Thank you. I read both of Wilson’s translations last year and totally agree with your take on them. This is also reflected in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.
I just finished reading Gareth Hinds' graphic novels of the Iliad and the Odyssey with my children (I know, a questionable choice for a 4 and 6 year old). I was struck by how incredibly violent these stories are. As a kid in school, we read very edited versions that left out quite a lot. Hinds' version is obviously edited but probably more accurate. I thought about everything you touched on here: how little power the women had, how only the Goddesses had power but used it for so much death and destruction, how awful cultures of military glory must have been for just about everyone. That said, I like the stories. They endure for a reason. Hinds says at the end that every war story is ultimately an anti-war story, and I think that's true. The Iliad is tragic. I feel deeply for Hector and his family, especially his wife and child, his mother, also his father the king. I feel for Odysseus and his longing for home and family, how he tried to get out of it but couldn't, even as I could not condone the violence of his homecoming. I also understand why a certain type of modern man, frustrated by his status in society, might long for those days: the fraternal bonds, the opportunity to prove valor through physical might instead of intellect. We had interesting conversations as a family after reading, especially with my son.
This includes a lot of interesting observations, but I think the analytic narrative relies too heavily on modern assumptions about what mutually beneficial arrangements would look like.
The concept of patriarchal rent seems poorly suited to describe the nature of relationships in preindustrial societies, where both parties depended on each other's labor for survival. It gives insufficient weight to the material conditions that shaped family arrangements: a world of frequent warfare, endemic insecurity, high infant mortality, no professional police in the modern sense, and subsistence farming.
I'm not arguing that the social arrangements reflected in Homer were equitable, or even close to it. My concern is narrower: the essay doesn't present the kind of evidence that would distinguish institutions that primarily solved coordination problems under severe material constraints from institutions that primarily served to extract value. Calling something a "rent" assumes the latter, but doesn't argue it..
Isn't Alice's point that there is no mutuality? Men are either powerful enough to gain a wife and female slaves, or they are not. They are either powerful enough to coerce their female possessions into labour, sex and child bearing, or their female possessions are seized by those who are.
There's no mutuality in Homer, but that doesn't mean there was no mutuality in ancient Greece. My biggest complaint about the essay is that it treats them like they're the same thing.
Imagine, 3000 years into the future, all that remains of our culture are "Infinity War" and "Endgame". Even though they would learn something about what we glorified, they would not learn much about how we lived.
Does the fact that both movies were massive hits in many other cultures change what we can infer from the text alone? Endgame was the highest-grossing foreign film in Chinese box-office history. That suggests one of two things, which both hurt the essay's claims.
First, it could be that Marvel movies speak to something common across all of 21st-century humanity. If that's true, then what a story glorifies can't explain any particular society; the same values resonate everywhere.
Alternatively, if the films' values simply don't reduce to any single set of cultural practices, then popularity tells us even less about how any audience actually lived. Either way, you can't read a society's actual arrangements off its most beloved fictions, an inference the essay's argument depends on.
> Since patrilineal societies trace descent down the male line, they care about paternal certainty and legitimate biological heirs. Patrilineal societies thus idealise virgins, chastity and cloistering. In Ancient Greece, wealthy families secluded female kin. Women’s names were not uttered in public; they were only recognised as appendages to husbands and fathers.
> In Ancient Greece, Southern Mesopotamia, Mughal India and Song China, patrilineal clans cloistered female kin in order to preserve their honour. Female wage labour was shunned for fear of inevitable stigma, suspicion and loss of status.
I'm not contradicting those statements, but in both cases, that's it. They're not supported by anything, which could be fine in context, but it is not evidence of even moderate historical knowledge.
I'm also skeptical because this essay doesn't even acknowledge the possibility that there could have been any sort of complicating factors. Evans doesn't consider and refute it, she just doesn't consider it. She's often perceptive and careful about contemporary matters, but there's just no evidence *in the essay* that she's grappled with historical research about ancient Greece.
I agree completely, and I'll just mention that Emily Wilson was briefly on substack. She hasn't written anything in a while, but she has a couple of good posts about translation, and I hope she'll return at some point: https://emily613.substack.com/
'the silence of the girls' is a really haunting novel that tells the story from the perspective of Briseis - would recommend a read to get a sense of what it would have been like to be a woman in that situation
Thank you for this brief but clear analysis. Women, like slaves, were unable to vote in Ancient Greece, and as they didn't fight in wars either, one could assume they were 'protected' in an insecure world because they were expected to reproduce the warriors in the sanctity of the home.
I suppose I'm not sure that's there's any evidence at all for mutuality! Much of what Alice is saying about Homer is well substantiated in terms of what we know about ancient greek culture. It is well evidenced that it was highly patriarchal and that women had very few rights, for example. Homer is illustrative rather than informative in that respect
Thank you. I read both of Wilson’s translations last year and totally agree with your take on them. This is also reflected in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.
This is fantastic
I just finished reading Gareth Hinds' graphic novels of the Iliad and the Odyssey with my children (I know, a questionable choice for a 4 and 6 year old). I was struck by how incredibly violent these stories are. As a kid in school, we read very edited versions that left out quite a lot. Hinds' version is obviously edited but probably more accurate. I thought about everything you touched on here: how little power the women had, how only the Goddesses had power but used it for so much death and destruction, how awful cultures of military glory must have been for just about everyone. That said, I like the stories. They endure for a reason. Hinds says at the end that every war story is ultimately an anti-war story, and I think that's true. The Iliad is tragic. I feel deeply for Hector and his family, especially his wife and child, his mother, also his father the king. I feel for Odysseus and his longing for home and family, how he tried to get out of it but couldn't, even as I could not condone the violence of his homecoming. I also understand why a certain type of modern man, frustrated by his status in society, might long for those days: the fraternal bonds, the opportunity to prove valor through physical might instead of intellect. We had interesting conversations as a family after reading, especially with my son.
This includes a lot of interesting observations, but I think the analytic narrative relies too heavily on modern assumptions about what mutually beneficial arrangements would look like.
The concept of patriarchal rent seems poorly suited to describe the nature of relationships in preindustrial societies, where both parties depended on each other's labor for survival. It gives insufficient weight to the material conditions that shaped family arrangements: a world of frequent warfare, endemic insecurity, high infant mortality, no professional police in the modern sense, and subsistence farming.
I'm not arguing that the social arrangements reflected in Homer were equitable, or even close to it. My concern is narrower: the essay doesn't present the kind of evidence that would distinguish institutions that primarily solved coordination problems under severe material constraints from institutions that primarily served to extract value. Calling something a "rent" assumes the latter, but doesn't argue it..
Isn't Alice's point that there is no mutuality? Men are either powerful enough to gain a wife and female slaves, or they are not. They are either powerful enough to coerce their female possessions into labour, sex and child bearing, or their female possessions are seized by those who are.
There's no mutuality in Homer, but that doesn't mean there was no mutuality in ancient Greece. My biggest complaint about the essay is that it treats them like they're the same thing.
Imagine, 3000 years into the future, all that remains of our culture are "Infinity War" and "Endgame". Even though they would learn something about what we glorified, they would not learn much about how we lived.
Does the fact that both movies were massive hits in many other cultures change what we can infer from the text alone? Endgame was the highest-grossing foreign film in Chinese box-office history. That suggests one of two things, which both hurt the essay's claims.
First, it could be that Marvel movies speak to something common across all of 21st-century humanity. If that's true, then what a story glorifies can't explain any particular society; the same values resonate everywhere.
Alternatively, if the films' values simply don't reduce to any single set of cultural practices, then popularity tells us even less about how any audience actually lived. Either way, you can't read a society's actual arrangements off its most beloved fictions, an inference the essay's argument depends on.
I think there's a lot more history Alice Evans draws on than just Homer in her other work;
Perhaps, and I could certainly have missed it, though I've been following this substack since launch.
A quick search through the archives makes me skeptical that it's here. The first two examples I could find were bald assertions:
"Why does Kinship Vary across the World?" [https://www.ggd.world/p/why-does-kinship-vary-across-the] briefly mentions Ancient Greece (below), but never substantiates or sources it:
> Since patrilineal societies trace descent down the male line, they care about paternal certainty and legitimate biological heirs. Patrilineal societies thus idealise virgins, chastity and cloistering. In Ancient Greece, wealthy families secluded female kin. Women’s names were not uttered in public; they were only recognised as appendages to husbands and fathers.
"An Intellectual History of the Patriarchy" [https://www.ggd.world/p/an-intellectual-history-of-the-patriarchy] does the same thing:
> In Ancient Greece, Southern Mesopotamia, Mughal India and Song China, patrilineal clans cloistered female kin in order to preserve their honour. Female wage labour was shunned for fear of inevitable stigma, suspicion and loss of status.
I'm not contradicting those statements, but in both cases, that's it. They're not supported by anything, which could be fine in context, but it is not evidence of even moderate historical knowledge.
I'm also skeptical because this essay doesn't even acknowledge the possibility that there could have been any sort of complicating factors. Evans doesn't consider and refute it, she just doesn't consider it. She's often perceptive and careful about contemporary matters, but there's just no evidence *in the essay* that she's grappled with historical research about ancient Greece.
I agree completely, and I'll just mention that Emily Wilson was briefly on substack. She hasn't written anything in a while, but she has a couple of good posts about translation, and I hope she'll return at some point: https://emily613.substack.com/
'the silence of the girls' is a really haunting novel that tells the story from the perspective of Briseis - would recommend a read to get a sense of what it would have been like to be a woman in that situation
Thank you for this brief but clear analysis. Women, like slaves, were unable to vote in Ancient Greece, and as they didn't fight in wars either, one could assume they were 'protected' in an insecure world because they were expected to reproduce the warriors in the sanctity of the home.
I suppose I'm not sure that's there's any evidence at all for mutuality! Much of what Alice is saying about Homer is well substantiated in terms of what we know about ancient greek culture. It is well evidenced that it was highly patriarchal and that women had very few rights, for example. Homer is illustrative rather than informative in that respect
Just restarted this yesterday. Funny the timing all flows from that movie, which I will probably skip unless I hear I'd ought to.