Homer‘s The Iliad is currently on Usha Vance’s reading list.
JD Vance’s wife has frequently been spotted clutching Emily Wilson’s 2023 translation of the classic text while on the Republican campaign trail—apparently to keep up with her 7-year-old son, who’s “obsessed with mythology,” she told NBC News this week. And Wilson herself has now spoken up to suggest that the Yale-educated history grad should also be reading between the lines.
“I think there‘s all kinds of ironies,” the classicist told Vanity Fair when asked for her thoughts on Vance’s reading material.
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“'The Iliad' is a poem about how men fight for control of women‘s bodies—the whole plot is premised on that, and on the rage that happens between men over who gets to have absolute control over women’s bodies," she said, perhaps referring to JD Vance’s views on female reproductive rights.
“One of the other driving features of the plot is the question of what happens when a very powerful man, in this case Achilles, refuses to accept a loss, and what happens in terms of the deadliness, and what is the death count,” she then said, drawing a potent connection to Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election.
Wilson then spoke about the rising phenomenon of The Iliad–and other classical literature–being adopted by conservatives as allegories for our time.
“I get that, of course, there are people who are looking for justification for their own vision of the world,” she said.
Wilson suggested that this “vision” might be “to imagine ancient history involved this wonderful land where there weren‘t really any women, and nobody bothered listening to them.” But then, she noted, it’s also very possible that much alt-right discourse online is disingenuous.
“Half of them are probably robots,” she explained. “I can’t really comment on the psychology of the bots.”
