Still can’t get enough of the Odyssey? You’re in luck. Two months after the release of Christopher Nolan’s mammoth film adaptation of Homer’s poem, readers can regale themselves with the just-released Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature (Liveright/Norton, Sept. 1). The essay collection is written by Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the Odyssey was the first-ever translation of the poem, in English, by a woman. Wilson has Nolan to thank for her book returning to bestseller lists, but this hasn’t stopped her—nor should it—from giving entertaining interviews in which she tears into the film; in a long essay for the London Review of Books, she wrote, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
In Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, which earned a Kirkus star, Wilson offers yet more detailed insights into the Odyssey that will fascinate both die-hard classicists and newcomers to ancient texts. As an example, she describes how, “in modern popular imagination, the Cyclops is a ‘monster.’…And yet in the Greek, Polyphemus is a human being, and the son of a god—although he is also alien in his habits and his physical appearance.” In her translation, therefore, Wilson refers to Polyphemus not as a “beast” but as a “wild man.” She also delves into the poem’s famous opening line, which she has reworked as “Tell me about a complicated man.” Her overall goal, she writes, was “to evoke the energy and clarity and beauty and music and pacing of the original, avoiding both the flatness or awkwardness or the more ‘literal’ translations and the looser ones that tend to expand or riff on the original.”
Wilson’s new collection just might be the gateway drug—lotus?—that’ll keep readers blissfully ensconced in the ancient world. In Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece (Basic Books, May 12), historian Adrian Goldsworthy begins, according to our starred review, “with the beginning, with Crete and Mycenae, with palace powers and then, with Homeric memories of war and heroism,” adding: “There are moments when we may as well be reading of our own time as theirs: ‘Frightened people can readily turn to savagery.’”
In Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower (Norton, May 19), Andrew Bayliss offers a stinging portrait of the warring Greek city-state, writing, “The only freedom the Spartans were interested in was their own—and particularly the freedom to treat anyone they thought beneath them as they pleased.” That included, the author writes, “feeding off the forced labour of their helots,” or enslaved people.
For those who want to learn about parallels between the decline of ancient civilizations and our own contentious times, there is Thomas F. Madden’s The Fall of Republics: A History From Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution (Princeton Univ., June 9). Having read about the collapse of ancient Sparta, the Roman Republic, and Carthage, America’s Founding Fathers conceived of a separation of powers—a safeguard to keep tyranny at bay, Madden observes. “In every way,” he writes, “the Founders’ experiment has outperformed the Roman Republic. Although the U.S. Constitution strains under the weight of hyper-partisanship, it remains remarkably strong and secure.”
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
