Emily Wilson

speaker

214 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Emily Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Daily · What’s Epic About the ‘Odyssey’? Everything. · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

But I also in some ways look forward to that because I think that's going to be so generative to think about and discuss with students.

But say what you mean by that specifically.

So, for instance, I mean, I think it's very likely that this is going to be presented as the story of a husband who's very much in love and is returning to his soulmate, as opposed to he has a hero who's generating glory for himself through this quest.

I also think it's from the casting that we've seen so far, we haven't been told anything about a...

Actor playing Eurycleia, the enslaved elderly nursemaid who famously washes Odysseus' leg and recognizes the scar on his leg because, of course, the enslaved women in the household know the bodies of their enslavers in ways that even his wife doesn't know his body on that level.

Eurycleia has been taking care of him ever since he was a little baby.

So when he comes home, she recognizes him.

She recognizes him when she's washing his feet as a gesture of hospitality.

She's washing the feet and reaches up the leg and recognizes the scar that he got when he was hunting on his first trip.

I think that's an amazing sequence and she's an amazing character.

I think it would be a shame if the norms of Hollywood meant an older woman actor isn't going to get a part in that scene.

you know, to play Eurycleia.

I also wonder about the degree to which the whole apparatus of the enslaved members of the household, will that be fully fleshed out in the Nolan version, or will it just be maybe one enslaved character?

I think Eumaeus has been announced, but maybe there won't be as much richness in terms of the social world of the enslaved members of the household as there is in the original poem.

I think it's crucial in the original in terms of what does the poem say about nostos, about homecoming, and about the fact that it's such an exclusive privilege to get to have a homecoming journey and to have a house at all.

Eumaeus the swineherd says, if only my owner would come back because he might one day give me a house of my own.

And that we have this really clear sense that the enslaved members of the household

don't actually want to belong to someone else's house.

They want a house of their own, but they don't get a homecoming journey because they belong to someone else's homecoming journey.

And of course, his journey is not glorious and his house is not glorious unless it's full of people who haven't chosen to be there.

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