An Intricate Epic for Our Chaotic Times
By Pasquale Toscano (Vassar College)
Epic is a very old genre. Its values can feel outmoded, its heroes devoid of inner lives. Yet by some measures, it’s more popular these days than ever. That’s because modern adaptations—from Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson to Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey to novels that reimagine marginalized classical figures—are drawing folks of all ages back to the ancient stories. Epic’s grandeur, propulsion, and indelibly archetypal characters ensure we can’t let go of it for good.
Even the genre’s most troubling features—like overt misogyny—aren’t always as straightforward as they seem. In 2017, for instance, Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey showed that the harsh portrayals of women such as Circe—a witch who got a second act as the title heroine of Madeline Miller’s bestselling novel—stem from choices made by earlier translators as much as from the language of this paradoxically intricate text. For her part, Wilson muted the epic’s most alienating qualities by using value-neutral words for women and—since we’re unused to long poems—trimming Homer’s twelve-beat meter to the five stresses of blank verse. It was an edition for the #MeToo reckoning that briskly matched the length of the original Greek. But certain complicating details were elided in the process, leaving room for another translation to capture them.
The classicist Daniel Mendelsohn’s new Odyssey is just such a work. Everywhere his critical acumen shines through. From pitch-perfect diction to sonic sensitivity—and with lines that blur the boundary of prose and verse, after Homer’s own prosody—Mendelsohn consistently brings the far-flung world of the Odyssey to boisterously riveting life.
Mendelsohn does this in part by carefully retaining Homer’s layered perspectives. He preserves, for instance, the way in which Circe’s image is shaded by the paternalism of Odysseus, who speaks of her while recounting his journey from Troy to Ithaca. True to the Greek, Mendelsohn repeats words like “sinister,” even when her spells seem anything but and exposes the objectifying gaze of Odysseus’s men as they watch Circe “weaving a goddess’s work: so fine, so delightful, so dazzling.” No wonder she turns them into swine.
Mendelsohn also alerts us to the intricacies of Homer’s technique in his introduction and translator’s note. Frequently building on insights from his moving memoir An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic, these prefatory materials reveal a Homer plumbing the depths of selfhood and revelation. Such themes, Mendelsohn stresses, resonate strongly today, helping explain why Odyssey adaptations don’t abate. In such a crowded field, however, the virtue of this finely textured version is that even while sweeping us up in the larger lessons of Homer’s plot, it reminds us of the careful brushstrokes that make that narrative great.
This same capaciousness also means Mendelsohn’s translation won’t be for everyone. Occasionally, it can even feel baggy alongside Wilson’s ebullience. For instance, whereas Wilson translates “polytropos” as “complicated,” pressing the word’s nuances into a novelistic box, Mendelsohn renders the compound adjective as “who had so many roundabout ways,” unleashing the possibilities to run free. More often, however, their differences—never unkindly parsed by Mendelsohn himself—give us two crucial access points for a text as protean as its hero. Wilson’s Odyssey feels primed for performance and public reading—like her wonderful videos on YouTube—while Mendelsohn’s earnest philology invites private, reflective engagement about language and the “many-sided” self. The result is a reading experience of immense intimacy.
This might be a boon at such a chaotic political moment. But it also raises the question: should we be undertaking the heavy lift of a distant genre by long-dead authors when so many urgent issues demand our attention? Mendelsohn himself doesn’t speak to this query, nor does he reference contemporary politics more generally. I’m guessing that’s to prolong the book’s reach. Fair enough. Regardless, the granularities of Mendelsohn’s translation implicitly show why a three-thousand-year-old author is perfectly poised to address the political precarities of today.
This is less surprising when one remembers that epic is the genre most thoroughly engaged with questions of power. Often it celebrates heroic strongmen—thanks to convention and the pressures of patronage (from rulers not too lenient themselves). Yet the greatest epicists also know that to dramatize the derring-do of heroes is to include all that is—and all who are—sacrificed en route. They entwine these two strands, caduceus-like, around one narrative pole, presenting the fight for glory in all its ambivalent mess. The effect is often to undercut the ruling class and covertly critique unchecked authority—a theme that remains as relevant now as ever.
Mendelssohn draws out these tensions masterfully, handing us a vocabulary for discussing leadership and questioning the leaders themselves. Early in the poem, Homer reports that Odysseus “struggled to safeguard his life and the homecoming of his companions.” Soon after, though, we are told, “But he did not save his companions even so, though he longed to, / For their heedlessness destroyed them, theirs and nobody else’s.” The defensiveness of the wording comes through in the sputtering sibilance, the vehement repetitions, and the relentless hedging of concession with careful causality. The party line on the deaths of Odysseus’s men must be carefully drawn now since the plot to come reveals that many of these “companions” did, in fact, perish from the “heedlessness” of their leader. What does it mean to praise such a figure, then—and when does it become immoral to do so? As a species, we’ll always need our heroes, for inspiration and support—for better and for worse. But choosing whom to admire—and for how long to support them—is the tricky part. Mendelsohn’s translation allows us to heed Homer’s careful ironies, giving us a framework for confronting the challenges these choices pose.
The Odyssey builds much of this scaffold around growing into manhood, a theme Mendelsohn amply highlights in his introduction. When Odysseus returns home, he and his son Telemachus liberate their island from the suitors who have overrun their home. Alternatively, they slaughter these rabble-rousers indiscriminately. Telemachus then hangs en masse the slave women who slept—or were forced to sleep—with the suitors. All very troubling stuff.
We cannot ignore the disturbing elements of their actions for at least two reasons. First, regarding Telemachus, “the psychologically persuasive touches in Homer’s portrait of this immature young man,” as Mendelsohn puts it, evokes the lonely reactionism of male teenagers in America, much discussed of late. Too young to remember his father, he’s grown resentful, chiding his mother Penelope—“So now go back to your rooms”—as the suitors ravage their hall, a kind of echo chamber of frustrated masculinity, as it were. Even the king’s return doesn’t help. Odysseus couldn’t have survived without the wisdom of women like Circe (and only Penelope outsmarts him, Mendelsohn notes), but his lesson for Telemachus is that manliness coheres in bellicose self-fashioning: “Then he went / And stood by his father’s chair, armed in glittering bronze.” Of course, it’s thrilling when the suitors get theirs, but just beneath the surface, Homer shows that the adage boys will be boys is bunk. They don’t grow up in a vacuum; their sense of manhood is learned, and therefore might also be taught differently.
Second, the Odyssey’s revenge plot compels us to scrutinize how stories of grievance and restoration are narrated. As Mendelsohn himself observes, Homer’s interest in the relativities of truth seems “surprisingly self-conscious, even modern,” especially when it comes to Odysseus’s own spin-doctoring. As he ruthlessly eliminates all those who stand in his way to reclaiming control of Ithaca, for example, Odysseus justifies the bloodshed by presenting himself as the unassailably aggrieved party: “You dogs, you never imagined that I would make my way back home / From the country of the Trojans,” he booms, unconcerned with generating a cycle of violence that will necessitate the intervention of the gods. From this angle, Odysseus is cruelly calculating, and the poem artfully glorifies his efforts to mitigate this fact. His indignant, bombastic pronouncements—such as “How, while I was still alive—but out of sight—you courted my wife, / No fear at all of the gods who hold the far-flung heavens, / No fear of the righteous anger of people in time to come!”—thus give a masterclass in the pretenses of power and intoxications of revenge. The horrifying picture to emerge suggests that fears of being forgotten in a changing world warp one’s sense of others and self. Yet Homer’s magic is to create what Mendelsohn calls a “fathomless, quick-silver” hero who, from another vantage, remarkably perseveres in a world trying its best to kill him.
Mendelsohn’s dual portrait of a hero both admirable and unsettling preserves these complexities. His translation warns us that heroism is rarely as inherent as it is created, from the storytelling of both politicians and bards. If language creates the hero, though, it can also undo him—or pull his framing apart for a closer look. Epic shows us how.
Even so, epic is no mere user’s guide, as the poise and potency of Mendelsohn’s translation also reminds us. The genre’s greatest strength lies not just in its heroes’ will to survive but in its own ability to live on—its capacity to raise a monument to human endurance and creativity amidst turmoil. During a period in which so much seems fleeting, uncertain, or unjust, epic’s lasting vitality might even offer a balm. We owe Mendelsohn a debt of gratitude for administering such a salve to us now.
Published July 8, 2025.
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