I have. I spent two decades at it. I often find the way modern working women portray the traditional female role completely dismissive and scathing, like it is all downside. I did not experience it as all down side.

I spent a lot of years trying to comprehend how to play the feminine role in an empowered way, to stop seeing myself as simply a victim. The gist of what I came to understand can be summed up in the negotiating trope "The first person to name a number loses."

Emotional labor is a hot buzz word currently that seems to be the fashionable new way to say that doing women's work makes you a chump, a victim. But I think it is more complicated than that.

I don't like this trend that I see where modern women translate the stories of traditional women and are as derisive of the woman's role as men are, if not more so. The female slaves were executed, but so we're many men. This write up implies that the death of women has a unique horror to it that we need not feel over the more prosaic deaths of men.

At the time The Odyssey was written, life was generally harder than it is now. This was true for both men and women, rich and poor. Death was pretty common. It was not inherently more wonderful to be an executed male than an executed female.

I probably won't read Wilson's translation -- I recently read Fagles', and am not keen to re-read for sake of a new translation, although might be interested in a comparison of translation differences. But you are correct that Greek society was very, very different from "modern" society in many ways.

I was debating going into the ways it is different, but it seems that the political climate is too toxic, so I will instead link to a fantastic lecture series on the Odyssey that I personally found enlightening: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/odyssey-of-homer.htm...

The modern impulse to impose its cultural norms upon the past is deeply upsetting. Its a sign of a frail, unsure, and declining culture.

It's not a modern impulse, it's pretty much an invariant aspect of culture.

Of course, so is the tendency to perceive invariant aspects of culture as both unique to the present culture and signs of decline.

What are you trying to say here? Invariant is not a verb, and it's definition of "never changing" doesn't make sense in the way you used it.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/invariant

Its arguably even the case that it could be argued to be the sign of a particular kind of ascending culture, since being able to reinterpret the past and spread your own cultural norms could be said to give weight/momentum to a particular culture's propagation...

Things that are constant at any generation throughout history: the young always appear selfish and without morals; the past is not treated with enough respect; the overall culture is surely in decline. Athenians under Pericles were convinced of these, as were Romans under Augustus.

I don't mean to be unpleasant, but the idea that there has always been an oppositional libertine youth culture of selfishness is a modern canard.

History is cyclic. Humans flip between freedom to oppression, and I think so much of those steps back come from the fact that we are encouraged to forget the mistakes and lifestyles of the past. You see this in communism, various cultural revolutions, and other horrible things, yet certain revisionists wish to look back at those horrifying events with rose-tinted glasses. No, we should be willing to accept and see the truth, for all it's glory and brutality.

We can "save" the women of literature, yet ignore the oppression in the modern day woman, ie. the gender-driven infanticide that still exists today. If written words from 3000 years ago offends our sensibilities, what hope to do we, as a culture, have to hold up a guiding light to the rest of the world?

Fortunately, in our era those regressive forces are a frail, unsure, and declining culture.

It's important to seek the truth before attempting to change it, and I'm glad Emily can separate her clear desire to inhabit a different world from (what I see as) the duty to accurately present the work. If I need a translation of the Odyssey for myself or someone else, I guess I'll be getting a copy of this one.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17645.The_Penelopiad

Yes, Penelope's maids come to a bad end. I think a lot of critics misread this as misogyny on Homer's part. However, it is meant to be balanced with the death of the suitors and also Odysseus' shipmates, leaving only the marriage at the end.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624881

That's the story as summarized in a potential entry for a 'most trite message board comment' competition of some sort. The actual story is another story. Either that or people have been doing it wrong and reading too much into it for a couple of thousand years.

You wanna argue with Tolstoy?

I might refer you to TVtropes. All stories are the same eventually.

Of the 24 books of the Odyssey, Odysseus' famous seafaring wanderings account for just 4. Likewise, the narrative focuses on Odysseus in 20 out of the 24 books, and he is at home, on Ithaca, for 12 of them. Clearly, Odysseus trying to get home is not the main point of the story, however memorable some of his nautical adventures are.

If you ask me, the poem is about barbarism versus civilization, revenge versus justice, family, and the nature of heroism.

But that doesn't have anything to do with this article though, which I rather liked.

> You wanna argue with Tolstoy?

Tolstoy famously described Shakespeare as "insignificant" and didn't understand what all the fuss was about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lear,_Tolstoy_and_the_Fool

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/06/two-plots/

- Jack Woodford might have actually said it

- It works (sort of) for Anna Karenina

In Woodford's autobiography he attributes it to H. Allen Smith: https://books.google.com/books?id=AckQU9DPMnwC&pg=PT299&dq=J...

"My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, "All southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'"

And it's easy to attribute!

http://www.patconroy.com/articles_aba-85.php

Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison And I went to pick her up in the rain But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck She got runned over by a damned old train

That is sloppy reasoning, and it bothers me. (As it should you)

Edit: I'll summarize the arguments you've made so far and the obvious objections.

- The Odyssey is a trivial story of a dude returning to his wife [Not true, 20-odd centuries of scholarship saying otherwise]

- There is a tiny number of stories all stories reduce to (possibly two), a Major Writer of a World Literature Said So [not true, and, obviously, he did not say that]

- The above idea is somehow supported by tvtropes [tvtropes is wonderful but also full of thousands of tropes rather than two]

Every single one of these things is just deeply and demonstrably wrong. The totality of your evidence is... a made-up Tolstoy quote and a country song? It's hard to tell how to even argue with this.

Who's making stuff up?