What’s the Problem with Elon Musk’s ‘Iliad’ Advice?

On August 24th, 2024, Elon Musk, who is currently one of the richest, most powerful, and most influential human beings on the planet, tweeted, “Can’t recommend The Iliad enough! Best as Penguin audiobook at 1.25 speed.” He accompanied these words with a link to the audiobook edition of E. V. Rieu’s 1946 prose translation of the Odyssey (a different poem from the Iliad), published by Penguin Classics. This tweet has created a lot of discourse in the online classics community, with many classicists criticizing Musk while others are left wondering what there is to criticize. In this post, I will explain what the problems are with Musk’s recommendation, which basically break down into two separate issues: right-wing dog whistling and bad practical advice.

Use of ancient Greek literature as a dog whistle for right-wing social politics

Classics has been a small academic field for a long time and, unfortunately, in recent years, our field has become increasingly endangered due to many colleges and universities eliminating or downsizing their classics programs and not hiring new tenure-track faculty to replace old faculty who are retiring. In most contexts, a prominent public figure with a large platform recommending that his followers read the Iliad and/or the Odyssey would be a good thing for classics.

Context, however, is extremely important. Elon Musk isn’t just any high-profile public figure and he isn’t just recommending that people read Homer in vacuum; he is a man who seeks to advance a particular sociopolitical agenda and he is recommending that people read the Iliad in the context of this agenda.

Over the past few years, Musk has increasingly embraced white male supremacist, anti-LGBTQ social politics. As the new owner of Twitter (which he has tried and largely failed to rebrand as X), he has invited right-wing figures and Neo-Nazis who were previously banned from the site for hate speech to return, he has deliberately boosted right-wing and anti-trans accounts, he has significantly relaxed enforcement of rules banning transphobic harassment on the site, and he has banned use of the words cis and cisgender as “slurs.” Most of his own recent activity on the site consists of racist, sexist, queerphobic (especially transphobic), and antisemitic dog whistling.

Moreover, under Musk’s ownership, accounts promoting hard-right ideologies centered around the glorification of “traditional” white masculinity have absolutely exploded in both number and prominence. Many of these accounts use a front of promoting “western” literature, art, and philosophy to appeal to a broad audience while also promoting their ideologies in sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. Many of these accounts focus specifically on content related to ancient Greece and Rome.

Only a few days before Musk made his tweet recommending the Iliad, the prominent right-wing political operative Christopher F. Rufo, who is best known for having basically single-handedly manufactured the media hysteria over “critical race theory” back in 2020, issued a tweet celebrating that the recently right-wing-hijacked New College of Florida will be teaching Greek literature instead of “gender studies.”

ABOVE: Screenshot of a tweet that Christopher F. Rufo made on August 19th, 2024 celebrating that New College of Florida will be teaching Greek literature instead of “gender studies”

Although none of us know what Musk’s private thoughts are, we can reasonably infer based on the information I have just described that a significant part of his motivation for recommending the Iliad is to signal to the trad masculinity “western values” accounts who use his platform and follow him that he is on their side and supports their goals.

Rufo, Musk, and others of their ilk are using Greek literature as a dog whistle for white male supremacist, anti-LGBTQ social politics. This is, of course, ironic considering the sheer extent to which homoeroticism and gender nonconformity pervade Greek literature, but the right-wing promoters of Greek literature are generally ill-informed about what the literature they promote actually contains and don’t care much about it anyway. They care more about Homer as a symbol of lost white masculinity than as actual literature.

To be clear, I am absolutely in favor of more people reading the Iliad and the Odyssey; they are poetic masterpieces that have exerted enormous influence on subsequent western literature, art, and philosophy and I firmly believe that they still hold immense value to read and study even today. I agree with Musk in recommending that people should read the epics.

These poems, however, also contain much that is abhorrent (including slavery, misogyny, oppression of women, horrible violent atrocities, and much else) and they can unfortunately appeal to some people for the wrong reasons. It is important that, when people read these epics, they do so critically and not out of naïve admiration for powerful men and their violent deeds.

If the discipline of classics is to survive the coming years, it cannot be through alliance, whether active or passive, with men like Rufo and Musk, whose actual knowledge of our field is superficial and who only pretend to care about it insofar as they believe that they can leverage it to advance their own agenda in the culture war.

Why Musk’s advice about how to read the Iliad is bad

This brings us to the second, less serious problem with Musk’s recommendation, which is that he gives his audience highly specific advice about what the “best” way to experience the Iliad is, recommending an exact translation (Rieu’s), format (audiobook), and speed (1.25) and providing a specific link—but, practically speaking, his advice is mostly bad.

The most obvious problem, of course, is that, even though his tweet recommends the Iliad, his link is to an audiobook of the Odyssey (an entirely different poem!), but this is just the beginning.

Musk specifically recommends E. V. Rieu’s translation, which, although it is not entirely without merits, is not one that I or many other classicists would highly recommend to readers today. To understand why I say this, we need to discuss the difficulties inherent in translation, what Rieu’s priorities were when he made his renditions, and the priorities that I think matter for contemporary readers.

Translating any work of literature, especially a poem as long and complex as the Iliad or the Odyssey, is never an easy endeavor. Every translator must balance multiple goals and, when these goals conflict, decide which ones to prioritize. Often a translator must choose between trying to convey the literal meaning of the text they are translating as accurately as possible, imitating the poetic quality of the original, and using language that their audience will find accessible.

Because every translator has different priorities, there can never be such a thing as a single “best” or “worst” translation because different translations are useful for different purposes and audiences.

E. V. Rieu cofounded the Penguin Classics series in the mid-1940s with the mission to make the great literature of the past available in a cheap, paperback form that the ordinary working man could easily afford and in simple-language prose translations that he could easily understand. Rieu’s own 1946 translation of the Odyssey and 1950 translation of the Iliad were two of the very first volumes published for this series. As such, the first and foremost priority behind their creation was to use language that was accessible to the 1940s/50s layman.

Although Rieu’s mission of making Homer accessible to the broader public was admirable, in practice, it means that his translations hold several disadvantages compared to others that are available today. The first and most obvious of these is that his translations are in prose, not verse—and not even especially elegant prose at that. Some people may like reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in simple prose, but it is a very different experience from reading them in verse.

Second, although a reader would normally expect a prose translation to be more faithful to the literal meaning of the original text than a verse one, Rieu actually follows the Greek text of Homer less closely than many verse translations. Because of his assumptions about his target audience of ordinary, working people, he often simplified or omitted Homeric language that he thought this audience might find confusing.

As part of this overall program of simplification, Rieu introduces many modern colloquialisms not found in the original Greek. He also tries very hard to present the Homeric heroes in a positive, gentlemanly light by the standards of his own time. For instance, he translates the common epithet “δῖος” (which literally means “shining,” “heavenly,” or “godlike”) as simply “good,” which has a different, much simpler connotation than the original word in Greek, and he introduces modern polite expressions such as “Kindly. . .” and “Be good enough to. . .” before orders.

Perhaps most egregiously, Rieu significantly pares down the role of the gods throughout the epics by omitting references to unnamed or non-specific deities that occur in the Greek. To illustrate, here are the first five lines of the Iliad in the original Greek, in which the poet calls upon the Muse, the goddess of poetic inspiration, to tell the story of Akhilleus’s rage:

“μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή.”

Here is my own attempt at a fairly literal translation of these lines:

“Sing, goddess, the wrath of the son of Peleus Akhilleus,
ruinous, which set up myriad woes for the Akhaians,
sent many strong souls of heroes to Hades,
and made them into carrion for dogs
and all birds, and Zeus’s will was being accomplished.”

Here is how Rieu renders these same lines in his original 1950 translation:

“The Wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfillment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for dogs and passing birds.”

Readers will immediately notice that someone very important is missing from Rieu’s version of the invocation: the Muse herself!

To be clear, using language that is accessible to a target audience is an important goal for every translator. Indeed, the whole point of translation is to take something that is said in language a reader cannot understand and render it into language that they can understand. Nonetheless, a certain degree of fidelity to the meaning of the original is generally expected and Rieu’s translation is inconsistent in this regard.

ABOVE: First edition covers of E. V. Rieu’s translations of the Iliad (left) and Odyssey (right) for Penguin Classics

E. V. Rieu’s son D. C. H. Rieu revised his father’s translation of the Odyssey in 1991 and of the Iliad in 2003 to fix some of the problems I’ve just pointed out. For instance, he removes some of the more glaring colloquialisms and restores the references to deities that his father omitted. The most recent Penguin Classics editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey (including the audiobook that Elon links in his tweet) use the younger Rieu’s revised translations.

Unfortunately, his revisions keep most of the colloquialisms and in some cases make the elder Rieu’s prose, which was often already inelegant, even more clunky. Here, for instance, is his revised version of the Iliad‘s proem:

“Anger—sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that accursed anger, which brought the Greeks endless sufferings and sent the mighty souls of many warriors to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and a feast for the birds; and Zeus’ purpose was fulfilled.”

As you can see the Muse is back—but the translation repeats the word “anger” three times in the span of the first two lines, even though the corresponding word in Greek (μῆνις) only occurs once!

If your top priority for a translation is literal closeness to the Greek text, then Richmond Lattimore and Caroline Alexander’s translations are your best bets. If your top priority is poetic quality and beauty of language, then Alexander Pope, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, or Emily Wilson’s translation could be a good fit for you (depending on your particular poetic preferences).

Even when it comes to accessible language, Rieu’s translations aren’t necessarily the most accessible to audiences today, since they were originally published three quarters of a century ago and what was considered accessible language back then may not necessarily be the case to audiences today. Most readers will probably find more recent translations, such as those of Fagles, Alexander, and Wilson, more accessible than Rieu’s.

Under no criterion is Rieu’s translation clearly one of the best. This is not really Rieu’s own fault so much as a natural consequence of the fact that so many other translators of Homer have been so damn talented. Ironically, the Rieu translation’s greatest commendation may be that it is one of the cheaper modern translations available to purchase, which means that, ironically, for the world’s richest man, Elon Musk has cheap taste.

On top of all this, Musk recommends listening to the Iliad at 1.25 speed, which is also bad advice for most people. The Iliad and the Odyssey are highly complex poems that are replete with subtle details that only attentive readers will catch, vivid poetic descriptions, complicated similes, and allusions to myths and mythic figures who were familiar to the poems’ original audiences but are obscure to most readers today.

A person who listens to an audiobook of the Iliad or the Odyssey at faster-than-normal speed might get something out of the experience, but it is far from the “best” way to experience the poems and a person who speed-listens to them is likely to miss out on a great deal compared to if they listened at a normal speed.

In general, regardless of whether one reads the Homeric epics in print or listens to them on audiobook, I would recommend taking the poems slowly, taking time to think about what is happening and what the poet is saying and rereading or re-listening to difficult passages to better understand them. Many critical guides and commentaries to the epics exist, which can be immensely helpful, especially for readers who are encountering them for the first time.

Of the two epics, the Iliad is, if anything, an even more complex and challenging work to read than the Odyssey. Notably, while the Odyssey predominantly focuses on a single protagonist (Odysseus), the Iliad has a much larger cast of characters and is less focused on any single individual. While the story of Akhilleus’s rage frames the narrative, Akhilleus isn’t the central character of the whole epic. In fact, the majority of the work follows the battles between the Akhaians and Trojans that take place in his absence.

Given the sheer number of characters and the complexity of events, it can be difficult even for an attentive reader who is reading the Iliad slowly to keep track of everything that is going on. I imagine that listening to the poem at faster-than-normal speed would only make it even more difficult to follow.

For those readers who are interested, I will be making another post sometime in the next few days with general advice and recommendations about reading the Iliad and the Odyssey and ancient Greek literature in translation in general.