Why Is the Right Obsessed With Epic Poetry?

In September 2023, the richest man in the world was daydreaming about the Trojan War. “I sometimes wonder if perhaps Rome was started by exiles from Troy,” Elon Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he had bought and swiftly renamed. His thoughts on the legendary war—documented in Homer’s two epic poems—were prompted by an online controversy over Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. The British classicist argued that previous translators had imported their own sexism into the poem and obscured the presence of slavery, so right-wing accounts labeled her work “Woke Homer.”