Fagels translation, which, which I also read.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  So, uh, so which poem is this that you mentioned just now?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  The Yehuda Amakeh. I know I'm pronouncing his name wrong. I, I know it, but the poem, diameter of a bomb.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Oh, seriously?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  No, it's Yehuda Ami Thai, by the way, but you're close.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Oh, I have to read you this poem. You know, this is wow. I don't believe you've never I read this poem in prison and it's become one of the things that has been a touchstone of how I think about the world and how I think about suffering. The diameter of the bomb, the diameter of the bomb was 30 centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters with four dead and 11 wounded and around these in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered in one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from at a distance of more than 100 kilometers enlarges the circle considerably and the solitary man mourning her death at

• 17:49Speaker 01

  the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won't even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Wow. Yeah, I've never heard that. That's extraordinary. One other thing I want to mention to listeners, I don't know if we mentioned in the first episode, is that similar to a Russian novel, people get patronymics. They get an extra name based on their father just to confuse you. But it's a really simple, it's a pretty simple rule. And so if I remember this correctly, Atreides, A-T-R-I-D-E-S, Agamemnon and Menelaus both get called Atreides. And the reason is, is that their father is, and I'm forgetting his name now, it's Atreus, I think. So Atreides means son of Atreus. They're brothers, so

• 18:52Speaker 00

  they're both Atreides. So a lot of characters either have as their name the son of, or they occasionally get this bonus name that alludes to their origins. One of the more powerful aspects of the poem is the constant invocation of home, which of course, the Odyssey, the next book, is all about that and the attempt to return home. But often a character will trash talk. A person they're in, they're fighting with and say, you know, you're not going to get home. You're going to be eaten by dogs here on the plains of Troy and your mother will never be able to mourn your death.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  And this is a terrible, terrible threat and, and, and, and fate for, for the characters.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  I wondered this, it makes me want to know the, the, the original and be able to read in it.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Oh, sure.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Because the translation is so fresh that I just wonder how this sounded in the original. It was one line, it was talking about the, the, um, the Argives wouldn't, wouldn't relent to the Trojans, but the Trojans were pounding them and pounding them and sort of pushing them back towards the ships. And it says, but the Argives, they held tight as a working widow holds the scales. And it'd just be these, these, they're like, so I think, I think Homer does it in two ways. One is invoking a soldier and a soldier's life outside of war. And the others, you had these similes and these metaphors that yoke the world of war to the world of war, work. They yoke the world of war to the, to the world of not war in this elegant way that makes you, people often say things like, well, you wouldn't relate to the story because,

• 20:32Speaker 01

  because you're not a soldier or because you don't like war. But I think it's actually really skillful, precise things that, that the story does that reminds you that this is not just about war, that it is about family, that it is about friendship, that it is about the, the unmistakable burden of, of sorrow and cruelty.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to allude to or meant, just mention is the cinematic nature of, of this book. It's visually stunning. I want to read a very short excerpt here, which is an example of this. And when I read this, I will mention Ares. Ares is the god of war.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  And sometimes, anyway, Ares is the god of war. Here's the quote. "Just then, Aeneas hurled his brazen spear at Marionus, hoping to hit the man as he charged behind his shield. But he eyed Aeneas straight on. He dodged the bronze, ducking down with a quick lunge. And behind his back, the heavy spear shaft plunged and stuck in the earth, the butt end quivering into the air, till suddenly rugged Ares snuffed its fury out dead still." So, end of quote. That image of this guy just being, missing being killed,

• 21:58Speaker 00

  and then the spear lodging in the ground and quivering, the butt end, the part that is at the sharp end, until suddenly the god of war snuffed its fury out. It eventually stopped quivering and it comes to a stop. But you can see it so, so vividly. The other thing, of course, the other thing, of course, is the violence in this book is so graphic. The descriptions of how people die and where the spears get them and the swords and how their heads are hurt inside their helmets. It's, it's, it's pretty gruesome.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  And literally, one of the things about the brutality of it is how descriptive the brutality is.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  And, and the brutality, it exists as exactly what it is, but it's often accompanied juxtaposed with the cost of it. Nobody's oblivious, even as they chase fame, even if they chase good fortune. There's this one passage where it's one guy, Hippas, he's out for fame and it says that he's here because he's out for fame. But then this, this is the passage that narrates his death. Yeah, how can you start a passage this way, right? It's so much often where he tells you in advance what's gonna happen, and then you still delight in the telling. It says, "No Trojans could save him now, sprain as they might." Ajax sent a Telemann charging quickly into the carnage,

• 23:27Speaker 01

  spearing him at close range through the bronze-cheeked helmet. The horsehair crest cracked wide open around the point, smashed by the mass of spear and hand that drove it. His brains burst from the wound and sprays of blood soaking the weapon's socket. His strength dissolved on the spot, his grip loosed, and he dropped the foot of brave Patroclus corpse. There on the ground it lay, he rushed to join it, pitching over the dead man's body face to face. A world away from Larissa's dark, rich soil, never would he repay his loving parents now for the gift of rearing. His life cut short so soon, brought down by the spear of Lionhearted Ajax. You have a passage where, you know,

• 24:12Speaker 01

  where actually, nobody is necessarily a villain, and everybody is left mourning. But it's just beautiful to me, the way that you get reminded that your actions of today don't just touch you, it touches the family that you left. You went to war to bring honor to your family, when really, you went to war to... And it always reminds you that they at war chasing riches. Yeah. They murdered somebody, and they immediately taken the armor. And it also reminds you of one subtle thing, too. One, they at war chasing riches. And two, a lot of them don't have money. So they're not just taking the armor and stuff in the clothes. They actually using the armor and their weapons for the next fight. You know, even Hector, the great warrior that he is,

• 24:58Speaker 01

  puts on Achilles' armor. He doesn't just like take it as a trophy. He also takes it as something that will protect him. And so often, people die because their armor is not as good as others.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's just not, it, it, it cracks in some place. It shatters Achilles gets to wear armor. Right. It's like, what? And oh, you send a people, it's almost like some of the soldiers you recognize have no hope to survive the end of the chapter, let alone the end of the book.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  And somehow they still have to, they still have to have that humanity. You know, it's, it's, it's wild. I think it's also just a lesson that in this world, everybody can matter. You know, I think it's, it's a certain kind of democracy and, and, and the violence that happens in the book. And a certain kind of democracy and the capriciousness of the gods, even amongst the gods. You know, I, I thought it was also compelling, um, realizing that Zeus could be swayed. He could be swayed by something, um, other than, it was a moment when, when Zeus was going to, um, save Seradon. He was going to save his son and Hera. And usually you see people praying, you see people extorting the gods. You see people bemoaning and willing and what has been done. But this was one where it was just pure reason.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  It was logic. It was like, are you seriously considering rescuing your son? All of the gods have lost sons and daughters to this war and to the violence of the humans. Um, it's death, not just a natural consequence of life. It was a weird moment where I would have never thought that he would be open to being convinced.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  And so it's also like, the book is a, it's a contradiction in the way life is. You know, you could, you could, you could be all powerful and still be swayed by reason. You could be capricious and, and cruel and still have a soft bite and rescue somebody because, because you say that they are ordained not to die in Troy.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, I just want to mention something about the plot to make clear what you just said. The extraordinary moment and it, I don't, I don't remember if, if Homer tells you in advance how it's going to turn out, but you know, it's going to turn out this way that, uh, Achilles, who's not helping his teammates, his comrades, uh,

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Allows his best friend, Patroclus, to go into battle. He gives him limits. He says, "Don't pursue them. Make sure you don't go past a certain point." And of course, Patroclus fails to take that advice and Hector kills him. But one of the more extraordinary parts of the book, it's again a incredible plot twist, is that Achilles, because he loves Patroclus, wants to protect him. So he gives him his armor. So when Patroclus goes into battle, he's wearing the best, he's got the best gear. And as you say, when Hector kills Patroclus, he takes his armor. He doesn't just take it as a trophy. He puts it on. And

• 27:51Speaker 00

  the emotional and it's such a visceral image of wearing your enemy's armor. And it's a theme that runs through the whole book, by the way. There's two horrible motifs of war that run, among others, that run through the book. One is that when a person is killed in the war, his enemy takes the armor. It's sort of a trophy of triumph. And the second thing is, you want to keep the body. So a lot of the book is about making sure that the body is not disfigured. To die out in the plains, out in the field, in the battlefield,

• 28:35Speaker 00

  and be eaten by dogs and birds is everybody's unspoken fear. And Patroclus, there's a whole chapter about the Greeks trying to get Patroclus's body back to the ships and to save it from being despoiled by the Trojans. And similarly, this is just an incredible image. I had heard about it as a child. My dad had told me this story. But Achilles, after he avenges the death of Patroclus and kills Hector,

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Takes his body, ties it to the back of his chariot and drives it around town for, not town, but around the camp for days. I think it's 12 days, which his body should be grotesquely disfigured. And yet, the gods intervene and they keep Hector's body pristine. They don't allow it to decay, which is an important motif in literature often, that certain people's bodies don't decay, like normal people's. And they, the gods protect it from being disfigured by being dragged along the ground. And it's a huge thing

• 29:51Speaker 00

  to keep your, to be able to bury your dead and to keep your armor. I'll just mention that after Hector takes his armor, Achilles' armor, Achilles needs a new set. This is a crazy chapter.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  At first, I thought he was gonna go to war. See, this is the thing. I thought that he was going, that one Homer is actually better than the movie. And people often say the book is better than the movie.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  But I think that the Iliad as a book, Hector has way more dimension. You know, when he kills Patroclus and he takes the armor, he is cruel. He is as insulting and biting as anybody else. He's really cruel to Paris. It's almost as if it's a

• 30:36Speaker 00

  His half-brother.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  His half-brother, who Helena Troy, and this is how the whole war starts. But he is not oblivious to the absurdity of the situation they're in, and that is the fault of his brother. He does not pretend like that's not the case. And I thought that was just one of the really compelling things that made the book so engaging, is that, you know, people had real dimension and bite. They were cruel at times, and the cruelty backfired on them. But they had that dimension. They made mistakes.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  So, when Achilles, you know, we'll come back to that, because I agree with that, although I I think in the first part of the book Hector is by far the most compelling character. He's extraordinary. His scene, which we talked about in the first episode with his wife is unbelievable. But Achilles, who is a very dislikeable character through much of the book, in my mind redeems himself. I'll be interested in if you agree, but I just want to mention this crazy intermediate chapter, this little digression, which would have been cut in a normal movie. They would have left this on the cutting room floor. They would never would have made it to the final version of the film. Because Achilles gives Patroclus his armor and because Hector

• 31:53Speaker 00

  takes the armor after he kills Patroclus, Achilles needs a new set of armor, doesn't want to go, even though he's the greatest warrior on the battlefield, you gotta have armor. So I think it's his mother goes up to the gods and says, she goes to Hephaestus, who's the god of the forge, he's the craftsman of armor, and that scene, I can't do justice to it, it's a long, long scene, I'm not gonna read it, but the scene where Hephaestus crafts a new, even better, incredible set of armor and a shield, and at one point, I was wondering,

• 32:34Speaker 00

  did I hallucinate this? Because I read this last part on an 11-hour cross-country flight and I was going in and out of sleep. The shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles, this new set, has like living scenes on it. There's like multiple towns and there's stuff happening on the shield where the people in the town are doing this, that, and the other. It's like a hologram. It's insane.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  This is one of my favorite. This is one of my favorite parts. This is book 18. It was one of my favorite parts because I thought also, so it's this part at the beginning where Achilles is playing a liar and they come in and they get him to go to war and it says something to the effect that he rose from his peace. And what I thought was beautiful is that when he rose from his peace, this idea that he both rose to break his peace. So it was a physical action that broke his peace. But also this idea of what is peace and you had this great warrior who knew how to play the lyre, but was singing about war. So then it became this thing that you could have peace in a recounting of stories of war.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  And I felt like it was an argument that we live in all of the time. We talk about video games, you talk about violent movies. It was saying that Achilles could be in peace as he sings of war. So I could be in peace. This, this, the Iliad could be about something else besides teaching me how to be angry and how to be violent, which, which is one of the arguments that we make about great literature all the time. And so I thought that that was a beautiful rendition of it because his peace was only broken when it actually asked him to physically engage in war. And that was the thing that broke his peace. But later on, it was this idea in, in chapter 18, when you was getting the shield. I thought it was another reminder though, that like, again, you don't go to war without the rest of the world.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  When you, when you carrying this, this armor in a battle that is supposed to protect you, the actual thing that's protecting you, if you're ever protected at all, is this real hope of the best of humanity, which is the realization that

• 34:43Speaker 01

  you could have all of it juxtaposed. I mean, Patroclus might be one of the most honored characters in the book. Uh, he, he was one of the most noble characters in the book. You know, he wanted, he was pleading with Achilles to fight and, and, and by my recollection, it never felt, nobody really was ever fighting for just money. They sometimes were offended, you know, by, by like the, like, you know, I don't need the money right now. Achilles was like, you don't, yeah, I don't need the money. Let's go fight now. I'm in it, I'm in it, you know, but Patroclus was this honorable dude who really, he stops. Uh, when he's on his way to tell Achilles of how bad it's going. He meets a friend that's in a bad way. And the friend is like, I'm good, just leave me. And he's like, and I can't leave you like this. And he's a, a medicine man as well and, and tries to help this guy.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  And then has to eventually leave because the war's going so bad. Then he says, I hate to leave you, but I have to leave you to go to Achilles to try to get help. But my point is that. I learned that Petrouchka was killed somebody in a dice game. You know, and so there's this idea that that you don't have to be the sum total of a thing that you did in the past. I think connects to the idea that, you know, Achilles redeemed himself. And and part of, for me, what Achilles redeemed himself is, is how do you apologize? For your foolishness, you know, how do you apologize for your anger? And how you do it, him and Agamemnon did it, but how do you do it in a way that acknowledges the power of the gods? But sort of really, really says, what kind of fool am I? And I actually think that he did it better than Agamemnon in some ways, because

• 36:11Speaker 01

  he was the character who who had to reflect on profound loss. And I think the way that he dealt with Priam at the end. You know, he and he dealt with it with with, he didn't deal with it out of ignorance. He knew that a god brought him, but he also, he also. Everybody believed that he would disobey the gods, you know? So it wasn't as if, you know, it's this point about free will existing in a world in which we know that the gods are acting with reckless. You know, while the bed and on the destruction of the lives of humans. I just thought, I thought it was beautiful for that reason, that this sort of paired relationship between the two of them. And what both of us say is about being able to transform your life.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're going to get to Achilles in a minute. I just, I want to tell listeners, if you're reading the book now and you're in the middle of it and say, chapter 14 or chapter 16 or chapter eight, the last, it, keep going. The last six chapters are, seven chapters are. You, it's as moving as anything you'll ever read. Uh, it's, uh, it's extraordinary and it's only, um, as you, as you alluded to earlier, Dwayne, that. On the surface, this is a dark, bleak book about death and violence. But that's not what it's really about. It's about pride, and it's about ego, and it's about destiny.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  It's about freedom, and it's about recognizing your failings. So, you know, part of the last third of the book is Agamemnon and Achilles recognizing that they've been doing this ridiculous feud, and it's killed a bunch of their friends, and how trivial and stupid it was. But when they were in the middle of it, they couldn't recognize it, couldn't admit it, and their ego kept cropping up. Um, I just remembered the thing.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  And you know. Oh, go ahead.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  The thing I was gonna mention earlier is that when you talked about the two speeches being word for word, Odysseus does actually kind of mess up the instructions, but he does at one point quote exactly what Agamemnon told him to say. And I think the reason is because this book was not written down. It was memorized. So when you got to a passage where a character is doing something that was alluded to earlier, it's often going to be literally a transcription, a transcript of the previous set of remarks, because when you want to deliver it out loud and sing it, you want to make sure you got it right, and it made it a lot easier.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and yes and no, though, because it's also something that's really clever that happens as a poet, just thinking about the artistry in it and what I was still. So Odysseus does memorize that part word for word, right?

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  And then you say, well, Agamemnon told him to do it. So then he goes to Achilles and tells Achilles, and Achilles is like, okay, I need you to tell him exactly what I said, word for word. When Odysseus goes back to Agamemnon, he does not. He's like, I'm not repeating any of those things. He went back and said, you know.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it didn't turn out.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Achilles is still in his anger. He's still in his anger. I don't think he's gonna be at the party, right? And so I do, I think it's both, but also think it's this way. And I don't think, I think it was about.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Odysseus' belief that the two of them would do the right thing at some point. And he was like, I will tell you exactly what Agamemnon says. He didn't even, he didn't say the part about he has to bend his knee to Agamemnon. No, he said everything except that one line.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  That's small.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Right. I'm gonna leave this little part out. I will say that. So I also thought that, I don't know, I mean, I, we, I've often heard people talk about, um, Don Quixote as, as being the birthplace, the, the birth of the novel. It's something about the Iliad being such an old story. That's refreshing, it's surprising because you see how embedded within it. It's so much of the ways in which we still tell stories now.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and I do think that all of the, you know, mnemonic devices, but we use those even when we do them with just phrases and things like that. I think that we're always telling ourselves how to remember the story of our lives. And, and for real, this for me is a beautiful model because the hardest thing I think for us to do is when we in our moments of suffer, of suffering or sorrow or struggle to remember that our lives are still yoked to the lives of a whole lot of others. And I think this is, that's one of the things that I walked away from reading a book over being immersed in it for like just three days is, is how interconnected all of these lives were, even, even the lives of the gods.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  They couldn't exist really without these humans that who, who, who they kept entangling themselves with.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  That's beautiful. Um, I want to read a passage about mortality and mercy. Uh, it kind of illuminates Achilles' character. It's not a very flattering portrait. Um, and again, I want to come back into it a little bit. We'll talk about why I think Achilles redeems himself. But in this scene.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Achilles stumbles on a character called Lycaean. Lycaean is a son of Priam, like Hector. I think Priam has 50 or so sons. He's got a lot of, they're all, you know, part brothers to each other, most of them. And it turns out Achilles has already captured him once before in a previous war. It's shipped him off to slavery, but he escapes. And now, to his very bad misfortune, is captured again when Achilles is in a very different mood. And Lycaean first points out that even though he's Hector's half-brother, he's only a

• 42:20Speaker 00

  half-brother because they have different mothers. And he says, "Don't kill me. I'm not from the same womb as Hector who killed your friend, your strong, gentle friend." Meaning, "Okay, I'm related to Hector, but at least we had different mothers." And Achilles' response is, you know, he also offers him money. You know, he says, "Let me go. I'll pay you off." This is another constant theme. It very rarely works. It obviously depends on the circumstances, but in this case Achilles is not interested. Here's his response to the plea of Lycaean for mercy.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Fool, don't talk to me of ransom. No more speeches. Before Patroclus met his day of destiny, true, it warmed my heart a bit to spare some Trojans. Drove, I took alive and auctioned off as slaves. But now, not a single Trojan flees his death. Not one, the gods hand over to me before your gates. None of all the Trojans, sons of Priam, least of all." So that's his, he's basically saying, "You're done." And here's the part I think is just so haunting. He says, Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you. And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life, a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you, death and the strong force of fate are waiting. There will come a dawn, or a sunset, or a high noon, when a man will take my life in battle too. It's just unbelievable. Achilles, and then he kills him really gruesomely, by the way, which I won't read. So Achilles is, he's a death machine at this point, but it doesn't stop him from saying,

• 44:33Speaker 00

  he says, "Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?" So he calls him friend, inside, I got from George Steiner, and he writes about this book, this passage in his book, Errata. So he addresses him as friend. Now, by what right does he have to call this man he's about to slaughter, his friend? And I think the way I read it is, they're both mortal, they're both gonna die. Okay, so this time, Lycan's gonna die first. There's no reason to moan about it. It's inevitable. We're humans, we're all gonna die. And so, you know, he's saying, "Come, friend, you too must die. We have, we share this."

• 45:15Speaker 00

  And then, of course, he says, "You know, just to prove my point, Patroclus died, and he's better than you are. So how are you gonna justify your surviving? And even I'm gonna die, who is the son of a great man, the mother who gave me life, a deathless goddess." What an incredible line, just the writing, it's just so good.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  You know, and the wild thing about that is that... The characters do get differentiated in those ways. Like Achilles has a kind of self-awareness. Menelaus has a kind of self-awareness. Diomedus has a kind of self-awareness that some of the characters actually lack. And you could see like that, that he believed that he could bribe Achilles on the battlefield. It's several people who think that they're going to bribe their way to surviving. And it's like, why would you believe that this is going to happen? Um, yeah, I think that that was one, but also that set up the turn that happens in the end. Because you could just see Achilles as heartless, as brutal, as fully, fully committed to rage. And then you see him soften.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And I think that's, that, that scene right there is the setup for, you know, returning Hector's body. Because that's what makes it feel wildly more authentic. I actually thought he was going to let him go. I was, I was pre him son, like him. I mean, and what he was saying sounded compelling to me. I thought, oh, yeah, you, you did save him once. So I, I thought, I thought Achilles was a baby. You know what? I'm gonna send you back to your dad since your half brother's in coming. He was like, nah, this is not going to work. You're not going to patronize me. I know you didn't bring up my friend's name to save your life. This will not work.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I want to, let's talk a little bit about the softening of Achilles. Before we do that, I, I want to give an insight that I got from Ido Hebroni that didn't make it into the recording of the first episode we did, which is that we hate Achilles. And he's horrible. He's selfish. He, he's merciless. As you say, we're going to learn his mercilessness has a redemptive change. He changes. But in the first part of the book, he's, seems incredibly selfish. He's letting his friends die for his ego because he's in a feud with Agamemnon.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  But talking to Ido, he, he points out that, and I can't believe I didn't see this. Maybe you saw it. Their feud is because Agamemnon takes his woman, Briseus, that he'd earned in battle.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  And you think, well, that's kind of trivial. That's kind of, isn't that a little bit petty? Your commander steals your, what you think you're entitled to. Okay, fine. You're annoyed. You're angry, but you're going to let your friends die? In fact, you're going to demand from the gods that your friends be killed, your comrades? So he's very dislikeable in the first part of the book, but Edo points out, which I can't believe I didn't see it, is that Agamemnon's doing exactly what Paris did. So the Greeks go to war to avenge this grotesque act of Paris to steal the wife of Menelaus. And here's Agamemnon doing

• 48:36Speaker 00

  the same thing. He's stealing the woman of Achilles because he thinks he's, he'd like to have her. She's very attractive and very skilled and has great crafts and, and she's, you know, a great attractive trophy. And that's what Paris did. So what Achilles is saying is that this, I'm out. I'm done. This is unacceptable. This is not a petty emotional thing. You've lost your credibility as my commander. We went to war over an injustice. You're doing the same injustice, which of course happens in war all the time, right?

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Both sides inevitably, no matter who thinks they have the more moral cause, do things that are inhuman, that are cruel beyond words. And so Achilles has just lost his, for him, Agamemnon's lost his credibility as his commander. It's a great, great insight.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  And it was, it's another passage early on where, you know, you wonder if it's self-serving of Achilles when he says it, but he goes into this whole riff about why they can't convince him to fight. And he said, we're all here to serve and to fight and to die. But if we're not going to follow the, he actually explains it. He says, if we're not going to follow the rules, if we're not going to have honor, then I'm not going to be involved in it anymore. So actually, I mean, it was. Because I know that Achilles dies in it, and one of the reasons why I was compelled by him from the first page is that I really do think that he was forcing himself to stand on principle, independent of the carnage his standing on principle was going to create.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  And, and I think that he knew he wasn't going to make it home from the very beginning. I think that one difference in the, in Troy, the movie with Brad Pitt, in reading this that I found profoundly unsettling, was that Achilles put the armor on Patroclus.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  You know, because in, in the movie, Patroclus like sneaks out, and what you find is that Achilles, the overwhelming grief he feels, is, is also part impossible because it was like his decision to make.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  You know, a, a, and I, I, I feel like that was also a part of, for me, the arc of his character. He was trying to be principled. He was trying to say, I told you that I wasn't going to fight, but this is what I could do. And, and it worked, and he was being a strategist, and he was trying to, you know, abide by his principles. And, and you, you could see when he comes to Agamemnon at the end, he was like, everything is over now. Patroclus is, is dead. I, I realized that I wasn't valuing the thing that I should have valued the most, which, incidentally, is the thing that they all end up going back to before they die, is the families that they left behind. You know, everybody is evoking the family and the life that was independent of the spoils of war. Like, and, and so it's also this interesting narrative

• 51:34Speaker 01

  of what matters most. When the front end, they talk about the spoils and the riches, but when your head is smashed, then when you mourn in your good friend, and everybody has good friends, you know, it's not, it's not isolated to the, to the, um, Argives, it's not isolated to the Trojans. The Achaeans have great friendships too, right? And so you see that at the end, the thing that's most lost is the joy that comes from having a great friendship. That is the thing that's most, you know, profound about Achilles' loss. It's not even, it's not even a woman that he claimed in war, which also, you know, kind of puts the lie to his anger around it. And, and even, even, even, even Helen is constantly

• 52:18Speaker 01

  saying, I wish I would have died those 20 years ago. I wish I hadn't. And come here is the kind of frivolousness of the frailty of human decisions that create all of the disorder that exists in the book and the inscapability of the frailty of human decision making. That's that's also one of the lessons of the book, I think, is that humans are fallible and you have to keep going. You know, that's that's I feel like that's the lesson that's one of the lessons of the whole book is you have to keep trying to figure it out.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  So let's talk about the softening of Achilles. So the first softening, obviously, is he weeps constantly after Patroclus is killed. He weeps over the body. He weeps. He's in despair. And here's it's the toughest guy in the world, right? He's the strongest, toughest, scariest, manliest man, but he weeps uncontrollably, page after page. So that's the first thing. And then this whole thing about Hector's body, which I was totally unprepared for. So I know he's going to give it back, but I just assumed that, you know, Priam's gonna make the case and come visit him and Achilles is going to feel sorry for

• 53:34Speaker 00

  him. And before we do that, by the way, there's this absurd chapter where they have these, I mean, so beautiful that I felt like the whole pace of the book slows down in the last 25%. So Patroclus, when they bury him and they're gonna, I think they burn him on a funeral pyre, but they have these games. They have this sort of weird interregnum where they

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  They compete against each other in this most in this really sweet and honorable way. And Achilles is doling out all these incredible prizes of animals and livestock and tripods, which are these bronze things for holding kettles on to cook, which are really important and hard to make. And I had trouble figuring that out. I'd ask Claude, why were they all into tripods? You know, what does that mean? Well, they were important. So they had this weird funeral games, which is

• 54:33Speaker 01

  I thought they had cameras.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  I don't think so. They have these weird games. And then I, Priam wants to get his son's body back. And Achilles has no interest in returning it. And, and this gets back to your question about free will and, and human impulse. The gods kind of say, you know, this can't, we can't have this. This cannot be that Hector is going to keep being dragged around and his father and mother are not going to bury him. So the gods set up a negotiation. They, they, they work on Priam. Priam's afraid to go, by the way. He's going to go visit Achilles' tent, which is, could be suicidal. Because he's going to get murdered, killed by the Greeks.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  So they assure him they're going to protect him and how that works out is so cinematic. He gets like a secret god, I forget who it is, to escort him and fake, fake him out for a while. It's amazing scene.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Hermes.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's Hermes. And then the gods go to Achilles and say, you know, I know you're really mad about your friend, but you gotta give Hector's body back. And he's like, I think he resisted at first, but ultimately it's, on the surface, it's very disappointing. The gods compel Priam and, and Achilles to this reconciliation. And I thought, well, that's going to take all the emotion out of it, right? Because they're not really acting freely. They're under the pressure of the gods. And instead, it becomes one of the most extraordinary scenes in, in, in the book and of course, in literature. Despite the role of the gods, their encounter is so human.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  It's, it doesn't feel coerced. They have an incredible, it's not even a bond. It's not like Achilles feels sorry for, it's hard to explain. They connect with each other as human beings in this and in this recognition of tragedy and sorrow and despair. It's it's just extraordinary. And I just gonna say one more thing, and then I want you to talk about your reaction to it. The role of food and hospitality is is so ever-present in the book. And especially in this this encounter between Priam and Achilles.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  They break bread together, right? They're enemies. They're enemies to the death. And and worse, Achilles has killed this man's son. And yet they create this unbelievable bond with

• 57:12Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. Achilles has killed multiple.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, true.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Achilles has killed multiple of this man's sons.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  It's true.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  He's killed at least six of his sons.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  True, true. And yet somehow it they have this extraordinary this extraordinary encounter.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  But I I want to say two things. One, remember that Hermes posed as Achilles' right-hand man.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  When he went to Priam.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Which also says something different about honor. Also says something different about what does it mean to expect kindness and generosity even from a stranger? And even to such a degree that the stranger is connected, like Achilles might grant you mercy. But why would you believe that his right-hand man would do the same thing? He might kill you on the spot. He might believe that you have something to fury his plan. So so that was one point. But it would what I thought, because, you know, I read this this Father's Day weekend.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  And and in a real way, you have so many, you know, the the life expectancy rate of black men in America is is tragically low anyway. And I'm dealing with, you know, thinking about a friend of mine who passed younger than he might have. But also, I've been obsessed with with early death since I was young, because I went to prison as a kid. But but this book is is really the lives of a lot of older men. Who lived to be seniors and a lot of young men who didn't make it. And and these men are all engaged in in the deaf in in the deaf sport. So it's all it's this constant awareness.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  And what I thought was compelling about the end is that when Priam was trying to convince Achilles to let his son go. He said, remember your own father, great god like Achilles. As old as I am, past the threshold of deadly old age, no doubt the countrymen round about him plague him now. With no one there to defend him, beat away disaster, no one, but at least he hears you're still alive. And his whole old heart rejoices, hopes rising day by day to see his beloved son come sailing home from Troy. And and what I found beautiful about Priam. Is that he was able to, you know.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Go to Achilles and not lose his dignity. By invoking, I I think the the sort of.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Idea of fatherhood and the idea that that Achilles knew that he wasn't going to leave Troy. But also Achilles, like Petrouchka was like his brother, his son, you know, I mean. It was it was he was all his best friend. And so was this notion that I think he he remarked on this twin loss that Achilles was feeling. He wouldn't be able to raise his sons and and had like the Priam had. But also given that like Priam had it, why would you deny the man to have something that you know. Your father was about to be denied because you knew you were doomed not to leave the shores of Troy. Um, or you hope you would leave and be buried with Petrouchka. And so I that's why I found it really moving. I found it. What is the duties of, you know, um, what did I know, what did I know of loves austere?

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  And lonely offices was just the last two lines of Robert Hayden's Those Winter Sundays. But I think that that moment for Priam captures that what did I know? What did I know of loves austere and lonely offices? Like, how do you know what the duty of love is? And Priam could not have expected, he says, and look at me. I have wept on the feet of the man who who murdered my son. I've kissed the man, the hands of the man who murdered my son. I just think he put us in a whole different state of of what fathers do. For their sons, even even to the point of, I'm there already, they're already gone. But you still have to be a father. I I I think that might be why I found it particularly beautiful to to read it at this particular time of year.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  You mentioned the Hayden poem, Those Winter Sundays. Read, just read those last, say those last two lines slowly. It's, that poem is about a, a boy who's, can't understand, his father's not a warm man. He's, he's a, he's a harsh man. And he assumes that lack of warmth is, says something about what his father feels. And of course, he's wrong. He doesn't understand, he can't understand what his father feels. Read, what are those last two lines again?

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  What did I know? What did I know of loves austere and lonely offices?

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  And of course, we're all somewhat ignorant of, I mean, I love that line, I've always loved that poem. Loves lonely offices, as if it's a, a place you go to work and do your duty and, and you get repaid for, you know, even though it's lonely. But yeah, fathers.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Although, I mean, although Elliot, you know, reminds you that sometimes you don't get repaid. I mean, that's the tragedy. I mean, I actually think that the, the son writing about the father is also thinking about the fact that you don't get paid because sometimes the very people who should see your generosity and your love and what you've done, Priam is constantly concerned with that about all of his sons, including Paris. You know, his sons have literally brought ruin to the family, all but Hector, which is also one of the deeply profound reasons why he's distraught because he is in some way not, uh, uh, uh, he's in some way an honest man, constantly telling his sons how, how they are just like not good human beings. And that's why he's so disappointed in them and devastated with Hector's death.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  But I, I, I also just think that, um,

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  We say, you know, you can't know. Except literature gives you some kind of sense of it. You know, reading that in, it it it gave me a sense of the lonely office of fatherhood. When when I I have a friend whose um whose father, friend of mine, he got he got arrested and he got sentenced to some time in prison. And he had an option to to get out early. And he was going to the hearing. And his father came and and and testified in front of in front of the judge. And he talks about he my friend wrote an essay about it, Randall Horton. And he talks about his father like like weeping and getting emotional, but essentially pleading for his life. It is literally, oh, it's like I I never thought of it this way.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  But it is a modern rendition of what preem did. You know, it's like my son is not innocent. This this is not why I'm here. This is this is not the conversation that we're having. We're having a conversation about like what a man deserves that is that is independent of the marker of guilt. You know, what mercy does a man deserve? And and I think that's why I found myself like deeply moved by it because you can learn from hearing the story. I I think in some ways that the whole point of the story, even when a story tells you, you cannot know unless you've been here. The story is actually trying to give you a clue. No, actually, you do know because now you have been here.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  You know, for three days I was on a battlefield in in Troy, wondering who would survive. And strangely, even though I know the story, it was still able to surprise me again and again because Homer got to choose when the story went in. And so when you read all of those other iterations, you forget that you haven't read this one, which is making all kinds of decisions that changes the texture of like your emotional response to the book. And I've, yeah, I mean, I I this is I didn't know it was a it was a um such a book about, you know, fathers and sons and and and how fraught it is to try to become a man in a world, you know, within the shadow of of your history.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  One of the stranger aspects of this book, which you mentioned in passing, and I think we talked about in the first episode of the conversation. Hector just is totally disgusted by Paris for provoking this and then for failing to fight at the level of intensity that he thinks he needs to, for being the first cause of the whole problem. But I don't think, and I just hadn't thought of until you talked about it, I don't think Priam ever reprimands Paris. Hector recommends, Hector is his half-brother.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Hector reprimands him constantly in the first part of the book. But Priam never says, you know, maybe you ought to give that woman back. Like, maybe you made a mistake. He accepts this war, which is horrible, as his destiny. As, even though it's his son who provokes it, he never tries to fix it. You could, I don't know whether we should judge him for that. But he just accepts it. And, I mean, there is a scene, it takes about four lines or so where, and Helen makes a very brief appearance at the beginning of the book, and it, a bunch of guys say, yeah, I guess I can understand why

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  you'd go to war for, or go to war to try to get her back. You know, the line from, it's from a play by Christopher Marlowe, when he says about Helen, is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I thought that was in Homer.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  No, I did too, but it's not. And burned the topless towers of Iliad. Iliad is Troy. So basically, she's so striking.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  That she caused a thousand ships to leave Greece and come to Troy, and ultimately leading to the destruction of Troy. So she's a pivotal figure. But Priam, anyway, Priam never reprimands his son. And he does this extraordinary act of retrieving his son's body, partly for himself, partly for his wife, who also wants to mourn her son, Hector. And as you point out, he's one of many who get killed. And this is the only one they really, they want. Because Hector is extraordinary.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  This is literally the only one. I forgot that. He has all these children, but this is the only one the whole, the whole Troy rejoices when they get their body back. And in fact, you know, it's an 11-day celebration and preordained the day that the war was going to commence on. It's this whole rich, you know, it's wild to think that these two war parties know each other, know each other's rights so well and are willing to honor him, even in the face of death. Because Achilles, not only does he say, "I'm gonna give you your son, but I also am gonna use my power and my influence to let you live another 11 days." And it's also just interesting to, in the book, knowing that Achilles could make that commitment. And we believe that Agamemnon is gonna hold on to it.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I forgot about that. That's incredible.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  You know, I wrote a book, I wrote this huge, so in Ambassadors of the Regan area, I had this 100-line poem that I wrote in Iambic Pentameter. And I used a lot of lines like "the wine dark asphalt." And I was trying to, like, use these riffs that I got from Homer, or from what I imagined to be Homer. But I also threaded lines from Shakespeare into the poem. I threaded lines from Public Enemy into the poem. And what I found fascinating is that when the poem got reviewed, it was this 100-line poem about this kid that goes to prison. So an epic about some young kid that goes to prison. But it intentionally wasn't me. The kid was in prison for murder. But what I found fascinating is somebody, a reviewer, said, "And these gritty, street-soaked lines."

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  And what I found fascinating is people didn't hear the Homer in it because sometimes you you choose to hear what's there. And also, I think it says something about the flexibility of of language in this book and like the Fagels translation and the other translations in a way in which, in some sense, the best ways to describe moments in life, the best ways from a thousand years ago, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, still work today, which which for me is something that's revelatory about the possibility that you could find in words. That that idea about hold your horses from the funeral chapter? I was like, wait, is this where the line, hold your horses, came from? Because it was

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  such a perfect phrase that, and I know what it means colloquially, right? I had never heard it as like metaphor operating in a real world, literally, the older man is telling a younger man, hold your horses, you are about to get us injured here. So many moments like that.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  Well, the scene which I already read the first part of Lycan, after Achilles kills him, he takes him, I think, by the foot and slings him into the river. And he says, he says, sleep with the fishes.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  He says, sleep with the fishes.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know Greek, so I have to find out. But is that Fagels, the translator, creating this great double entendre? Or is it, is that where maybe where it comes from? In fact, and he says this, it's a beautiful thing. He says, sleep with the fishes, they'll clean your body. They're going to eat your flesh. He says, I think they're going to bolt you, meaning like bolt your food down. But yeah, you saw that one too, right?

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was so, I was like, what? You, I, yeah, it was, this is why I honestly think it's part adventure story, you know, part war story, part deep psychological analysis of a human psyche, but also a lesson on how the the circular telling them a story, how to to keep going back to like what the center is, but doing it in different ways. So by the time you get to the end, you know, you recognize that you haven't read a war story at all. You read a story about all of the ways in which the human condition frustrates our ability to know each other. And still somehow, we do know each other.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's beautiful.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  Maybe we'll close, let's talk a little bit about

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  this human need to have the body.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  You know, when, when the United States

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  captured Osama bin Laden, they made sure the body was lost at sea. At least, I think that's the official story. And here in the Middle East, I mean, over the last three years, we've had a lot of situations where sacrifices are made, not just for living hostages, but for just the bodies. And there's a deep religious tie and, and connection to the body, even though the body is understood to be just a garment for the soul. There's something about the body. You know, it's incredibly, it's horrifying that, that this need for closure

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  is 2,800 years old and hasn't gone away. Right? What really was it such a big deal? To have the body for, for prayer, but it is, and it hasn't changed. Talk about that, you have any ideas, thoughts on that?

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I also believe that

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  the, the book tells you why, because you get to see that to mourn. I also feel like sometimes we live in a world,

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  not to compare myself to Achilles, but when I got profoundly depressed, I literally remember writing you on my way to Italy, telling you that I am weeping every day and I am struggling and incapable of understanding. And I think if you take it out of the situation that is happening in the book and you say, what can happen to a man where like everything in his life fractured and he's left in a, in, in what feels like an inconsumable grief or a unrelenting grief, right? I felt like I was there. And you could, and I sensed that in Achilles, when you had somebody who never cried and now was constantly weeping. Like, it reminded me of the world that I was in. Man, he knew he had a source to his weeping, but you couldn't just grieve alone.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  You had to have access to the bandwidth of, of human emotions, but also to the history of a human being. I think as a way in which death ties you to, to, to the moment of death. But, but that's not what's gonna make you whole. And so you see that first Achilles, they needed the body back, but the body was the start of the conversation where you become whole. And you become whole as a part of a ritual that begins with the body. And then you had all of the games, but games weren't just games. The games were opportunities for old men to remember where they were young. And the games were opportunities for young men to imagine being old again. It's a moment in which they race and Ajax, little Ajax is super fast. And, um, one of the guards clips him up as he's about to win the race, right?

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  And it says that he falls across the finish line, comes in second with like, you know, waste and stuff all in his face. And the older man, I think it was Od- uh, uh, um, Odys- uh, Odysseus wins. But another kid says, you know, Odysseus can't, can't beat nobody in a race. He like three times as old as him, right? And so, so then you realize the race is not even about the great gifts. The race is about these generations communing with each other in play in the face of the fact that some of their lives are gonna get cut profoundly short. So I think the attachment is more so about how do you start a grieving process that includes the full capaciousness of a person's life?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Because otherwise, you can't get out of the cycle of just relentless weeping. Um, Priam says to Achilles, "I haven't slept for 12 days."

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  You know, it is a physicality to the mourning that happens when you find out about the body first becoming just a garment.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  And then, and then how do you make that body more than a garment again on the back end? I think it is through the 11 day ritual of prayer. It is through the 11 day ritual of honoring. It is through the 11 day ritual of remembering. And I say all of this as somebody who recognizes that the horror of exile is it doesn't just cut you, make you incapable of experiencing those things in your actual life, but sometimes the exile scripts you of the experiences that allow you to have that structure in the back of your head. You know, some, some of those men, their lives got so cut, so short that they might have never participated in this thing as an adult.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  So they didn't even fully understand the rites that were going to happen to usher them home. And I think that's also part of the tragedy that, that comes with this idea of the body being the container for so much of, of the memories that people walk around with.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  He even kept the bones, you know, I mean, and, and they was really meticulous about it. They, they burnt all of these other bones and they was like, hey, be careful, just get Petrouchka's bones. Here's in the middle beside, yeah, beside that heavy urn. Those are his bones. Don't get no other bones because we're taking his bones back. And Petrouchka's acts Achilles, his last, his, his last request was that, that he bury his bones with Achilles, that Achilles bones be buried with Petrouchka's bones. It's a strangely, profoundly intimate portrayal of, of friendship. And, and I say, I don't say strange as in weird. I say strange as in it's not a familiar thing that we notice even in the writings today of, of, of the intimate relationships among men.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, that's, it's, that whole thing is just so powerful.

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  I got nothing more to say, Duane. I love listening to your thoughts on this book. I wish we could talk tomorrow about it. Do you have anything you want to add about the experience now that it's behind you?

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  Thank you. You know, we talk about this all the time in great books and how, and even my organization, Freedom Reads, we talk about what it means to read a book with somebody.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  Before you keep going, take a second and talk about what Freedom Reads is for people who don't know, because it's an amazing project.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  So Freedom Reads is an organization I began when somebody asked me, what would you do for people in prison if money wasn't an issue? I said, I would put a million books in prison because we put millions of people in prison. And I said, I would do it one library at a time. And then through various constraints on the system, I ended up conceptualizing a library as three bookcases that are accessible on each side, that sit about 44 inches high and have 500 books. And it has the Iliad and it has the Odyssey, you know? It has a lot of other amazing and dope books in it, but we put them on the cell block. So if you have a prison that has 2,000 people and they're spread across 20 cell blocks, we would come and put this 500-book, beautiful, handcrafted library, Freedom Library,

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  on each cell block so that the people could read in community. I want to say one self-serving thing, and I hope you keep this. Not self-serving for me. I want to say a thing that I feel like is really edifying for you, but kind of self-serving for me, because people always ask me how I curate the library, and it's a complicated thing where you talk to a lot of people, but some decisions you just make. And one decision I just made was, Adam Smith can save your life. I put that in the Freedom Library. And I've heard you talk about it as a self-help book. I think it's a sophisticated self-help book, but I would agree that it's a book that's giving you a real practical way for how to live.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  So one of my friends, his name is Anthony Nguyen, he's incarcerated in Virginia, and one of my colleagues named Craig Gore, they're working on an essay. So Craig wanted to interview somebody who has lived with a Freedom Library. And Anthony, they started a book club, and they read 24 books together, you know? They read Don Quixote, they read all kinds of things. They read some Oscar Wilde, they read all kinds of things. But so he says, Anthony, can you tell me, like, what book you found to be the one that you just have to talk about that you read in a Freedom Library? And first, how many books have you read, anyway? He said, well, we read 24 for the book club, and I probably read another 40, so I read 60.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  He starts talking about Adam Smith can save your life. And, and I'm, I'm listening to these two men, both of these men are about 50 years old, right? And he's talking about the book. He's like, yeah, you know, Adam Smith? Everybody says he founded capitalism, but it turns out he wrote this other book called The, The, The Theory of Moral Sentiment. And he spent the next three and a half minutes waxing poetic about Adam Smith. It was so thoughtful, so interesting, so engaging that at the end of the riff, Craig said, wait a minute, tell me who wrote that book again? Tell me the name of the book. I need to get that book. And this is what the Freedom Library does. It creates these, these moments that are radically like unpredictable, unexpected. Another book he talked about was, um, A Gentleman in Moscow.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  You know, and, and, and what I just found beautiful is that he, in real time, over, you know, a 15 minute interview, just talked about why, um, books open up portals to community, to, to grace, to self-reflection. And I feel like in, in, in a very real way, um, this is the first time, first time in my life, actually, that I read a book in concert with somebody and like engaged with the book in this way, because as I was reading it, I was thinking about all conversations. I was highlighting sections, but I also, because I read it so quickly, um, found me losing myself in this book. Also, uh, me losing myself in another, a layer of developing a friendship,

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  which is, is the kind of thing that I, I don't know if it's as efficient a, a way to do something like that as, as reading a book like this in this kind of compressed time where, you know, every emotion in my life got connected to this reading of the book, which meant that every emotion in my life got connected to this conversation, which means that now, you know, you have become a, a, a, a different kind of friend to me. So, so I really do appreciate this because it was pretty dope.

• 1:22:37Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't know how to respond to that other than, I mean, I.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  My book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, I love it. You remember the title is "How Adam Smith Can Save Your Life." It's actually "How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life." But that's a good title, too. It's a better title. But I always felt your library of 500 books, and we'll put a link up to the Freedom Reads Project, you can see pictures of what the... I mean, I just like the bookcase itself. I think it's exquisitely beautiful. And I've had the privilege of being with you and seeing how the project is working. And we've talked

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  a lot about how the library physically is created. And there are many, many... It's 500 books, but there's a lot of good books in the world. And the fact that you decided to include my book, it breaks my heart in the best possible way. I occasionally say the phrase, "I am not worthy." I am not worthy. But the fact that it spoke to someone, it's more than makes my day. It's magnificent. So, thank you for sharing that. But yeah, you and I, we've read... We had a wonderful experience. You can go back and listen to

• 1:24:05Speaker 00

  the episode where I read Invisible Man and you read a book of Primo Levi. And reading books together is a magnificent thing. And talking about it, I had 10 things in this conversation I did not know about or think about. And I'm going to share it with Ido Chivroni, who has been teaching the Iliad for over a decade. And I'm sure he's going to learn a lot from your insights as well. So, I'm just incredibly grateful that... You put the three days into, you're holding up the Primo Levi. What is it? If this be, what is it? Can we get that?

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  If this is a man.

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  If this is a man. Um, and then, uh, the second book in that, what's the other book?

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  The, the truce.

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  The truce, which both, those are the original titles from the Italian that Primo Levi gave the books, but they, in translation, they're typically retitled as Survival of the Ashes. And, um, and also, uh, the other one, he's, it's not called The Truth. It's called, uh, blanket on the title. But anyway, they're, they're not good titles. His original titles are unbelievable. Um, so it's really, it's important. We've had this connection and it's special and I'm looking forward to the next one. Do you want to say anything else about the Iliad before we, before we go?

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I'm, I'm, it's an amazing book. I'm, I'm so happy to have gotten a chance to engage with it. And, and I forgot about the other two books, but, but I think this, this was the first original book. But both of those, I opened my solo show up with a, with a piece from, um, If This Is A Man. I mean, uh, the connection, you know, where I've literally every time I perform my solo show. So at this point, probably, you know, dozens of times I've opened it up with a passage. For, I mean, I'm on a stage and I, and I take the, the book off of the Freedom Library and I open it up. And I, and, and, and the bookmark is a, is a, um, piece of handmade paper from some clothes of mine, uh, some clothes of some friends of mine who did time in prison. I turned it into paper and I read a part that has this one line that says, um,

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  You can read the passage if you want.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. I'll read it. He says, um,

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  "He told me his story and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story because so are all our stories. Hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?" And, and, you know, and I say it from the stage and then the next thing I say is, what do you think? I say, what do you see when you hear the word prison? And then I go into this 90 minute, you know, conversation about my life and incarceration,

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  but in books. But the beautiful thing about it is people always say, no, is a story that you tell just a story about what's in the full pages of the piece, like what's in the four corners of a contract. But it's like, no, the story, the capaciousness of the Iliad, what I just learned is that, you know, it escapes the pages relentlessly. It refuses to be constrained by the fact that it's seemingly just about a war. It makes itself about so many different elements of your life. And I think the same is always true for a good book. And that thing that happens becomes exponentially more true when you read in

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  the company of a generous and intelligent and thoughtful, funny friend. So that's what I will say is that I didn't know that Homer and the Iliad would be a passageway to deepen the friendship. You know, I just thought it was something that I would check off and say, I read it. You know, I mean, I've read the Iliad. And now I'm thinking, no, it's a great book. But but I have profound connections with the world after having read it. You know, it's not, it's not just something to check off on. Yeah, I've read this great book, you know. It's almost like I lived the book and having lived it, I'm a different human being.

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Dwayne Betts. Dwayne, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:28:22Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.