Calloway Scott

Emily Wilson’s mistranslation of polytropos has already been beaten to death but I think there is an important piece of commentary missing. Homer’s usage of polytropos — many-sided, of many turns — as the first epithet describing Odysseus is inseparable from the story in the same way that it’s vital to Père Goriot for Goriot to actually be old. Odysseus’s first singular opponent in the Odyssey is the cyclops: literally one-sided with one eye, who cannot comprehend Odysseus’s trick, who is defeated by being blinded. His one tool is neutralized and he is done, whereas Odysseus ends up, both here and ultimately, victorious. Additionally, an accurate translation is needed because it makes sense of the entire narrative. Each obstacle in the Odyssey tests a different side of Odysseus. Using “complicated” instead of “man of many devices” or even something like “devious” is an egregious inaccuracy. It takes the broad and layered “skilled in all ways of contending,” a description of Odysseus’s nature, and collapses it into a simple psychological diagnosis, both patronizing Odysseus and injuring the artistry behind the myth. Part of what makes Homer the bedrock of Western Civilization and not just a few accidentally received and easily dismissible scrolls is that the stories are coherent at the structural level — meaning narrative, allusions, symbolism, and, notably, word choice. This level of architecture is what we typically expect from more modern authors, meaning that we should treat it as something closer to translating Dante or Don Quixote, rather than as something closer to Livy or Tacitus, where the information takes precedence over the structure. Massacring the classics for a gold star in a university department or for an Oscar should be expected behavior from our intellectual and artistic betters by now. However, expectation should not permit us to condone or accept this sort of dismemberment, where Homer is treated as mere novelty, rather than as the literary and artistic giant that Western Civilization has always known him to be.

The academic left has traditionally opposed “the Western canon” but has never supported the idea of expanding the canon to include classic works of ancient India, Arabia, Persia, China. Their opposition is not really against “the West” per se, but rather against the idea of using college to learn “old wisdom,” i.e. knowledge for which there’s no immediate market, whether an economic market (did you learn the type of analysis the financial firm wants?) or political market (did you learn the intersectional formulae the NGO ecosystem wants?).

Madeline Miller didn’t need to make up out of thin air that Achilles and Patroclus were gay, Plato already called them lovers over 2,000 years ago

All this fuss over Achilles and Helen's casting is so absurd because both of them combined probably have a screen time of not more than 15 minutes in the entire Odyssey. You need to be redirecting this hatred to Matt Damon playing Odysseus.

🚨 NEW: Zohran Mamdani to permanently fund NYC libraries and parks. Libraries will no longer have to plead for funding each year.

Because he was trying to help them with philosophy. And in so doing he dragged his men out further and farther then they could go. Philosophy is negation and thesis and antithesis and a caterwauling and banging with no fixed center. It is a statue for Poseidon and also a hollow sacrilegious treachery that he had to atone for by walking away from philosophy so far with an oar that he was surrounded by people who didn't know what an oar was.

This might just be the most complete and total bastardization of the truth available. Homer, as we are told by Aristophanes and later Wilamowitz, was the "First Teacher" or "Master Teacher" BECAUSE his works were used to transmit the aristocratic values of the Bronze Age, in fact, he was almost the singular reference point in regards to these values which were to be instilled in the effort of Paideia. What it means to be an aristocrat is understood ONLY through a "moral" reflection on the values as embodied by the great heroes of the epics, and thus too much of Western culture's thoughts on the idea. This is obvious when idiot pew-riding charlatans like this have plenty to say about the errors of ascribing moral value to Achilles but will turn around and provide plenty of "doulia" towards Hector for other reasons. How completely absurd and backwards is it to claim that a hero is never to be venerated because of his tragic flaw? This is the whole point of describing these characters with such compelling narratives; later Greek philosophy would dedicate countless pages to the excess and insufficiencies of specific traits in much the same tradition. The Iliad is quite literally a handbook of moral virtue. Not your virtue, so be it, no one contests that you do not possess the worldview of the ancient Greeks nor should you delude yourself in attempting to claim otherwise—the meaning of the cross in on your profile is the inversion and firm end to such "tragic" circumstances. The foundation of Western education is looking at men like Achilles and determining how to be like them. Homer is the founder of it. We can stop pretending, lying, and spewing bullshit about this issue to serve as a front for other things. Classic scholarship has had this solved for centuries

In Emily Wilson’s own explanation of why she misleadingly translated ‘polytropos’ (literally ‘many-turned’ or ‘many-turning’) to the pejorative epithet ‘complicated’ when describing Odysseus, she gives the correct translation:

Roman Helmet Guy is a moron. Here's why: The word is a compound adjective formed by the prefix poly- (from polys, meaning “many”, “multiple”, or “great in number”) + the noun tropos + the adjectival ending -os. Tropos itself derives from the verb trepō (τρέπω), “to turn, to twist, to change direction”. Its IE root trep- carries the core sense of “turning” or “bending”. In Greek, tropos literally means “a turn”, “a twist”, “a way”, “a direction”, or “a path”, and only secondarily “manner”, “character”, “method” or “habit”. Thus the literal etymological force of polytropos is “having many turns” or “of many twistings/ways” aka a single word that fuses multiplicity (poly-) with the idea of deviation, adaptation, and change (tropos). It is not a simple descriptor; it encodes the notion of something that constantly “turns” or “shifts”, whether geographically or mentally. Per the standard reference Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, the word carries two intertwined layers of meaning:Literal / physical: “much-turned”, “much-wandering”, “much-traveled”, “roaming widely”. This is precisely how Odysseus is understood in Odyssey 1.1 (“ἄνδρα … πολύτροπον”) and again at 10.330 (Circe addressing him). Metaphorical / characterological: “versatile”, “of many devices”, “resourceful”, “wily”, “shifty”, “adaptable”. Examples: Hermes (Homeric Hymn to Hermes), Plato (Hippias Minor 364e–365a, where he contrasts the “polytropos” Odysseus with the “simple” Achilles), Thucydides (versatility of mind), Plutarch (on Alcibiades). Later texts can shade into “fickle” or “changeable”. The adverb polytropōs simply means “in many ways” or “variously”. In Modern Greek the word survives as a learned term meaning “resourceful,” “inventive,” “intricate,” or “complicated”, with the same double edge. Homer places polytropos in the very first line of the Odyssey (“Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον…”) precisely because the word is deliberately ambiguous. It invites a double reading that no single English adjective can fully replicate: Literal: the hero who has literally “turned” through countless places; Trojan War, stormy seas, islands, underworld, back to Ithaca. Metaphorical: the hero whose mind and character are full of twists; cunning, shape-shifting, never straightforward, endlessly adaptive. This is not accidental. Homer is announcing a new kind of hero: not the straight-line, uncomplicated warrior (Achilles, “the simplest and most truthful”, in Plato’s words), but the multifaceted, many-layered, non-linear survivor. Polytropos is the ancient Greek way of saying “complicated man”. Emily Wilson’s choice of “complicated” is therefore not a simplification or a betrayal of the Greek; it is a defensible modern English rendering that captures the core etymological and conceptual force of the word. “Complicated” preserves the sense of “many turns”, “not straightforward”, “full of twists”; both in Odysseus’s journey and in his character, while remaining immediately intelligible to contemporary readers. English simply has no single native word that packs the same literal + metaphorical punch as the Greek compound. “Man of many ways,” “versatile,” “wily,” or “of many devices” all require footnotes or sound archaic; “complicated” does the job cleanly. They attack Wilson for choosing “complicated”. Who? Peoople who do not read ancient Greek (and certainly not fluently). They are reacting to a surface-level English word without grasping the layered ambiguity Homer himself built into polytropos. Someone who cannot read the original line, who has never parsed the etymology of tropos, and who has never seen how later Greek authors exploited the same double meaning is simply not in a position to lecture a professional classicist on what the Greek “really” means. Wilson did a good translation. She's is genuinely a good scholar. They, on the other hand, are ποικιλοτρόπως, πολυτρόπως, παντοτρόπως, διαρκώς, και εντελώς αμετατρόπως ηλίθιοι.