Emily Wilson: Likeminded Sheep and Clinging Cuttlefish in the ‘Odyssey’

The third of the LRB Winter Lectures for 2027; the second lecture will be given by Sheila Fitzpatrick, and you can book a ticket for the whole series on the event page for the first, which will be given by Jonathan Rée.

‘So may the gods grant all your heart’s desires,’ Odysseus says to Nausicaa in Book VI of the Odyssey, ‘a home and husband, somebody likeminded.’ Likemindedness is a motif that runs through Homer’s poem, which is full of connections and divisions both across human cultures and between humans and other species and landscapes. And yet the poem is also interested in many-mindedness, and the possibilities for misunderstandings, miscommunications and deceit. In this lecture, Emily Wilson reflects on the themes of empathy, connection and multiplicity in Homer and other ancient literature, and considers what links contemporary cultures to antiquity and what separates them from it.

Emily Wilson’s translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad are published by Norton. A professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, The Death of Socrates and a biography of Seneca, and has translated Seneca and Euripides as well as Homer. Wilson has been writing for the London Review since 2004 – her first piece was on Sappho – and those essays, along with a few others, have been collected in a book, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea, published by the LRB and Profile. She is also one of the hosts of two Close Readings podcast series on ancient Greek and Latin literature.