With the publication of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, the English-speaking world has further confirmation that it is undergoing a renaissance of sobriety and high seriousness in Homeric translation. This era began in 2015 with Caroline Alexander’s translation of the Iliad, a magisterial transmission of Homer’s unselfconscious—plain and direct, but not grandiose—elegance employing a line of flexible meter with mainly five to seven beats and a scrupulous rendering of each word in a format matching the original Greek text line by line. (See “A classic restored,” The New Criterion, May 2016). Wilson’s Odyssey rests on three principles. First, like Alexander and others, she strives for line parity with the original text. Second, she succeeds at the Heraclean labor of rendering the poem in iambic pentameter, the meter that dominates our English prosodic traditions and is used by both Pope and Chapman in their translations of Homer. (The accentual syllabic iambic pentameter appeals naturally to the English ear. Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and countless others provide ample evidence.) Finally, Wilson states in her introduction that she rejects “grand, ornate, and rhetorically elevated English.” Thankfully, at this she also succeeds, as Homer is anything but Ruskin.

The quantitative meter of Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, and Statius is the dactylic hexameter, the supreme verse form in antiquity, patterned upon vowel length, rather than stress accent. It is naturally suited to Greek and Latin verse, with their long nouns and adjectives of multiple elements and verbs of complex morphology piling