Emily Wilson: preference

Transcript context

…What kinds of people, if you had to generalize, prefer the Iliad to the Odyssey? What’s that preference correlated with, empirically? [laughs] I think it’s about mood, partly. The Odyssey is much more varied just in terms of scenes. If you’re easily bored, you may prefer the Odyssey because it has more different characters, more different scenes, more different types of things happen. In the Iliad, it’s some men are angry, some people get killed, some men are angry, some people get killed. It’s that, relentlessly, over and over and over. And it’s in this very, very small space, small stretch of time, whereas the Odyssey has far more variety in terms of what kinds of people are speaking, what kinds of events are happening. Is it fair to say that throughout most of the history of Western criticism, earlier critics preferred the Iliad to the Odyssey, even though the Odyssey, I would say, is clearly superior?…

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