In the episode that Wilson calls “one of the most horrible and haunting of the whole poem,” Odysseus returns home to find that his palace has been overrun by suitors for his wife’s hand. Though she has resisted them, the women in her palace have not. Odysseus, after slaying the suitors, tells his son, Telemachus, to kill the women. It is an interesting injunction from Odysseus, who himself, during his 10 years of wandering, was serially unfaithful. In Robert Fagles’s much-praised translation of the poem, Telemachus says, before he executes the palace women on his father’s command: “No clean death for the likes of them, by god!/Not from me — they showered abuse on my head, my mother’s too!/You sluts — the suitors’ whores!”But Wilson, in her introduction, reminds us that these palace women — “maidservants” has often been put forward as a “correct” translation of the Greek δμωαι, dmoai, which Wilson calls “an entirely misleading and also not at all literal translation,” the root of the Greek meaning “to overpower, to tame, to subdue” — weren’t free. Rather, they were slaves, and if women, only barely. Young female slaves in a palace would have had little agency to resist the demands of powerful men. Where Fagles wrote “whores” and “the likes of them” — and Lattimore “the creatures” — the original Greek, Wilson explained, is just a feminine definite article meaning “female ones.” To call them “whores” and “creatures” reflects, for Wilson, “a misogynistic agenda”: their translators’ interpretation of how these females would be defined.
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Wyatt Mason on Professor Emily Wilson in The First Woman to Translate the “Odyssey” Into English. New York Times, November 2, 2017.

This is so important. I never knew that the “maidservants” on Ithaka were slaves based on the popular men’s translations that I’ve read before. Fagles and Lattimore have condemned enslaved women as “whores” and “creatures,” blaming them for crimes that they were the victims of. The enslaved women on Ithaka had no say in any aspect of their lives, and Odysseus and Telemachus vitcim-blamed them so severely as to torture them to death. Fagles and Lattimore’s translations of these women are absolutely outrageous, even if they don’t surprise me at all. Another great example as to why we need more women in classics.

(via likeniobe)