Emily Wilson's 5 crucial decisions she made in her Iliad translation

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
1

This is from the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/09/20/emily-wilson-iliad-translation-terms/

I found it quite interesting, particularly Wilson’s translation of 24.130-1 where Thetis is urging Achilles to return to everyday activities:

ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητι μίσγεσθʹ.

I suppose the “περ” could refer generally to the idea of making love, but it’s would be hard to completely reject the obvious meaning of “γυναικί περ”. Homer may be ambiguous; a translator is forced to choose. If you read any of the other translations Wilson quotes, you would not be aware of the possibility of Wilson’s clearly valid reading.

Mark

2

From the article, which I had to view on archive.is to read:

Even the smallest of words, like “even” (“per” in Greek), can create enormously consequential interpretive challenges for the translator. In Book 24 of the “Iliad,” the goddess Thetis visits her mortal son, Achilles, who is prostrate with grief for his dead friend, Patroclus. Achilles is still dragging the corpse of Patroclus’s killer, Hector, around the city walls every day, and still refusing to eat, drink or have sex — the normal activities of mortals. The goddess asks her son how long he will “devour” his heart with grief, rather than eating normal bread, and she reminds him that it is also good to have sex, or more literally (as I render it) to “join in love” — “even with a woman.”

Let’s not forget the “μεμνημένος … οὔτ’ εὐνῆς” that introduces this sentence. Neglecting the “bed-chamber”, a word often translated “marriage-bed” where it refers specifically to marital sex. But however translated, it is not a word of homosexual love, and would be strange language if Homer really means “even with a woman” next. Which of course he doesn’t. This isn’t an Athenian production. Nor modern slash fiction. Homer does not make sly allusions about homosexuality.

I don’t know how the line is usually translated, but it comes across to me more or less like the fortune cookie joke: “Even a woman can be a fine thing…in bed.”

And this is a strange out-of-character thing to say under any interpretation, both for Thetis and for Homer. The ancient commentaries are full of complaints about the line, and mention the athetization in more than one place.

ἀνοίκειοι γὰρ ἥρωϊ καὶ θεᾷ

τίς ἂν εἴη ταύτης τῆς παραινέσεως ἀπρεπεστέρα παρὰ μητρός;

But Eustathius blames the athetization on prudery: ἀθετοῦσι τοὺς στίχους τούτους οἱ παλαιοί, διά τε ἄλλα, καὶ μάλιστα διὰ τὴν εὐνήν, ὅ ἐστι μῖξιν. τοῖς γὰρ πολεμοῦσιν οὐ τοιούτων ἀλλ’ εὐτονίας χρεία, φασί, καὶ πνεύματος, ὡς καὶ τοῖς γυμναζομένοις. διὸ καὶ οἱ ἀθληταὶ τὸν τοῦ ἀθλεῖν πάντα καιρὸν οὐκ ἀφίεντο πλησιάζειν γυναιξί. The ancients, he says, agreed with Mickey’s storied advice to Rocky about women before a fight.

Making casual comments about the worthlessness of women isn’t really Homer’s thing, unlike for the later Greeks and the commentary tradition. It’s a difficult thing to me to understand how he might have meant this line, if he said it this way.

The περ being taken with ἀγαθόν would be a more Homeric way to understand it, but doesn’t solve the ἀνοίκειοι problem.

3

I’m more or less in agreement with points 1, 3, and 5.

Dog-face: I’m not native in English, but I’m not sure this conveys the idea of shamelessness implied in κυνώπης.

Per: In Homeric poetry homosexual themes are generally suppressed. In the Iliad (20.233–235) Zeus abducts Ganymedes just to serve him wine, while in other sources Zeus makes him his lover. (http://discourse.textkit.com/t/sleeping-beneath-the-portico/11495/1 here’s a very old thread where we discussed this among other things). I don’t think there’s any explicit hint of homosexuality between Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, although later Greek chose to interpret it that way.

In Vol VI in the Cambridge commentary to the Iliad, Nicholas Richardson notes: “In 130 περ must be taken as emphasizing the whole phrase γυναικί … μίσγεσθαι”, and I agree.

4

I don’t think there’s any explicit hint of homosexuality between Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, although later Greek chose to interpret it that way.

This is of course exactly what Emily Wilson says.

On the most linguistically straightforward reading, the phrase suggests that his mother thinks Achilles would prefer to join with someone other than a woman — such as Patroclus, his beloved dead friend. > This may be a surprise, given that earlier in “The Iliad,” the two men were described as sharing their beds with enslaved women, and they are never described by Homer as having sex with each other > — although by the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., readers such as Aeschylus and Plato certainly assumed that they were lovers. Is Thetis suddenly “outing” her son? Or is she simply acknowledging the depth of his desire to be with his dead companion?

Translators sometimes leave the word out entirely (Fagles: “It’s a welcome thing to make love with a woman”) or apply the emphasis to the activity, not the partner (Lattimore: “even to lie with a woman”; Caroline Alexander, “Indeed, it is good to lie with a woman”) — although this is not a natural reading of the Greek word order. > I do not think it is generally the translator’s job to correct or fight against the text; hence my decision to settle on the simple “even with a woman.” Readers can decide for themselves whether Achilles is yearning to “join” Patroclus in a sexual sense or to mingle with his dear ashes in the tomb.

I am not going to comment on the translation until I have actually read it. The faux outrage expressed in various places amuses me. As Wilson says elsewhere if you don’t like her approach don’t read it. Her version is one of many and is not intended to supplant or replace the others.

5

I didn’t want to come across as argumentative, and in any case my disagreements with what Wilson says in this article are rather minor; more like discussion openers, really. So no outrage from my side, this time… The main point I wanted to make is that an argument can be made, and indeed has been made, that the Iliad and the Odyssey poet(s) must have been aware of homosexual elements in the myths, but voluntarily chose to suppress them. To that end, I linked to the earlier 10 year old discussion. Why the poet(s) chose to do so I can’t tell, but I think it’s an interesting question and worthy of discussion.

The case in point is Ganymedes, whom Zeus abducts. In other sources it’s made clear that Ganymedes is to be Zeus’ lover, but in the Iliad he just serves him wine. Iliad 20.231 ff.:

Τρωὸς δ᾽ αὖ τρεῖς παῖδες ἀμύμονες ἐξεγένοντο
Ἶλός τ᾽ Ἀσσάρακός τε καὶ ἀντίθεος Γανυμήδης,
ὃς δὴ κάλλιστος γένετο θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων:
τὸν καὶ ἀνηρείψαντο θεοὶ Διὶ οἰνοχοεύειν
κάλλεος εἵνεκα οἷο ἵν᾽ ἀθανάτοισι μετείη.

In the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, Ganymedes’ sexual relations with Zeus are implied much more strongly, because it appears in the context of Aphrodite having sex with a mortal (Aeneas) and is given in parallel with other sexual relationships between mortals and immortals (the myths of Eos and Tithonus). There’s a discussion of this (at least) in Andrew Faulkner’s commentary on the Homer Hymn to Aphrodite (in the running commentary to lines 202-217 of the Hymn).

6

Two points: It isn’t Thetis who is outing Achilles. She’s having a private conversation with her son. It’s the muse who’s doing the outing by reporting a private conversation.

Secondly, while agreeing that it seems that the Iliad and Odyssey poet avoids mentioning homosexuality regarding Ganymede and the guys sleeping in the portico, I don’t know how that information would be important to the stories.

As someone who is just starting to read the Iliad, it is certainly presumptuous on my part to say this, but I don’t see how one could consider ἀγαθὸν δὲ γυναικί περ ἐν φιλότητι μίσγεσθʹ not ambiguous at least. Sounds like 21st century ἀπρέπεια. (I just started reading M.L. West’s Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. :wink:

Mark

7

I didn’t want to come across as argumentative,

Edouard

I really didn’t have you in mind when I made my remarks and apologise that this is the impression I gave. Nor was I thinking only of posts on Textkit. As soon as Emily Wilson says something or publishes a book there is an army of armchair critics and a few scholars who take aim. One has to wonder why?

I will think about the rest of your post and if I have something to contribute I will do my best.

8

Re: who is outing who. I don’t think there’s any evidence that ancient Greeks had a concept of “outing”. I don’t think they had a word for homosexual, or that they had anything like our concept of sexual or gender identity (I’m not saying homosexuality didn’t exist, of course it did, they just thought differently about it). I really don’t think they had a dichotomy “gay” vs. “straight” like we do, so “outing” would have been meaningless to them. It’s not like homosexuality was a dark secret that you had to hide. Anyway, since marriages were generally arranged by the families of the people concerned and not by the people themselves, one’s personal preferences were often not what defined who one’s lifetime partner was going to be, whatever one’s sexual orientation. Marriage notwithstanding, at least free elite men were free to have extramarital sex with whoever they wanted (well not quite everyone, but you get my point). Unlike in later times in Christian writers, I’m not aware of any prejudice against homosexuals in classical and pre-classical Greece, not at least as far we are talking about the more dominant/“active” partner (but there was some prejudice against the “passive” partner).

It is true that περ is ambiguous here, however if Thetis meant “your lover is dead, but hey, you could try women for a change”, it’s surprising that nowhere else in the Iliad (as far as I’m aware) is it implied that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers. I don’t reject that possibility, I just find it strange. Like I said, there’s some evidence (Ganymes being the most important example) that “Homer” chose to suppress homosexual elements for some reason, but it is quite conceivable he left a little hint in this line. What I’m quite sure about is that it’s not an outing, it’s not like Thetis is dropping a bomb to that effect. Either she is referring to a fact already well known the audience (A. and P. are lovers – certainly in later centuries in Athens it was common knowledge) but otherwise suppressed for some reason in this particular poem, the Iliad, or περ just refers loosely to the whole phrase (which I think is more likely).

As to why “Homer” would suppress homosexual elements (if indeed he did), I can’t say. Not out of “homophobia”, because as far as I’m aware, there’s no evidence of homophobia in ancient Greece, but perhaps there was some other reason.

9

Thank you, Paul, for your generous response. I fully agree that “outing” and other attitudes towards homosexuality are totally anachronistic. I have to admit, I was joking when I suggested that the muse was the guilty party. I thought it was funny to look at an incident in an ancient epic from the perspective of a modern advice columnist. Sorry for not making it clear that I was joking.

Mark

10

Some points:

  1. Cunliffe and LSJ disagree about how to interpret περ in general. Even (pun) simple ἀγαθός περ ἐών is concessive in LSJ: “however brave thou art”, but intensive per (pun) Cunliffe: “you the great warrior, i.e. implying that he should be content with that”. I had always read it the LSJ-way, but now that I think about it, I think that the context may lean more towards Cunliffe. It depends on how precisely you take μὴ κλέπτε νόῳ. And how do we take a case like:

ἤγαγε Σιδονίηθεν ἐπιπλὼς εὐρέα πόντον,
τὴν ὁδὸν ἣν Ἑλένην > περ > ἀνήγαγεν εὐπατέρειαν·

Whatever περ is for here, and I could make a guess, it doesn’t really seem to act as a concessive.

  1. Wilson says that “readers can decide for themselves”. Really? Does her translation actually allow a reader to decide the above issue? Of course not, the word “even” decides it for them, and in the more unlikely direction.

  2. Seneca asks whether Wilson is being unfairly persecuted, and says that “one has to wonder why”. I strongly suggest, and I underline this, that he refrain from making statements with the implication that the people he is holding a conversation with are doing so from evil motivation.

  3. Paul makes the point that Homer knows what homosexuality is and suppresses it. I think that this is precisely true. In fact, I will go farther and claim that Homer is positively anxious about the impression of a homosexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, even moreso than the Ganymede relationship. He is so anxious about it that he gives them a severe case of the “not-gays” (named, I think, by the Red Letter Media folks over the Paramount 2009 Star Trek movie’s ugly habit of adding unmotivated sexual comments about women to the male characters’ dialogue to make sure that audiences do not wonder if the characters might be gay – please no one watch that link if you are under 40, it’s more than crass):

Ι663 αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς εὗδε μυχῷ κλισίης εὐπήκτου·
Ι664 τῷ δ’ ἄρα παρκατέλεκτο γυνή, τὴν Λεσβόθεν ἦγε,
Ι665 Φόρβαντος θυγάτηρ Διομήδη καλλιπάρῃος.
Ι666 Πάτροκλος δ’ ἑτέρωθεν ἐλέξατο· πὰρ δ’ ἄρα καὶ τῷ
Ι667 Ἶφις ἐΰζωνος, τήν οἱ πόρε δῖος Ἀχιλλεὺς
Ι668 Σκῦρον ἑλὼν αἰπεῖαν Ἐνυῆος πτολίεθρον.

Really, Homer? You make that extremely, abundantly clear about these two, don’t you, my blind bard?

Anyway, the “Homer” responsible for these lines has at the very least heard rude jokes about Achilles and Patroclus, and is possibly even aware of alternate versions of his story where the two of them really are lovers.

  1. Contra, however, to Paul’s point on the lack of “homophobia” in Greece, the record is more debatable. Aeschines (1.87) claims that the death penalty can be applied to any man hiring a free Athenian for ὕβρις. Was that really the law? Was it ever applied? Maybe, maybe not. We’re too far removed to tell easily. But Athens was evidently such a place that he could get away with claiming it as fact in court with a straight face, and later publishing this in his speeches. I more than suspect that there was “homophobia” of some kind in ancient Greece, varying by place, time, and person. The bizarre old game of making the Greeks and Romans the battlefield for modern social posturing needs to be dropped.

Regardless, it’s quite a leap to extend any point about homophobia in golden age Athens across time and space to get it all the way to Homer. And even if we accept Paul’s claim that the prejudice was only against the “passive” partner, a prejudice that seemed quite severe by Aeschines’ time at least, it would still apply here to at least one of Homer’s central heroes, whether Patroclus or Achilles is meant.

Aeschines’ referenced statement: …προκειμένης ἑκατέρῳ ζημίας ἐκ τοῦ νόμου θανάτου, ὥσπερ ἐνθάδ’ ἐάν τις μισθώσηταί τινα Ἀθηναίων ἐφ’ ὕβρει, καὶ πάλιν ἐάν τις Ἀθηναίων ἐπὶ τῇ τοῦ σώματος αἰσχύνῃ ἑκὼν μισθαρνῇ.

11

Re: Joel’s 4&5. Aeschines’ statement is all about making a free Athenian citizen the “passive” partner. I haven’t studied this much beyond Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, but what matters is that it was disgraceful for a free man to submit to certain sexual acts (like passive anal sex). Well certainly you could call that homophobia, but I’m reluctant to use that term because the Greeks were obsessed with the active/passive dichotomy and not about gay/straight like people today; I’m not claiming that ancient were more open-minded than people today, just that we’re dealing with different mores. Free men were free to have their way with slaves, foreigners etc., and even with free citizen boys homosexual (pederastic) relations were accepted as long as certain boundaries were not crossed.

If Joel’s right (and I’m not too sure about this), if Homer indeed is “positively anxious” about homosexuality, it would be for this reason: if indeed Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, one of them would have to be “on top” and the other “on the bottom”. Being “on the bottom” was probably not deemed worthy of a hero, and that just might have been the reason this was suppressed, because it was absolutely essential that they’re both represented as top-notch heroes. I’m not too sure about this, but I guess it’s possible.

12

Related to this subject is another old thread. My posts were somewhat confused, but I ended up wondering if the Greek version of Lev 18.22 is not actually a specific condemnation of taking the passive “feminine” part in homosexual intercourse, κοίτη γυναικός referring specifically to that part, rather than a generic “thou shalt not have gay sex” (as usually translated). If this is the case, the law is really analogical to Aeschines’ statement, and taking the “active” part in homosexual sex was not considered unlawful as long the “passive” partner was a slave or a foreigner, i.e. a free Israelite man was not “defiled” by being submitted to penetration. The prohibition against men when they are taking the active part in unlawful sexual acts is given in different terms – when sex with animals is prohibited, the term used is κοίτη σου εἰς σπερματισμόν.

Lev. 18. 22 καὶ μετὰ ἄρσενος οὐ κοιμηθήσῃ κοίτην γυναικός, βδέλυγμα γάρ ἐστιν. 23. καὶ πρὸς πᾶν τετράπουν οὐ δώσεις τὴν κοίτην σου εἰς σπερματισμόν ἐκμιανθῆναι πρὸς αὐτό. καὶ γυνὴ οὐ στήσεται πρὸς πᾶν τετράπουν βιβασθῆναι, μυσαρὸν γάρ ἐστι.

The prohibition against sex with one’s neighbor’s wife is expressed in similar terms, since here again we’re talking about the active part (Lev 18.20 καὶ πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα τοῦ πλησίον σου οὐ δώσεις κοίτην σπέρματός σου, ἐκμιανθῆναι πρὸς αὐτήν.)

13

In the Greek you’ve quoted, κοιμηθήσῃ κοίτην γυναικός, quoted by Clement as κοίτην γυναικείαν, does sound like a ban on “playing the female part in sex with a man.” Lev 20:13 would likely have made clear, however, to Greek Jews without any Hebrew, that both parties were actually liable to death.

That a real gulf exists between Athenian Greek and Homeric Greeks beliefs about this (who also had radically different marriage practices and different social conditions for women), can be illustrated by the fact that Homer wrote (in the line quoted above):

τῷ δ’ ἄρα παρκατέλεκτο γυνή, τὴν Λεσβόθεν ἦγε

But Xenophon would have written:

τῷ δ’ ἄρα παρκατέλεκτο πάϊς γ᾿ ὃν Λεσβόθεν ἦγε

Even in Xenophon we see Greeks that go beyond this “it was only disgraceful for the passive partner” idea. See Lykourgos’s attitude: εἰ δέ τις παιδὸς σώματος ὀρεγόμενος φανείη, αἴσχιστον τοῦτο θεὶς ἐποίησεν ἐν Λακεδαίμονι μηδὲν ἧττον ἐραστὰς παιδικῶν ἀπέχεσθαι ἢ γονεῖς παίδων ἢ καὶ ἀδελφοὶ ἀδελφῶν εἰς ἀφροδίσια ἀπέχονται.

I am very skeptical of Dover’s sweeping conclusions about the popular sexual morality even of only golden age Athenian Greeks, drawn from such a small quantity of literary evidence (only a few thousand pages survived), and no comparative anthropology. He relies (by necessity) too much on Xenophon (who is hardly the typical Athenian) and the Platonic circle. At the very start, his claim that the Greeks had no conception of varying sexuality is rather hard to swallow. It would require that no Athenian had eyes to notice that a fellow like Philokrates γυναῖκας ἐλευθέρας … ἤγαγε δεῦρ’ ἐφ’ ὕβρει seemed to differ from a pair like Pausanias and Agathon. And how to explain a term like παιδεραστής being used as a label for specific individuals, if it in fact applied to everyone?

14

Regarding Joel’s:

In fact, I will go farther and claim that Homer is positively anxious about the impression of a homosexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, even more so than the Ganymede relationship. He is so anxious about it that he gives them a severe case of the “not-gays”

The quoted lines from Book 9 say that Achilles and Patroclus each slept with captive women. This would only be “not-gays” if Homer assumed that same-sex attraction and opposite-sex attraction were mutually exclusive. Among the authors I’ve read (Dover, Foucault, Halperin), all have argued the contrary attitude prevailed, at least for the classical period.

Against the idea of Homer’s anxiety about suggesting a possible sexual attraction between his heroes, there is, also in Book 24, of Hermes:

Βῆ δ’ἰέναι κούρῳ αἰσυμνητῆρι ἐοικὼς / πρῶτον ὑπνυήτῃ, τοῦ περ χαριεστάτη ἥβη. 24.348-9

Lattimore: there walked on, and took the likeness of a young man, a noble, with beard new grown, which is the most graceful time of young manhood.

Would not a man who was very anxious about homosexuality avoid saying that?

Regarding dictionary definitions of περ, this is from Autenrieth: "enclitic particle, giving emphasis or prominence to an idea, usually to what immediately precedes it, very, at least, even, just, etc..

So when you hear Thetis’s line, a person would naturally try the more common syntax first before exploring others. In the Greek there is doubt (almost certainly intentional), which a translator probably cannot reproduce.

Mark

15

One could say the same about the swift acclaim she gets from other non-experts. Making big claims and taking aims certainly invites criticism, and I don’t know why you would disallow criticism about one translator, but not others, especially when Wilson freely offers critical remarks about earlier translators.

I agree with the rest of your post, but I would posit a minor quibble here. For evidence of anti-homosexual (and really anti-pederastic) views in classical Athens, see Thomas Hubbard’s “Popular Perceptions of Elite Homosexuality in Classical Athens” in Arion 6 (1998). I have a bibliography somewhere on this topic. I have a biblio on the topic somewhere after some work I did on Harmodius and Aristogeiton, so if you’re interested I can go looking for that (though Hubbard should be your first stop). That said, I don’t believe it’s relevant to Homer.

16

I’d be interested in seeing that bibliography.

Searching a bit through TLG, I see that the Hellenistic astrologer Valens claimed that Critodemus said that a conjunction of Mars and Mercury would create παιδερασταί. Dorotheus is claimed to have said the same, and also that Venus and the Moon ἐν τῷ δύνοντι create μαλακοί.

This just doesn’t fit at all the idea that the classical world had no concept of homosexuality. In fact, it seems to provide every indication that they thought that certain individuals were just born that way, παιδερασταί and μαλακοί separately.

This is hardly the view of St. Paul, of course, who seems to claim in Romans that it is behavior of choice, originating somehow in idol worship.

17

Making big claims and taking aims certainly invites criticism, and I don’t know why you would disallow criticism about one translator, but not others, especially when Wilson freely offers critical remarks about earlier translators.

What big claims did you have in mind? She talks very respectfully about other translations and she is clearly not trying to supplant what others have done.

I am certainly not “disallow(ing) criticism”. I was just wondering aloud why she is on the receiving end of so much. She worked for 10 years on this translation I doubt that few who criticise her, who are not professional classicists, have such an in depth knowledge of the text.

18

Chris, thanks for Hubbard’s interesting and well-argued article. Like I said, I haven’t looked into this much beyond Dover, so it really gives a different point of view. I don’t exactly know what to think about this, so I might well be interested about some further reading. Hubbard’s main focus is on Athens and, especially, pederastic relations with free citizen boys, but I admit that I might have simplified things a bit too much. Still, the question remains why “Homer” appears to downplay homosexuality, while for example the author of the Hymn to Aphrodite not so much.