Emily Wilson is a genius. Let us get that out of the way at the start. Her translations of Homer show that she is not just a classicist, but also a natural poet. The great proof that she is a natural poet is in her choice to limit herself to the same number of lines as the Greek original. A pure classicist would wonder why anyone would do that, when it must obviously be necessary to deviate from that limitation to convey the sense of the Greek; but a poet thrives on artificial limitations, which are what make the music happen. The poet who is a genius makes us forget that any limitations have been imposed: the thoughts seem to flow out naturally to fill a container shaped like lines of iambic pentameter, or whatever her chosen meter is. This is what Emily Wilson has done for Homer: her iambic pentameter flows like natural speech, without the distracting looseness of other recent translators’ attempts at the form.

We say all these things because we have been reading the Wikipedia article about Emily Wilson and are about to quibble with her about one little thing she said. But we have seen her derided as “woke”—a word that is hereby added to the Index Verborum Prohibitorum, because it is a playground insult with no more meaning than “poopyhead”—and we should not like to be placed among the deriders. If you do not like Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer, of course, you have other choices, some of them very good. Dr. Boli does like her translations, even if he cannot possibly be pleased by every word in them.

Now, here is the thing Dr. Boli would like to debate—in a friendly and respectful manner. In the Wikipedia article, we read,

In Wilson’s translation, enslaved characters are often called “slaves” rather than “maids” or “servants”, with translator notes explaining the word choices; discussing older translations of the Odyssey with journalist Anna North, Wilson said: “It sort of stuns me … how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible.”

Here is where Dr. Boli will perhaps put himself outside of current intellectual fashion. One of the luxuries of a longer life than average is a disregard that might almost be called cavalier of intellectual fashions. It seems to Dr. Boli that, in the single matter of the terms for slaves, the older translations may be more faithful to the universe of Greek thought.

The word “slave” provokes automatic outrage and horror in the average American or Briton of today—so much so that many of us refuse even to speak the word, substituting “enslaved person” every time we run across it. This is a safe and wholesome form of outrage; it is a petard we can set off without any fear of being hoist by it ourselves, because not one of us is a slaveholder. We can get very angry about slavery, knowing that it is probably the one sin in the world no one could catch us in. With trivial exceptions, none of us has ever known a slave or a slaveholder. The number of Americans who were alive before 1865 is small, and the British had outlawed slavery before that. Now, it is true that we may benefit from slave labor in other parts of the world, but——— And here is where we agree to stick our fingers in our ears and go on to the next topic.

We do not realize how our situation forms our view of slavery. To us a slave is an exceptional thing, and therefore using any other word to describe someone in a state of slavery seems like deliberate avoidance. But let us try a couple of thought experiments and see whether they give us a fresh point of view.

Suppose that, in a distant future world, motor vehicles have been banned. They caused hundreds of thousands of deaths a year; major wars were not as destructive as motor vehicles, and motor vehicles formed the bulk of the equipment in major wars. The very term motor vehicle has become the most fruitful source of outrage for these future people; they cannot understand how the wicked people of previous centuries tolerated the carnage for so long.

What will those enlightened people of the future see when they look back at our literature? They will see that we talk about cars, SUVs, station wagons, buses, trucks. They will see the names Ford, Toyota, Austin, Volkswagen, De Soto, Hyundai. But these are all motor vehicles! Isn’t it astonishing how much work seems to go into making motor vehicles invisible?

Or again, suppose a future in which artificial intelligence has so fundamentally changed our economy that no one works for a living anymore. The people of that utopian or dystopian future look back with horror on the benighted ages before them, when the great majority of human beings were employees, subject to the arbitrary whims of a boss who could at any moment say, “If you do not accede to my whims, I will stop feeding your family.” Yet when they look back at our literature, they see people described as clerks, cashiers, marketers, nurse practitioners, designers, custodians, systems analysts, insurance adjustors. Isn’t it astonishing how much work seems to go into making employment invisible?

If we were suddenly projected into one of those future worlds, we might try to explain—probably without much success—that it was not a question of making things invisible at all. It was quite the reverse. Motor vehicles are always visible in our world, and nearly everybody is employed. Therefore we need words that distinguish one kind of motor vehicle from another, or one kind of employee from another, more than we need the words “motor vehicle” or “employee.”

The same was true of slavery in the Greek or Roman world. A rich family might have a large staff. Of course they were all slaves, but in a world where half the population might be in a state of slavery, that was not the interesting or useful thing to know. What was necessary was to know what this slave’s business was: gardener, secretary, cook, lady’s maid, master’s favorite toy.

That is half the argument. The other half is this: that the automatic outrage we feel when we hear the word “slave” immediately throws us out of the world Homer inhabited. We know slavery as the wicked thing people of the past did; it is impossible for us to think of slavery without thinking of the evils thereof, and indeed the unexamined assumption that slavery is wicked is what underlies Dr. Wilson’s remark in the first place. Yet in all of classical literature (and he has certainly not read all of classical literature, so Dr. Boli would welcome contradictions), Dr. Boli cannot recall a single instance of a writer who suggested that slavery was wrong in an absolute sense. It might be wrong that this or that person should be enslaved, but no one questioned the fact of slavery itself. Even Paul of Tarsus, who was quite willing to die for his unorthodox opinions, would not condemn slavery outright. Even when he really, really wanted Philemon to free his slave Onesimus, Paul would not outright tell him that slavery was bad. He would only give Philemon the best literary guilt trip of all time (“albeit I do not say to thee how thou owest unto me even thine own self besides”). Homer will show us the tragedy of enslavement—that is, the act of making a slave of someone who was not. But if we are feeling outrage about the fact of slavery itself, we are not living in Homer’s world. Here, by the way, is rare evidence of moral progress; it is very seldom that we can point to anything in history and say, “See? We used to be worse than we are.”

Now, with that trivial quibble out of the way, we send you off to read Emily Wilson’s Odyssey with our heartiest recommendation. It seems to us that, in the translation itself, Dr. Wilson hits exactly the right notes when slaves come in, making them characters when Homer makes them characters and furniture when Homer makes them furniture. And in a little while, Dr. Boli will tell you why Emily Wilson chose the right meter for her translation, where more pedantic translators are tempted to make the wrong choice.