I think it goes beyond euphemism (a term I thought of using earlier but didn’t—or did I?). It represents an imagined world in which amfipoloi are just that, attendants, with no necessary implication of slave status. (Rather different from the Downton Abbey world, in which hired servants are hired servants. Or am I wrong?)
I have the feeling that you haven’t even read what I have written.
I am sorry that you feel I haven’t read what you have written but I have considered it very carefully. I think at many points we are simply at cross purposes.
You said “Wilson sets out to correct Homer according to her whim and to accuse others of misogyny for not doing the same thing.”
I think this is wrong on two counts. I object to your use of the word “whim” as it implies Wilson has not thought about this issue. You have no evidence for this and manifestly she has thought a great deal about it over the considerable period she has spent translating the Odyssey. I also object to your use of the word “correct” as I have explained and need not repeat. Although perhaps I should say again that all reading is a “correction” of a text.
I could have been clearer when I wrote “Her view on slavery” of course I meant her view on how to translate the words we are discussing. I don’t know anyone who has a positive of slavery itself although I am sure they exist.
A particular difficulty I have as an English native of a certain cultural background with the words Handmaiden etc is the way they are embedded in our class ridden society. I cannot hear the expression “handmaiden” without thinking of my college chapel and the Magnificat.
Of course I can accept that you prefer to translate in the way you do. I have always argued for plurality. In an earlier post I quoted Wilson as accepting that “Neither “maid” or “slave” or “handmaiden” is straight- up correct/ incorrect. None are exact synonyms. That’s translation for you.” her view is much more nuanced than you have and others have expressed (repressed - a mistyping which I will preserve) it to be.
Many of the words for slaves that Homer uses are euphemistic, and in my opinion, if a translator downplays this euphemistic aspect, she is misrepresenting the original and being counterproductive to understanding the actual power dynamics.
As Michael in this thread and others elsewhere have acknowledge all translation is a misrepresentation. I prefer it to characterise it as an act of reception as indeed is reading the original text. I disagree that calling a slave a slave obscures “the actual power dynamics” The very fact that we are having this discussion means that Wilson has highlighted this problematic area. Generations of “venerable housekeepers” are crying out “it wasn’t like that at all! At last someone understands us”
We have many translations which use your preferred terms and the fact that we have Wilson’s doesn’t invalidate those translations it invites us to think about them.
You quote the Homer encyclopaedia:
The avoidance of such words may reflect a “patriarchal” form of slavery > o> r may be part of a tendency to mitigate the actual harshness of a relation of domination, which is generally revealed only indirectly
I have underlined the or in the quote. The first of the alternatives proposed is that it was not necessary to refer to slaves as slaves because the Patriarchy well understood the situation. The second alternative implies that there was a deliberate concealment. I am not sure how we can decide between these two positions. But it does not mean that either position should constrain how we understand the text. My dislike of a “euphemistic” explanation is it connotes some feeling of misplaced and self-deceiving delicacy. I can’t help thinking here of Fraenkel’s explanation about why Agamemnon walks on the carpets “because he was too much of a gentleman to refuse his wife”.
I think it goes beyond euphemism (a term I thought of using earlier but didn’t—or did I?). It represents an imagined world in which amfipoloi are just that, attendants, with no necessary implication of slave status. (Rather different from the Downton Abbey world, in which hired servants are hired servants. Or am I wrong?)
Perhaps it was not helpful for me to introduce Downton Abbey but I thought it was widely seen in the states. They are indeed hired servants but were totally dependent on their employer and had to work from very early in the morning until very late at night. They lived in their master’s household working unseen in the house so all rather like Homer’s equivalents. The dreadful thing about their representation was the sentimental way in which the relationship between servant and master was drawn. One wondered whose interests were being safeguarded by this rose tinted spectacle. The author, an unreconstructed Tory, was given a peerage after this pap aired.
I agree that Homer’s is an imagined world (just as Downton Abbey is). But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We bring our other reading to it and add to it as has surely been done since antiquity. Perhaps this also doesn’t need saying. 
Finally for the avoidance of doubt I don’t believe Handmaids and the rest of her ilk are “incorrect translations” but they like any other of the possibilities are only a partial truth. Those who can read Greek can make their own minds up. Those that cannot will have to make what they can of the discussions. No-one will die as a result of adopting a reading one of us might disagree with.
Even in the real world outside Epic, was a αμφιπολη really in exactly the same social position as a δμωη? It’s actually very hard to maintain a stable slave-caste over time. The more similar your slaves are to you, the less stable the social situation is. That’s why they are δμωη – captured or purchased from somebody else’s tribe. It’s far harder to enslave your neighbor’s kid. More becomes possible as society gets more complex, but something has to produce distance. The servant/slave distinction is real.
As for “generations of venerable housekeepers” finally being understood by a Wilson/Seneca – what an amazing fantasy life.
I’ll give you that - you have indeed always argued for plurality, defending a minority view valiantly yet politely, even when the cause seems lost. 
What bothers me with Wilson is her way of dismissing differing opinions as “misogynistic agenda” – especially as own her so-called innovations as a translator are often rather controversial, while many of her observations aren’t really that new to anyone who has read Homer. Hence my “whim”. But enough of this already.
On a final positive note, let me mention a good observation made by Wilson: that Homer’s sirens aren’t sexy, even if they are often so represented. I’ll give her that. It must be said, though, that she often contrasts her own translation with other translations that never claimed to be particularly literal, like Fagles, Fitzgerald and Lombardo, so it’s not too difficult to find inaccuracies.
The word is αμφιπολος and it’s feminine…
Other than that, Homer has great number of different words for “slave”, but nowadays the nuanced way to translate them all is “slave”.
Joking aside, I think it’s true that the dynamics of slavery must have been very different in a society like Homer’s than when Europeans enslaved black-skinned Africans, where the difference in outward appearance allowed the formation of a permanent slave caste.
The word is αμφιπολος and it’s feminine…
Ah yes, thank you. I felt that it was wrong somehow when I wrote it. I should have known that it was a substantized adjective: “ἀμφίπολος, ον.”
The Transatlantic slave trade is a good example of distance (of ethnicity/religion/language/etc.) making slavery possible. The Barbary/Arab slave trade would be another. (It’s worth reading the diary of Ólafur Egilsson captured in the raids on Iceland, if you ever get the chance. There is also a European description of a 16th or 17th century raid on Sardinia, written by a French officer, who is very upset at his own complicity in kidnapping Christians to sell to the Turks. I’m having trouble finding it.) The Icelandic Sagas also provide varying descriptions of slavery. In Saint Olaf’s Saga it’s described as what amounts to a possibly temporary economic embarrassment. But in the Sagas generally – at least from my recollection – there seems to be the expectation that slaves are captured from abroad (Ireland, etc.).
Russian slavery and serfdom might be a good counterexample, but it’s highly complex. Here is Herbert Leventer with a rather relevant quotation on how to translate “kholop” (boy/slave) from Russian:
Hellie’s excellent survey of the recent literature on kholopstvo raises the question of the true meaning of “kholop.” Might I suggest that, for the Muscovite period, “servant” is a more accurate translation than “slave”? There is even a good precedent: the first Russian historian, Vasilii Tatishchev, suggested it over two hundred years ago. Criticizing the translators of the Bible for wrongly using “kholop” to translate both "sluzhitel’ " (servant) and “rab” (slave), Tatishchev explained that the kholop was not a slave. The rab became a slave through military conquest. The kholop was a native Russian, whose low position was only partly like that of the prisoner of war, since the master’s rights over him were “temporary,” like “those of a father over his children.”
Footnote: V. N. Tatishchev, Istoriia Rossiiskaia, 7 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1962-1968), 1:360-361. One advantage of translating “kholop” as “servant” is that this would avoid distorting the meaning of “kholop” in its most frequent appearance in Muscovite documents, ie.,., in petitions, where even nobles refer to themselves as “your kholop.” This is merely a polite “your servant”; it does not demonstrate any more servile grovelling before the Tsar than was shown by contemporary Englishmen (those “most humble and most obedient servants”) before their patrons.
Leventer goes on to point out that there are actually a number of examples of kholops suing for their freedom over mistreatment during the Muscovite era, and that the sale of kholops, while possible, was extremely rare.
What a narrow, “functional” appeciation of language!
Evidently, Orwell would not approve of Haigspeak, travel writers, Saturday morning food critics or Cloe magazine. The English language (and indeed any language) is much more than one man’s narrow conception of it.