Most every Homeric translation since has been scrutinized against his quartet of qualities. Wilson is not persuaded.

“These are not good criteria,” Wilson told me. “I think he was a terrible reader of poetry. It’s not like he ever translated Homer. I think he had a good ‘classics major’ undergraduate kind of Greek, but I think it’s all to do with a particular notion of aesthetics and class, the whole ‘plainness and nobility.’ It’s about noblesse oblige and you’re going to be the kind of gentleman who’s going to have gone to Rugby and that will be the kind of language that we speak: the classy kind of language. And projecting all of that back on to the classics. This is what ‘sweetness and light’ is. It’s describing a boys’ club. I think it’s very interesting that’s still with us. Those are the four? It’s just the boys’ club.”

“I do think that gender matters,” Wilson said later, “and I’m not going to not say it’s something I’m grappling with. I’m trying to take this task and this process of responding to this text and creating this text extremely seriously, with whatever I have, linguistically, sonically, emotionally.”

At the center of each of Homer’s epics is a warrior. In the “Iliad,” it is Achilles, the greatest of the Greeks, a demigod almost invulnerable to death. Although the war is begun over a woman, Helen, stolen from her Greek husband by a Trojan, the “Iliad” is a poem about and presided over by men. Zeus is the poem’s prevailing god, and what men do, or are willing to do, in love and war and in the friendships that arise in war and its losses, are the poem’s preoccupations.

In the “Odyssey,” preoccupations shift, radically. Zeus is replaced by Athena as the dominant god of the tale; the poem begins not with Odysseus but with his wife, Penelope, who has been without him for 20 years, in a kingdom overrun by suitors for her hand, whom the conventions of hospitality ensure she cannot simply expel. The reader doesn’t even see Odysseus until the fifth of the poem’s 24 books, where we learn that he has been living on an island with Calypso, a goddess, for seven years; that, earlier, he was detained by another goddess, Circe, with whom he also shared a bed; that the Sirens, as he navigates, call to him, desiring him; that a young princess falls in love with him; that, on all sides, women are temptresses, and whereas he submits, we are to understand that Penelope, alone, assailed, remains faithful.

“In the second-wave feminist scholarship in classics,” Wilson told me, “people were very keen to try to read Penelope as, ‘Let’s find Penelope’s voice in the “Odyssey,” and let’s celebrate her, because look, here she is being the hero in an epic in ways we can somehow unpack.’ I find that’s a little simplistic. What happens to all the unelite women?”

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!”