The Victorian critic Samuel Butler was convinced that the Odyssey was written by a woman. The Odyssey is the second of Homer’s epic Greek poems: it tells of the hero Odysseus’s decade-long attempt to return home, after fighting in the brutal Trojan War narrated in the Iliad.
The first poem takes place in a war-camp and on the battlefield; the second in ships, shepherd’s caves, kitchen hearths and island palaces. Hence Butler’s argument in his 1897 book, The Authoress of the Odyssey: “It is rarely in the Iliad that grandeur or force give way to allow the exhibition of domestic affection. Conversely, in the Odyssey the family life supplies the tissue into which is woven the thread of the poem.”
Butler was almost certainly wrong about the Odyssey having an “authoress” – it’s unfashionable nowadays to accept that a poem so moulded by oral transmission might even have a single “author”. Yet Butler’s view of the Odyssey as the more “domestic” of the poems, and thus appropriate for female engagement, remains pervasive.
Over a century after Butler’s analysis, three millennia after the Homeric poems first surfaced, stews over Homer and gender are still boiling over into our public sphere.
In 2017, the decorated academic Emily Wilson became the first woman to publish a translation of the Odyssey in English. It was with her new translation of the Iliad this autumn, however, that fur really started to fly. The pushback wasn’t coming from the academic world, though. Instead, it surfaced from the humming web of online culture warriors: devotees of Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and Elon Musk.
Consider a viral thread on Twitter (sorry, “X”), which recently took flight after accusing Wilson of “a crime against the classics”. The author, a young Elon Musk-admirer named Max who advertises his credentials as a year’s module of classical Greek as an undergraduate, has already been widely mocked by Twitter’s academics for mansplaining Homeric Greek to a full professor with 20 years at an Ivy League faculty under her belt.
Elite mockery, however, isn’t always helpful. Attacks by such men on female scholars like Wilson are not academic critiques; as Max himself tweeted, “many of my criticisms don’t require any knowledge of Greek”. They are salvos in a broader, evidence-free culture war, which takes classical literature as a blueprint for a once-and-future civilisation based on traditionally male virtues. (Elsewhere on our friend Max’s timeline: “It is unethical for men to go to therapy. This is how civilizations die. If you are feeling anxious just go to Lowes or the Home Depot” – American hardware stores.”) Coincidence, perhaps, that women in such a civilisation are reduced to mothers and “war-prizes”.
Young Max argues that Wilson’s translation pursues an agenda “to suck the ancient life” out of Homer’s poems “because she rejects the ancient manly virtues”. Where Butler defined the Iliad by its masculine “force and grandeur”, young Max argues that Wilson’s translation would destroy “the pomp and circumstance” of a warlike poem.
Lest anyone doubt the misogyny behind this approach: he peppered his critique with unflattering still-images of Wilson that he’d taken from video interviews, each paused with her mouth open at just the wrong angle, before complaining that she had “laughed” during a newspaper interview and thus failed to take Homer seriously. He also dismissed Caroline Alexander, the only other women to have published an English-language translation of Iliad. (Many other women, of course, have worked on unpublished translations.)
This may sound like a niche academic row, but it’s just one more case-study in a world in which basic liberal norms – women having a go at translating Greek – are now weaponised online as examples of “woke”. This renders real “wokeness” – of which there’s plenty in academia – harder to tackle intelligently.
The world of academic classics has always had problems with male dominance – not least because you were most likely to get a childhood start on Greek if you attended historically male private schools. As an undergraduate at Oxford, I had a Greek language teacher who only asked questions of the men and would pretend he didn’t see women’s hands raised or hear female voices offering suggestions; in a seminar, I remember two male lecturers joking about which would do better as a Greek warlord with their own booty of slave girls to rape.
By the time I returned to this world for a PhD, things had got much better. But with this slow progress, as in many walks of life, there is a cadre of reactionary men who feel a privileged realm is being slowly stolen from them.
In 2018, the classicist Donna Zuckerberg published Not All Dead White Men, a survey of the ways classical literature has become fetishised in the world of online misogyny. As she points out, the alt-right are fond of using portentous quotes from Marcus Aurelius to dress up old stereotypes about the superiority of the masculine “rational” mind. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing: a little knowledge of the classics becomes a fig-leaf for sexism primped up to seem fancy.
What’s saddest about all this is the insult it renders to the Greeks themselves – dead white men among them. One of the most widely discussed passages in Wilson’s Odyssey concerned an episode of gender-based violence. While Odysseus’s enemies occupy his house, they have intercourse with his slave girls; later, the same women are executed by Odysseus’s son as punishment. Readers raised on Robert Fagles’s popular translation are used to seeing these women described as “sluts” or “whores”. But not only did Wilson restrain herself from such judgement, so did Homer. The original word is δμωαι, which literally means “the overpowered women”; Wilson translates it “slaves” or sometimes “housegirls”.
If this is an erasure of misogyny, it is only of misogyny inserted by later translators. Homer – whoever he was – was no more a mindless channel for his own era’s assumptions than Euripides (famously for his female protagonists) or Shakespeare. What confirms the Homeric poems as great literature is that they contain glimpses of empathy for every soul to whom their lines give breath.
It used to be an anti-woke position to remind readers that the dead white men of literature weren’t all reactionaries – they could share liberal values, too. The classics’ hard-right fan boys would do well to remember that.
