Incredible and Strange Everything
For 400 years, male translators changed one Greek word in history's most famous epic—and it erased the truth about enslaved women who were murdered for being raped.
Emily Wilson became the first woman ever to translate Homer's Odyssey into English. Four centuries. Dozens of translations. Every single one written by men.
And readers immediately noticed something shocking: the story they thought they knew had been quietly rewritten.
Start with the very first word Homer uses to describe Odysseus: "polytropos."
Every male translator made it heroic:
"Resourceful"
"Versatile"
"Of many ways"
Emily Wilson translated the identical Greek word as: "complicated."
One word. The entire hero transforms.
Suddenly Odysseus isn't just clever—he's morally murky. He manipulates. Lies when truth would work better. Survives by any means necessary and sleeps soundly afterward.
That's what Homer actually wrote 2,800 years ago. English translators just kept softening it.
Wilson asked the question no one had dared: What else have they been editing?
The answer devastated: almost everything involving women.
Consider the enslaved women in Odysseus's household.
He leaves for 20 years. Suitors invade his home. These enslaved women—property with zero rights—are forced into sexual relationships with the invaders occupying the house.
When Odysseus finally returns, he and his son execute all twelve women. They hang them together in a mass killing.
Homer used the Greek word "dmôai." It means enslaved women. Human property who couldn't refuse anything.
But English translators couldn't stomach writing "slaves."
George Chapman (1614): "maids disloyal"
Alexander Pope (1725): "guilty maids"
Robert Fitzgerald (1961): "women who made love with suitors"
See what happened? They made it sound like choice. Like betrayal. Like these women deserved death.
Emily Wilson translated Homer's actual Greek word: "slaves."
The entire scene inverts. This isn't justice for disloyalty. This is a powerful man massacring enslaved women who were raped by invaders—women who had zero power to consent or refuse.
That's what Homer wrote. English readers just never knew.
Or take Penelope, waiting 20 years for Odysseus.
Earlier translators emphasized her faithfulness, purity, passive devotion. The perfect Victorian wife pining by the window.
Homer's Greek describes her as "periphron"—strategic, prudent, calculating.
Wilson's Penelope isn't passively waiting. She's scheming. Manipulating suitors. Stalling for time. Gathering intelligence. Playing sophisticated political games with her life as the stakes.
When Odysseus finally reveals himself, Wilson's Penelope doesn't dissolve in grateful tears. She tests him. Demands proof. Refuses to believe until he proves he knows secrets only her husband would know.
Because she's brilliant. Homer explicitly said so. Translators just kept making her passive because intelligent, calculating women made Victorian readers deeply uncomfortable.
Then there's Calypso, the goddess who keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years.
Countless translators wrote that Calypso "loved" him. That they had a "relationship."
Wilson translates the Greek word "katechein" with precision: Calypso "kept him captive." She "owned" him.
It's not romance. It's imprisonment. Sexual coercion—just with reversed genders from what audiences expected.
Homer wrote that explicitly. Translators softened it because it complicated the heroic narrative they wanted to tell.
When Wilson's translation published, it exploded into a bestseller. Critics called it revelatory, essential, transformative.
But some classical scholars accused her of "modernizing" Homer—imposing contemporary feminist ideology onto ancient text.
Wilson's response was elegant and devastating: Read the Greek yourself.
Every single choice she made came directly from Homer's original language. She wasn't adding feminism. She was removing four centuries of anti-feminist bias that previous translators had systematically inserted.
There's a scene where Odysseus's men eat the Sun God's sacred cattle despite explicit warnings.
Earlier translations called them "foolish" or "reckless"—stupid men who deserved their fate.
Homer's Greek says they were "starving"—desperate men at sea so long they couldn't think rationally anymore.
Wilson translates it accurately. And suddenly Odysseus's leadership looks questionable. Why did he let his crew reach that breaking point?
That's in Homer's original text. Translators just kept editing it out to protect the hero.
Or the climactic moment when Odysseus slaughters all the suitors.
Earlier translations made it sound like righteous justice—the hero reclaiming what's his.
Homer's Greek is far more ambiguous. The suitors are butchered like animals. Blood pools across floors. Bodies pile grotesquely. The violence is graphic, brutal, almost nauseating in its detail.
Wilson doesn't flinch. She translates violence as violence—not as heroic triumph.
And you're forced to confront something uncomfortable: Is this justice? Or is this a powerful man with superior weapons massacring younger, weaker men who technically broke no laws?
Homer doesn't answer. He just shows you the blood pooling on the floor.
Think about what this means.
For 400 years, English-speaking readers believed they were reading Homer's Odyssey. But they were reading Homer filtered through Victorian morality, mid-20th-century heroic ideals, and translators' unconscious assumptions about gender.
They were reading translations that judged women more harshly than men. That excused male violence while condemning female survival. That romanticized slavery, softened rape, turned captivity into romance.
Not because that's what Homer wrote 2,800 years ago—but because that's what translators assumed modern audiences wanted to read.
Emily Wilson didn't modernize The Odyssey. She de-Victorianized it.
She removed 400 years of accumulated editorial bias and let Homer's ancient Greek speak in its own voice.
The result? An Odyssey that's sharper, stranger, more morally unsettling—and more honest.
Odysseus isn't a noble hero on a sacred quest. He's complicated—doing terrible things and good things, not always distinguishing between them.
Penelope isn't passive. She's strategic, brilliant, navigating impossible circumstances with her life on the line.
The enslaved women aren't guilty traitors. They're slaves murdered by their owner for being raped.
Calypso isn't a lover waiting faithfully. She's a captor who sexually coerces her prisoner.
That's what Homer actually wrote in ancient Greek. We just didn't know because for 400 years, no translator was willing to write it in English.
Now, because one woman finally got the opportunity, we can read what Homer actually created.
And it turns out The Odyssey is better—more interesting, more morally complex, more honest about power and gender and violence—than we ever knew.
Not because Emily Wilson added modern perspectives.
But because she stopped letting centuries of male translators quietly edit the women out of their own stories.
Sometimes the most radical act isn't changing the story.
It's finally telling the story that was always there.
