For 400 years, every English translation of The Odyssey was written by men—and they kept quietly changing the words to make the women look worse and the hero look better.
Then in 2017, Emily Wilson became the first woman to translate Homer's epic into English. And suddenly, people realized how much the story had been rewritten.
Take one word: "polytropos." It's the very first description Homer gives of Odysseus. The first word that tells you who this character is.
Previous translators rendered it as "resourceful" or "versatile" or "of many ways." Sounds admirable. Heroic, even.
Emily Wilson translated it as "complicated."
That one word changes everything. Odysseus isn't just clever—he's morally ambiguous, manipulative, difficult. The kind of person who lies even when truth would work better. The kind of survivor who does whatever it takes and doesn't always feel guilty about it.
That's actually what Homer said. But for centuries, translators smoothed it over because heroes were supposed to be noble.
Wilson's translation was a revelation: What else had been quietly edited for 400 years?
The answer was: almost everything involving women.
Consider the enslaved women in Odysseus's household. When he finally returns home after 20 years, he discovers that some of these women had been forced into sexual relationships with the suitors occupying his house.
Odysseus and his son Telemachus execute these women—hanging them all in a brutal mass killing.
Earlier translations described these women with a specific Greek word that Homer uses: "dmôai." It means enslaved women. Property with no rights, no choice, no agency.
But English translators couldn't quite say that. Instead they wrote: "maids." Or "maidservants." Or "girls." Or "women of the household."
Anything but "slaves."
George Chapman in 1614 called them "maids disloyal." Alexander Pope in 1725 called them "guilty maids." Robert Fitzgerald in 1961 called them "women who made love with suitors."
Notice what happened? The translators made it sound like these women chose to sleep with the suitors. That they were disloyal. Guilty. Deserving of execution.
Emily Wilson translated the same word as "slaves."
Suddenly the scene isn't about justice for disloyalty. It's about Odysseus murdering enslaved women who were raped by men who invaded his house. Women who had no power to refuse.
That's what Homer actually wrote. But for 400 years, English readers didn't know that—because translators rewrote it.
Or take Penelope, Odysseus's wife who waits 20 years for him to return.
Earlier translators loved emphasizing her faithfulness, her purity, her patient suffering. She was the ideal Victorian wife: passive, chaste, devoted.
But Homer's Greek describes Penelope as "periphron"—which means "circumspect" or "prudent" or "strategic."
Wilson emphasizes this throughout. Her Penelope isn't just waiting—she's strategizing. She's manipulating the suitors, buying time, gathering intelligence, positioning herself politically.
When Odysseus finally reveals himself, Wilson's Penelope doesn't just collapse in grateful tears. She tests him. She's suspicious. She wants proof.
Because she's smart. And Homer said she was smart. But translators kept making her passive because smart women made Victorian and Edwardian readers uncomfortable.
Or consider Calypso, the goddess who holds Odysseus on her island for seven years.
The Greek word Homer uses is "katechein"—to hold back, to restrain, to detain.
But many translators wrote that Calypso "loved" Odysseus, that she "wanted him to stay," that they had a "relationship."
Emily Wilson translates it as: Calypso "kept him" as her captive. She "owned" him.
Suddenly it's clear: Odysseus was imprisoned. This wasn't a romantic affair. It was captivity and sexual coercion—with the genders reversed from the usual pattern.
Homer said that. But translators kept softening it because it complicated the heroic narrative.
Emily Wilson is 52 years old, a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania. She grew up in England, studied at Oxford, and has spent her career researching how translation shapes meaning.
When she decided to translate The Odyssey, she knew exactly what she was walking into.
Every major English translation had been done by men: Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Lattimore. These weren't bad translators—many were brilliant scholars. But they all worked within cultural assumptions they didn't question.
Wilson questioned everything.
She went back to the Greek and asked: What does this word actually mean? Not what did Victorian translators think it meant, but what would it have meant to Homer's audience?
She also imposed a rule on herself: consistency. If a Greek word means "slave," translate it as "slave" every time—not "slave" for men and "maid" for women. If a word means "complicated," don't change it to "versatile" because it sounds more flattering.
Translate what Homer said, not what later cultures wished he'd said.
The result was startling.
Wilson's Odyssey is written in iambic pentameter—the same rhythm as Shakespeare—which makes it feel both ancient and accessible. It's faster-paced than earlier translations, sharper, less flowery.
But more importantly, it's more honest about what the poem contains: violence, slavery, sexual coercion, moral ambiguity, intelligent women, and a protagonist who survives through cunning, lies, and ruthlessness.
That's actually what The Odyssey is about. But for 400 years, English translations had been quietly editing it into something more palatable.
When Wilson's translation was published in 2017, it became a New York Times bestseller. Critics called it revelatory. Classicists praised its accuracy. General readers discovered they could finally understand what Homer was saying.
But there was also backlash. Some scholars argued Wilson was "modernizing" Homer, imposing contemporary feminist values on an ancient text.
Wilson's response was simple: Read the Greek.
Every choice she made was defensible from the original language. She wasn't adding feminism—she was removing centuries of anti-feminist editorial bias that previous translators had inserted.
There's a scene where Odysseus's men die because they're hungry and eat the Sun God's cattle despite explicit warnings not to. Earlier translations described them as "foolish" or "reckless."
Homer's Greek says they were "starving." They were desperate men who'd been at sea so long they couldn't think straight.
Wilson translates it accurately. And suddenly Odysseus's leadership looks questionable—why did he let his men get so hungry they couldn't resist temptation?
That's in Homer. But translators kept editing it out because leaders were supposed to be competent.
Or there's the moment when Odysseus finally kills all the suitors who've been occupying his house. Earlier translations made it sound like justice—righteous vengeance for their offense against his household.
Homer's Greek is more ambiguous. The suitors are slaughtered like animals. Blood pools. Bodies pile up. It's graphic, brutal, almost nauseating.
Wilson doesn't flinch. She translates the violence as violence—not as heroic triumph.
And suddenly you have to confront something uncomfortable: Is this justice? Or is this a powerful man slaughtering younger, weaker men who technically hadn't broken any laws?
Homer doesn't answer that question. He just shows you the blood.
But translators kept making it sound noble because heroes were supposed to be unambiguously good.
Think about what this means. For 400 years, English-speaking readers thought they were reading Homer. But they were actually reading Homer filtered through Victorian morality, Edwardian gender assumptions, and mid-20th-century heroic ideals.
They were reading translations that quietly judged women more harshly than men. That excused male violence while condemning female survival strategies. That romanticized slavery and sexual coercion.
Not because that's what Homer wrote—but because that's what translators assumed their 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 Greek speak for itself.
The result is an Odyssey that's sharper, stranger, more unsettling—and more honest.
Odysseus isn't a noble hero. He's a complicated survivor who does terrible things and good things and doesn't always know the difference.
Penelope isn't a passive ideal wife. She's a strategic thinker navigating impossible political circumstances.
The enslaved women aren't guilty maids. They're enslaved women murdered by their owner.
Calypso isn't Odysseus's lover. She's his captor.
That's what Homer said. We just didn't know it because for 400 years, no one translated it that way.
Now, because one woman finally had the opportunity to translate this foundational text, we can read what Homer actually wrote.
And it turns out The Odyssey is a better, more interesting, more morally complex poem than we thought.
Not because Emily Wilson added anything. But because she stopped letting centuries of male translators quietly edit the women out of their own story.
Emily Wilson (born 1971): First woman to translate The Odyssey into English, and the first translator in 400 years to just tell the story Homer actually wrote.
She didn't change the epic. She revealed what had been changed all along.
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