Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote a review of it for Foreign Policy (alas, paywalled, I assume), although by far the most discussed review has been that of Emily Wilson, noted translator of Homer. I have a few scattered thoughts about the film that either didn’t fit into the FP piece or have been occasioned since then, which I thought I’d put here. Spoiler warnings, I suppose – Nolan does actually have a surprise or two (he is willing to bend the poem a bit to get it) – so if you don’t want that, skip to the second cat picture to get to recommendations.
First off as level setting, my general impression of the film: it was good. It aims to evoke emotions and largely does so. The actors are very skilled and it shows. Christopher Nolan does not like dialogue and that…also shows. As I said in my review, however, this is a ‘remix’ not a cover; Nolan feels perfectly free to put his own spin on the story, to shift themes around and so on. And that’s fine, people have been remixing the Odyssey since forever.1
I think this is one place where Wilson and I part ways in our review. As a Homerist, Wilson sees everything missing in Nolan’s film, which is fine to point out but at the same time of course there is no way that anyone was going to fit all of the subtly and themes of 12,000 lines of Greek into a film that needs to run a bit under three hours. At the same time, Wilson has written her review quite sharply, with some lines that come off more cutting than necessary given that, while The Odyssey might not have been the film of Wilson’s dreams, it is evidently a ‘good’ film to judge by audience reactions.
More broadly, I can’t help but think that, in a moment where the field of Classics is quite evidently sinking, it would have been helpful to be seen as sailing with the wind of a popular new adaptation of Homer, rather than nitpicking against it. In a way, Wilson’s critique because it is written so sharply (quoth Wilson, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script”) comes off as excessively contemptuous of both the film and its audience. There are, I would suggest, ways to make these very same critiques which avoid being so alienating in a context where Wilson must know that the media was bound to make her the ‘face’ of Classics (as indeed, they have done). Such a sharp critique risks coming off as belittling or condescending to a large audience of very enthused movie-goers (the film has a 97% positive audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and it is simply not a very good time for the public’s sense of classicists (such as they think of us at all) to be “The Odyssey was good and I like Homer but classicists are mean snotty killjoys who get angry when I enjoy things the ‘wrong’ way.” That public perception is a recipe for more department closures, especially at public institutions (Wilson teaches at a private, Ivy League institution).
There is a resolute refusal for the highest profile members of the field (and this goes for history as much as for classics) to ever consider for a moment that they might be in a position of speaking for the field which might bring with it deeper and greater obligations; instead we acknowledge no such obligations (except as pertain to more junior scholars at less impressive schools, of course) and then act surprised as the field wilts. This is especially true of figures in tenured positions at elite private universities who are wholly insulated from the costs of alienating the public – their jobs will never be at risk – but who are often elevated in the media to speak for the field as a whole.
To return to the film, prior to release there was a lot of discussion of its ‘historical accuracy.’ Seeing the film, I think much of that discussion missed the point, as the vibe here was in some ways ‘grounded’ but also impressionistic, almost dreamlike in quality. This is especially true of the flashback sequences, told from the perspective of Odysseus or Menelaus. Notably, these are the sequences in which nearly all of the supernatural stuff happens and one gets the sense that neither of these fellows might be entirely reliable narrators. A lot of the wild armor and costumes (like Agamenon’s horse-spine helmet) exist in these sequences, where we’re really not all that tethered to literal reality anyway.
More broadly, this is a film that isn’t trying for specific accuracy to either the 8th century of the poem’s composition of the 12th century of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Instead, it is using the Odyssey to evoke some specific ideas: the rupture of norms (particularly those involving kindness towards strangers, foreigners, immigrants) and civilizational collapse. And while Homer’s Odyssey doesn’t have a collapse of civilization narrative, it is there in broader Greek mythological thought: the heroes of the Trojan War are the last full generation of heroes. The generation of their children seem almost like a half-generation, by and large restricted to working out the consequences of their more consequential parents and living (and dying) in their shadows (think Orestes, Electra, Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus, Telemachus himself, etc).
Using the Odyssey in particular to do this lets Nolan position himself as speaking for, rather than against the western tradition or western canon. Thus the irony that I noted in my Foreign Policy piece that the ‘chuds’ hated this movie before it came out because of the casting, but if they had seen it and also understood subtext, they would hate the movie because it is a full-throated, violent rejection of them and their entire worldview. Effectively Christopher Nolan donning a mask of Homer to declare, on behalf of the tradition the chuds claim they stand for, “you know nothing of my work.” Not because Nolan is ‘super-woke’ – the film is, if anything, quite conservative in outlook – but rather because he isn’t and thus can argue for norms from a traditionalist lens.
None of which means everyone has to like the movie. I will say right now, a lot of the dialogue is stilted. In particular, Nolan is a subtle as a brick about connecting this to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, with characters saying things like “our Age of Bronze is collapsing” and “you are the Sea Peoples?” I can imagine someone more familiar with the background here, who has thus already picked up on the subtext (and it isn’t all that subtle as subtext) would be annoyed by it suddenly becoming text as Christopher Nolan basically has Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon walk into the audience to explain, “And now the moral of the story is…”
On the other hand, if I have come to realize just about anything about the general audiences for films these days it is that a lot of folks really do not grasp subtext at all. Watching folks revel obliviously in movies that revile them has given me a new appreciation for the Greek Chorus walking on stage and just straight up singing the moral at the audience between acts. So while I did find some of the very on-the-nose lines a bit off-putting, I find I understand the instinct to include them anyway.
By way of example, I saw more than one person on social media complaining that Athena (played by Zendaya in the film) looked wrong, because she didn’t look like a divinity, was simply dressed, didn’t wear Athena’s distinctive helmet and breastplate (the aegis with its distinctive gorgoneion) and looked too young for the role. Which misses – and this is the spoiler if you do not want the spoiler, stop reading because here is the spoiler – the point that Odysseus is seeing the form of a young Trojan priestess of Athena that his men murdered in cold blood in front of him during the sack of the city which we see later in the film.
Now the film is quite deliberately ambiguous as to if this is just Odysseus processing his trauma and what we’re seeing is trauma disassociation – I think ‘Athena’ never tells Odysseus anything he couldn’t himself know, for instance – or if this is Athena taking the form of this slain woman to communicate to Odysseus (since Athena regularly takes such disguises in the poem!).
Likewise, some of the chatter about the fate of Odysseus’ men misses the (re)framing of the film as a complete whole. We’re flat out told in the Underworld that Odysseus’ men are going to die, that conditions will be put before them to kill them relentlessly until they do and we also – and this is a departure from the poem – we also see exactly why, because once we finally get the full flashback to the fall of Troy, while Odysseus stands basically stunned by the horror of it (and only fights other armed men), his soldiers take part in the butchery of civilians, including, most evocatively, Zendaya’s priestess. In that moment, we see that Circe’s description of them – delivered earlier in the film but later chronologically – was not about something they might do to her but about things they had already done at Troy.
And so we get this motif: the men take part of Circe’s food and Odysseus does not, they take part of Helios’ cattle and Odysseus does not because they took part in the brutal sack of Troy in a way that Odysseus did not (and don’t show any remorse for it afterwards, unlike Odysseus). Odysseus’ men have already done the core violation and they are going to get one occasion after another until they break a rule so hard that it kills them.
If it seems strange that an angry Greek god might want to lure someone into a further act of sacrilege in order to punish them for it, that’s actually something that does happen! I am put in mind of a brief bit in Herodotus (Hdt. 1.157-161). Pactyes of Lydia has fled the wrath of the Persians and taken shelter as a suppliant – a protected refugee, in essence – in Cyme and the Cymeans are understandably worried that the Persians will attack them, so they want an excuse to get this guy gone. So they send a man to an oracle of Apollo to try to get a favorable oracle.
And the god Apollo gives them the oracle they seek, but the guy they sent (Aristodicus) is clever enough to know that something is up, so he makes a show of rousting out some of Apollo’s sacred birds and when Apollo essentially demands, ‘what the hell, man?’Aristodicus replies with, ‘yeah, I want to know why you are telling us to betray a suppliant too?’ to which Apollo replies (and this is a direct quote, trans. A.D. Godley), “Yes, I do command them, so that you may perish all the sooner for your impiety, and never again come to inquire of my oracle about giving up those that seek refuge with you.”
Basically, Herodotus has Apollo so angry that the Cymeans are even asking the question, trying to wriggle out of their duty here, that he is giving them the wrong answer so as to further justify his divine wrath. In the event, the Cymeans figure it out and move Pactyes along to another city and when that city also tries to betray him, they smuggle him out at the last minute to a third city (which also betrayed him, no one wants to get wrecked by Persia), thereby satisfying their obligation and thus avoiding Apollo’s wrath.
So the idea of the sacred cattle being a lure to bring the already-condemned-for-sacrilege men of Odysseus to their death is perfectly fitting with the way Greek gods roll in mythology.
On to Recommendations.
And I suppose we can start with the Odyssey discourse. First, of course, my own review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is at Foreign Policy, where I am mostly focused on the themes of the film rather than any question of accuracy. Emily Wilson’s (upon whose translation Nolan reportedly based his adaption) own review of the film, rather more negative, is both interesting and sharp-elbowed. But I also wanted to highlight Spencer McDaniel’s really detailed discussion at her blog, Tales of Times Forgotten which really gets into the weeds of the original poem, the history of the period and how the adaptation interacts with them, which gives, I think, a pretty good sense of “what is a classicist seeing and hearing when they watch this movie?”
And then in a sort-of-related recommendation, I thought there were quite a few good points in one of Jamelle Bouie’s recent Takes over in YouTube, “There are no white people on Middle-Earth.” It touches on modern culture war politics, of course, but the fundamental point he is making, I think is important and valid that our modern conception of race is just that: quite modern. And so while people in the past (or in fictional worlds) can obviously see skin tone, the broader categories of ‘white,’ ‘non-white’ and ‘black’ didn’t exist (or may not exist, for the fictional worlds) for them in the same way. Bouie doesn’t use this example, but I come back to a short comment in the Odyssey that Odysseus thought Memnon, the King of the Ethiopians, to have been the most attractive man he had ever seen – the idea that ‘whiteness’ was a universal beauty standard for all genders simply doesn’t exist in Homer’s world. And while we’re here, a careful look at Tolkien’s text suggests that his world is not quite so fair-skinned as it is usually cast: Samwise Gamgee, in a sense the truest hero of the work, has his skin described as brown more than once and while you might assume that’s because he’s outside all the time, he is a descendant of Harfoots who in turn are described as darker in complexion than other Hobbits. But that simply doesn’t matter to anyone because ‘white’ and ‘black’ aren’t the categories in Middle Earth that they are in our Earth.
Meanwhile, in civil-military thinking, I ran back over an April piece at History Does You by the always-worthwhile Secretary of Defense Rock on “The Myths of McMasterism” which is well worth the time. I think read alongside something like Kori Shake’s recent The State and the Soldier (2025) – which I need to give a closer read but may end up recommended here before too long too – it brings out how the sense in the American military that they had largely ‘solved’ the problem of civil-military relations has been an illusion, quite vividly exposed as such. Of course I had my own thoughts on this last year as well.
For this week’s book recommendation, I thought I might make a bunch of recommendations together to answer a question I (and every other classicist) get asked regularly: what translations of the Iliad and Odyssey do I recommend?
The thing is, there are a lot of very capable translations of both works and so choosing between them is basically always going to be something of a matter of taste and de gustibus non est disputandum (“on taste, there can be no disputes”). As we’ve discussed before, a translator (especially of poetry) is dealing with trying to balance incompatible demands of meaning, style, rhythm, and brevity. So Instead of offering one translation, I’ll suggest three with what I think are their relative merits and then you can have your pick.
First, for my personal favorite translation, I would suggest the Richmond Lattimore translation, The Iliad of Homer (1951) and The Odyssey of Homer (1965). Lattimore’s translation is, of the three I am going to recommend the most faithful to the original Greek, which is to say it tries the hardest to keep to the literal meaning of the Greek, while also keeping to original line numbers. That also means it is clunkiest of the bunch here, though not horribly so. That clunk is, of course, somewhat increased by its age and of the bunch Lattimore comes off feeling the most ‘ye olde Homer’ even though it is very much in ‘modern’ (that is, 1950s) English, albeit with an elevated style.
For something that is a bit looser but flows better, I always recommend Robert Fagles’ The Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996). The big thing to know about Fagles is that he does not keep at all to the original line numbering: all of his books run ‘long’ compared to the original poem. That allows him to ‘stretch out’ a lot to produce a translation that still captures most of the poems while being smoother and more elegant than Lattimore. That said, Fagles is definitely less faithful than Lattimore as well, though this is still very much a solid translation. Just beware of those line numbers because Fagles will not match up with anyone else. Fagles also translates in what I would describe as an ‘elevated’ style, an effort to capture Homer’s dialect – already archaic and artificial in the eight century BC – and give the poems a formal air despite these translations only being about 30 years old. A lot of readers really like that elevated style – they want to feel like they are reading capital-L Literature – but it bothers other readers. For that last group, we have my last recommendation which you knew was coming which is…
For something that is much more modern and pithier, but meaningfully more willing to bend the text to get there, Emily Wilson’s The Iliad (2024) and The Odyssey (2018). Wilson translates into modern, common vernacular English rather than an artificial ‘elevated’ style, which some folks like and some folks don’t. More importantly, I think, Wilson holds like iron to Homer’s line numbers and also insists on delivering both poems in iambic pentameter – her goal is to capture the punchy brevity of Homer’s Greek which I will be honest, neither Lattimore or especially not Fagles really capture. The result is a poem, in English, which scans and can be sung or chanted and which better manages the feeling of momentum the Greek has. The downside, of course, is that Wilson has to play a lot looser with the meaning of individual phrases to achieve this and so this is the least purely ‘faithful’ of the translations, though it is still very much Homer.
So there you go: if you value a maximally literal, one-to-one translation, go with Lattimore. If you want something elevated and complete, even if it bends meaning and maybe gets a bit ‘flabby,’ read Fagles (Fagles does read very well). If you want something that feels modern and captures the brevity and momentum of the Greek (but sometimes loses some of its subtler shades of meaning), go with Wilson. If you want the whole poem, utterly complete with all of its meaning, style and verve preserved, learn ancient Greek.
I saw a post by Tony Robbins on his blog, The One Thing, on Linkedin, where he talks about what the Odyssey can tell us about leadership. He mainly focuses on the Hero’s Journey and how this applies to his life, but he seems to ignore the rather big part where Odysseus fails to bring his men home because, as you explained, they just can’t help damning themselves in front of the gods.
I wondered what your thoughts on a post like this are, Bret.
…Since this post already links to Spencer McDaniel’s blog, I think this might as well be a good occasion to also link to her criticisms of “the Hero’s Journey” concept and its supposed universality.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/
In fact, with modern Western standards, this is actually Odysseus’s greatest failing. He is a bad leader. A good leader doesn’t allow his subordinates to commit crimes that damn them. Of course, an individual bad apple might be discounted as unavoidable, if they are really an individual case and properly dealt with. However, a leader whose men commit a major crime en masse is, no matter what, a failure. Either he supports and condones the crime, or worse, he has lost the grip of his subordinates. And the fact that the subordinates do even ponder such a self-destructive course shows that the leader has failed to indoctrinate them into the proper way of thinking.
Of course, Odysseus lives in a culture that doesn’t do training and education. And it shows.
That’s an interesting take but a couple of points:
first, Odysseus definitely does live in a culture that does training and education, because one of the main characters in the Odyssey actually has a mentor, in fact his mentor is called Mentor because *that is where the word “mentor” comes from*;
second, and more seriously – neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey display anything like a modern understanding of discipline and command responsibility. Nobody, not even the gods, holds Odysseus responsible for the misdeeds of his men. His men kill Helios’ cattle and therefore his men die, but Odysseus, their commanding officer, is spared. He is punished for his own misdeeds but not for theirs.
And in combat (as opposed to on board ship, or in a domestic context to servants/slaves) I am not sure there is a single example in either poem of any character giving orders to another character and expecting them to be obeyed. (I think that’s the case – happy to be corrected). The whole plot of the Iliad hinges on a character *not* obeying an order from his superior. There’s a lot of encouragement – Ajax at the ships imploring his fellow Achaeans to fight bravely, everyone begging Achilles to fight of course – but I don’t think that at any point Achilles says to his Myrmidons “Right, you hold the line here, you and you follow me” or anything like that. The faceless spearmen just follow their lords around like NPC henchmen.
Indeed, except that I would like to note that this responsibility for subordinates goes wider than military: if you are a middle manager in civilian government or even in private industry, and your subordinates (and their subordinates) behave badly, you are going to get trouble.
This is because the Greek culture didn’t do organised training. Mentor is fostering Telemachos like a father, bringing him up in the unwritten rules and traditional practices, but he is not giving Telemachos any kind of planned and conscious education. This is very visible e.g. in Xenophon, who discusses this in Oeconomicus and Cyropedia. In Oeconomicus, Kritobolos expresses total astonishment at the concept of giving a young wife actual training so that she could be an effective lady of the household.
The archaic world of Odyssey doesn’t really have anything except an unformally transmitted way of the fathers. In such world, you cannot really even expect that a leader should try to consciously affect the ways of thinking of his followers. They are all prisoners of tradition, and cannot try to rise beyond it – and this is a great contrast to our society.
Yes, all that sounds accurate. Though I am not sure that the link between “no organised training” and “no command responsibility” holds – I can easily imagine a culture where a lord is held responsible for his vassals’ actions even if he doesn’t train those vassals.
One of the reviews of the Odyssey makes the point IIRC that we only know the name of one of Odysseus’ men and he is mentioned once in the entire poem.
I think another element implicitly underlying this lack of structured obedience and the expectation of obedience to authority is that the Iliad and Odyssey are about the warrior aristocracy of their society. Agamemnon’s named subordinates are mostly kings or princes in their own right. Their subordinates (largely unnamed with the exception of Patroclus) are warriors who own their own expensive armor and weapons. Odysseus’ crew aren’t galley slaves or low-status citizens of negligible property like the rowers of the classical Athenian navy. Their culture has not accustomed them to strict obedience to anyone’s orders, even the orders of a king.
My critique of your critique. I would add this, our disregard and indeed, gleeful violation of kindness and civility for our near neighbours, associates, friends and kin, the society around us, is the more fundamental condition, from which cruelty to immigrants and foreign nations eventually becomes normalized; and is itself a corrosive force against the social substance of civility, cooperation, reciprocity and solidarity, out of which all societies are formed; and the lack of which leads to decay, dissolution and collapse.
Yeah. Nolan isn’t at all subtle about the idea that the cruelty and norm-breaking of the Achaeans in the sack of Troy is itself destroying the order and stability of their civilization. You can see this in how openly Odysseus’ sailors are willing to pillage a settlement whose people flee from them before they even get into the weirder and wilder parts of the sea with things lie heavily armored nine-foot giants and moving trees. And the way the suitors are besieging and abusing Ithaca in Odysseus’ absence is just another example of the same phenomenon, as is Agamemnon being murdered by Clytemnestra in retaliation for the (presented as norm-breaking) decision to sacrifice his own daughter to the gods in exchange for fair winds.
But frankly, living in 2026, the idea that deliberately breaking norms of kindness, respect, welcome, and civility for short-term personal gain is bad and ultimately leads to the downfall of your civilization… That seems like a message that a lot of people in our society either feel resonance with, or ought to be engaging with a lot more fully than they are.
Dr. Devereaux. I see a very significant historical contradiction between your review of The Odyssey:
And Dr. Emily Wilson’s review of The Odyssey:
So… did the Sea Peoples exist or not? Is it the currently prevailing historical theory, or a fringe historical hypothesis, or “now debunked”? Regardless which of you are correct, it’s kinda weird not to mention this part of Wilson’s review, since it seems to be in contradiction with yours.
To speak on academia broadly, what has been rejected is the idea that one group of invaders, politically united, called the “sea people”, was responsible for all the violence in the region. This is an interpretation based on the idea that generals and kings aggrandized their opponents in monuments and history, treating a combination of migrants, raiders, and local rebellions as a united front, either intentionally to drum up support or because of the extremely limited information available to them.
From there Wilson and Nolan are talking past each other…but Nolan wins this shadowboxing exchange. Wilsons best bit of evidence would be that a lot of the sea people ruins seem to have fallen to internal strife, which is what Nolan *actually shows*, the term sea people is a *generalization and mistake in story*, the sea people are *just greeks raiding greeks*. The thing Nolan doesn’t do is explain why society progressed to the point where this is happening, but even if the interpretation that climate change was at fault (which isn’t certain) there’s no way *Odysseus*, an ancient king, would *know that*! He’d just see the results.
In fact the very *twist* that Wilson is being contemptuous of is actually pretty close to the actual historical consensus. The sea people weren’t one group, they were a combination of warlords, raiders, refugees, and armies which plundered city centers, starting in greece. Just like the various Greek warlords from the illiad. The point that there’s legitimate dispute over is if they were primarily refugees or primarily raiders, but these are not contradictory professions and outside of being there we’d probably never know.
It’s also unclear what started the chain reaction. Academia generally favors a climate catastrophe, but it’s also possible that the internal strife brought about by the collapse of the palace economies in Greece was enough by itself to trigger civilization collapse, and that the flaws of these economies triggered their own collapse.
By simply framing the issue as being settled academia and bulldozing over all the nuance in the story Wilson is actually communicating less than nothing. You’re more liable to get an incorrect view from her review than if you hadn’t read it.
In other words the “no sea people” argument is at best technically right as the term is inaccurate but useless in context. The reason Devereaux isn’t being pedantic about the term is that he’s actually interested in communicating. Wilson isn’t, and her review is frustratingly bad.
Yes, Wilson is not up to date with the history here. But she is, after all, not a historian of the ancient world, she is a classicist with a training in literature, and is outside her lane here, just as a Shakespearean scholar shouldn’t be relied on for a description of siege warfare in the actual Hundred Years’ War.
This is more than “out of her lane”, though. There definitely were many large groups of sea-based raiders who at least sometimes cooperated on a large scale, and that’s what’s referred to as “Sea Peoples”. We have good archeological and/or textual evidence of several major actions, including attacks on Cyprus, Ugarit, and Egypt. Some of them we can even identify pretty reliably based on their kit (the Peleset were the Philistines, and the Sherden were the Sardinians) and several more have names of or close to those of known groups. This is widespread knowledge; even a lay person could look up the basics in a half hour, and it’s crackpottery to say they’re “disproven”, regardless of ongoing disputes about their motivations and exactly which group is whom.
I think the counterpoint is that every inaccuracy we do see is downwind of the fact it is an adaptation of a classic. The illiad might actually have some historical veracity as a mythologized oral history referring to actual raiders from the region, with the caveat that it depicts a single Cataclysmic clash between cultures represented by an all star cast instead of a messy series of disasters. That’s astounding and worth emphasizing, in part because it so neatly dovetails with the themes of the story (the end of an age and collapse of norms), but its an inherently warped view of the collapse.
This naturally lends itself to a view of both the sack of troy and similar sacks that emphasizes the united nature of the assailants. The inaccuracies with the sea people’s hypothesis Wilson is referring to are inaccuracies *in the text of the Illiad and Odyssey*, if you’re going to reference the bronze age collapse at all (and it’s *critical* to the themes) in a movie about the Odyssey you’re going to inherit those inaccuracies. Unless you deviate even more from the text you’ll end up with a simplified view of the history, but somehow I don’t think Classicist Wilson would approve of that either.
“The illiad might actually have some historical veracity as a mythologized oral history referring to actual raiders from the region”
Just saying that the connection between the Iliad/Odyssey and the Sea Peoples is entirely one that Nolan is making. (I think it’s a great plot element but it isn’t in the text.)
For Penelope and Telemachus in the film, one of the reasons for Penelope to remarry is that Ithaca needs a king to defend it against raiders – that point isn’t raised in the poem.
Nestor asks Telemachus, when he lands on Pylos, what his business is – “Who, then, strangers, are you, and from what port have you sailed? Are you traders? or do you sail the seas as rovers with your hand against every man, and every man’s hand against you?” – but that’s more a recognition of piracy always existing than an implication that there is some new and growing threat.
Menelaus has a lot to complain about when Telemachus reaches him, but Sea Peoples aren’t on the list.
Oh, to be clear the sea people in the illiad would be the Greek heroes and kings. The entire historical veracity isn’t in that Homer mentions a group of sea people, it’s that everything depicted in the Illiad fits what a view *from the sea people* might look like. They unite under a king to address a totally legitimate grievance, pillage a neighbor in an aggrandized and mythologized manner, then their various ships get scattered and they go around the Mediterranean violating every rule and divine law as refugees.
We don’t see this concern over raiders clearly in Homer, but then again Homer didn’t live during the period he’s talking about. The value of Homer is that it shows our only glimpse of what greeks remembered about this critical period where civilization broke, the wars and piracy and plundering of refugees and warriors, not that it coincides with the films narrative or a strict historical reality.
One of the biggest tells to that is actually that the states homer associates with figures aren’t possibly accurate. For example he associates Menelaus with Sparta… despite Sparta not existing. Sure, the region was still there, but both the dominant ethnic group and the actual polis date to centuries after the period of the poem. In fact the entire tradition of Greek kingship he assigns to them is distinct from the historical Wanax; he’s transplanting a later Basileus tradition into the past, and there are notable flaws.
This obviously warps our entire view of the story as history, because the protagonists themselves aren’t *real*. It still has value, but not as a direct account of events or people.
In reality there’s a high likelihood that the protagonists of the illiad weren’t legitimate authorities of states, but usurping warlords and refugees at best vaguely tied to the region homer associated them with. Someone in their vague position might have led a war against troy or a raiding Odyssey into the Mediterranean trying to reclaim their home from squatters, but every detail around that is false.
Oh, and Odysseus is worried about raiders in story; they’re the suitors. In some tellings he has to defend Ithaca against their sons and families too afterwards. This isn’t inconsistent with a historical story of refugee raiders invading a chieftains home before being driven out by force, turned into mythology. But you have to do a lot of interpretation to get there, which is my point; historical accuracy is at odds with the text of the illiad.
” Odysseus is worried about raiders in story; they’re the suitors.”
No, the suitors aren’t foreigners – Nolan got that right. They’re all the nobles of Ithaca and the neighbouring islands.
@ajay: Terry might have been talking about barely remembered historical memories that might have inspired the suitors plotline, not about that plotline itself.
I was, but also the raiders in history weren’t all foreigners either, certainly not in Greece where the disaster started, and especially not in Ithaca which is on a periphery of Greek civilization already. In Greece the historical migration pattern is basically a one step push where the Dorian people who lived just outside the Mycenaean civilization took over to some degree, changing dialects. We know very little about where the Dorian are “from”, but broadly it seems to be the more isolated, rural parts of Greece.
So the suitors would be on the fine border between countrymen and foreigners; greeks, but peripheral greeks from neighboring, less well off tribes who envied the Mycenaean wealth. Just like the suitors.
Narratively, it makes less sense to imagine “all” (informally and colloquially, in practice just a lot of) the local nobility of Ithaca hanging around Odysseus’ hall and eating of his goods while hitting on Penelope. If they are the local Big Men (or the sons of those Big Men), then they have their own lands and affairs to attend to. They have their own local ties. You’d expect, realistically, for there to be a sort of negotiation process wherein the Big Men collectively agree on which suitors actually have a shot (presumably the most powerful, high-status ones).
By contrast, it makes a LOT of sense to imagine a few ships full of heavily armed warriors from far away showing up one day on the island of Ithaca. Remember, Odysseus would have taken most of the best warrior Big Men and their entourages away with him to Troy… and most of those men never came back. Ithaca is now an island relatively vulnerable to these notional raiders. And so they settle in at the (missing) king’s palace as a gang of what are sometimes called ‘sedentary bandits.’ By their own standards they’re actually being nice by formally courting the (they believe) widowed queen and by not openly just killing off Telemachus and openly proclaiming one of their own chiefs as the new king of Ithaca.
I think the latter situation (in which the suitors are exactly the people who, in our own memory and mental image of history, we would call ‘Sea People’) fits better than the former, even if the former is what Homer actually depicted.
That’s extremely well put Simon and gets to the heart of what I’m trying to communicate. You can modify the details as needed to fit your narrative, but there’s a core idea here that relates to reality.
For instance you could depict the suitors as being refugees, either because they were kicked out of their home by other invaders or because the harvests declined and as excess young males they got exiled to avoid starvation. Or you could depict them as raiders whom are being at best mildly respectful in order to legitimize their occupation. It depends on how you want to depict the collapse and the morality of Odysseus killing them, there are numerous valid depictions.
But regardless the issue is that the Odyssey doesn’t show this, so in an adaptation you either open yourself up to criticism for deviating massively from the text, or criticism for not being true to a history which the text doesn’t depict. Nolan choose to broadly hit his themes of the collapse whilst not getting stuck in the mechanical details about why this is happening, which is *correct* for a movie; he doesn’t have time to go into the suitors story *and* depict the fall of troy in your original sin myth. It’s not short as is.
(Hence, if you wanted to truly go down these roads, a miniseries would be much better. You have more time with a slower pace. Throw in some extra sex and you have an HBO pitch.)
I’ve said too much about this already. It’s just that I so detest these criticisms by Wilson because they seem self interested, as on the one hand she says Odysseus isn’t captured accurately but on the other critiqued historical “flaws” original to the Odyssey. She could freely switch to the other form of criticism if one was inappropriate to the final product. Only a mindless, direct adaptation would be spared, but such an adaptation is vulnerable to criticism for not bringing up this history and being derivative. Which it would be.
So if your criticism has no solution-if you have constructed an argument where any solution to one part creates unacceptable flaws elsewhere-what’s the point? All I can think of is complaining for clicks. Which is disingenuous, looks it, and self serving at the expense of her broader fields reputation.
““Who, then, strangers, are you, and from what port have you sailed? Are you traders? or do you sail the seas as rovers with your hand against every man, and every man’s hand against you?”
…and I have just noticed that this is not just how Nestor greets Telemachus, but *exactly, word for word* how Polyphemus greets Odysseus. Not sure what this means but it seems significant!
I found the review rather strange. It spent so much time explaining that Nolan was doing something with this adaption – explaining that the movie had some ideas and themes – as if the main criticism was that the movie didn’t make sense instead of it being that it was a bad adaption. Because to me, I didn’t see what was even the point of using the Odyssey to tell this particular story.
The entire time I was struck by the sheer Americanness of the film. It seemed like Nolan heard that Odysseus was a veteran of a war and was immediately incapable of imagining him as anything other than a commando with PTSD from war crimes committed in an eastern desert city (with a bit of Oppenheimer to create a very Christian original sin throughline too). So many of the elements of the different context and culture of the original were scrapped to be thrown on the big bonfire of relevance to 2020s United States cultural struggles. People always make the argument that any adaption has to update for the times and bring in contemporary elements, but that to me is a fully generalised statement against being able to criticise adaptions at all. Why try to tie your movie to the prestige of an enduring classic text if you also think you have more interesting ideas that you’re going to overwrite things with?
Also, people keep talking about how the aesthetics don’t need to be grounded or realistic, when it’s a struggle to even understand what the inspirations were supposed to be. Most of the costumes wouldn’t have looked out of place on a bad inaccurate vikings TV show (except for when they were inexplicably grey hoodies with tactical leather vests), with a highlight being the suits of armour that looked like generic mobs from a free mobile game. I would love to see the design bible that lead to all these weird plasticky breastplates that were so indeterminate it was hard to tell what material they were supposed to be made of in the universe of the film.
I think part of the issue here is that Nolan, for better or for worse, tends to make the same movie over and over again. He has a set of thoughts and tropes that repeat, and I generally agree that the Odyssey is not the best vehicle for those thoughts.
That being said, adaptations have always updated to match the time they’re made in to some extent; there’s so many examples of this that in general I can’t really fault Nolan for contributing to that chain. The point in using the Odyssey for telling this particular story is to be able to link to an existing tradition, where you don’t have to set up the world and characters ex nihilo and can move directly to having your changes and thus your message speak out.
I should note that I’m no great fan of the movie and I did find both the movie in general and especially the visual choices rather uninspired, but alas subjective opinion is just that and hardly universal.
For its “Americanness” (which is ironic, since Nolan is British), I think we ought to rather blame centuries of Anglosphere literary scholars and gentleman-elites hammering home the supposed universality of Homer’s message and their importance as the foundation of a “Western” (read: British Commonwealth and Anglo-American) literary cultural sphere.
Yeah. If your culture spends generations telling the same story to every educated adult and insisting that it’s foundational and central to their culture and should be a cornerstone of their concept of what ‘their’ civilization even is…
You are going to get generations of authors within that culture basically writing fanfics and retellings of that same foundational text. Including versions that reimagine the characters and their struggles in ways that actually speak to their own sensibilities and cultural issues, rather than to those of people whose deaths were close to the building of the Pyramids of Giza than to the present day.
“I am a commando with PTSD from witnessing war crimes committed in an eastern desert city” is, regrettably, very far from being an experience that is exclusively available to Americans. (And Troy isn’t in a desert, it’s a riverside city on a fertile plain by the sea, though I admit I don’t know how Nolan portrayed it.)
Just off the top of my head, it’s also accessible at various points in the last twenty years to:
pretty much every other English speaking nation
pretty much every nation in Europe
pretty much every nation in the Middle East
several nations in Africa (how many depends on how broadly we define ‘eastern’)
many large nations in Asia (how many depends on how broadly we define ‘desert’)
several nations in South America (and here, I admit, we are really going to have to be flexible with our definitions of both ‘eastern’ and ‘desert’)
I will grant, though, that “mine is the only country whose people have ever had the experience of getting PTSD from witnessing war crimes committed in an eastern desert city” definitely is an experience available only to Americans.
About the same as the other big-screen depictions; i.e. pretty badly. Though we only get very brief glimpses of the city from the outside, virtually everything written at the end of this post about its depiction in 2004’s Troy would apply to Nolan’s version as well.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/01/15/is-there-really-a-scene-in-the-iliad-where-achilles-calls-hektor-out-of-troy-to-face-him/
I think this is going to depend on how strict one is regarding the definition of a “commando” also. I.e. according to Wikipedia’s list of “Participants in Operation Enduring Freedom” (unfortunately still more akin to where Wikipedia was ~20 years ago then where it generally happens to be now in terms of e.g. referencing and general comprehensiveness), the Czech Republic had only sent military police; does that count? The Belgian contingent might have been exclusively aerial; fighter (F-16) pilots are probably more likely than a median soldier to have been directly involved in war crimes, but are they commandos? Irish advisors might have been confined to Kabul headquarters, likely placing them entirely in the clear.
It generally seems to be more prominent as a *cultural trope* in the USA than in most other Western countries, though.
That something is accessible to another nation doesn’t mean it’s not coded towards a particular one. If I showed you a picture of a couple in park, on a blanket, eating baguette and cheese and drinking wine, I’m pretty sure you’d assume it was French, because at least in the USA those are coded as French things. If I told you it was a picture from Alabama, you’d probably question it, despite the fact that French baguettes are available at many supermarkets here.
It’s not a question of fact, but of perception, is what I’m saying. The fact is that any culture can have vets with PTSD. But this isn’t a documentary on the subject, it’s a film using tropes to convey a message.
In this case, I think the whole “traumatized vet” thing, while obviously something that occurs within every modern military and culture, it’s often coded American. This is for a few reasons. A lot of movies that codified the “traumatized vet” character are very American, for example, dealing with American themes and American characters and American culture. We also have a lot of military people in our culture–in some areas “What unit were you in?” is right up there with “What church do you go to?” in terms of standard getting-to-know-you questions. And for better or worse we used to be the world’s police force, so we did a lot of fighting (this role has been dramatically, and stupidly, reduced).
Further, our culture is particularly vulnerable to creating PTSD vets. Our combat systems–the idea of pushing the tempo past the point of the enemy’s ability to respond–probably plays a large part in this. On the home front, while we honor vets, we don’t really take care of them very well (ask anyone about the VA). There seems to be something else, too. A lingering effect of Vietnam, maybe, combined with the continued existence of an attitude of “If you weren’t weak you’d be fine” (a statement I’ve heard multiple people make about PTSD sufferers). The combination means that this particular type of character is fairly easily identifiable to an American audience, and as an American trope.
I’d be curious to see a broad study of how military PTSD is handled in various countries. But leaving that aside, I think the combination of culture and how the tropes were codified is what makes the “combat vet with PTSD” American-coded.
“In this case, I think the whole “traumatized vet” thing, while obviously something that occurs within every modern military and culture, it’s often coded American. ”
It is possible that you think this because most of the media you are exposed to is American, though. The First World War in the UK, for example, exists in popular culture pretty much *only* as a trauma narrative. From Pat Barker to Dorothy Sayers to Siegfried Sassoon to “1917” to Robert Graves to, well, the list goes on.
I don’t consume enough French or German media to know whether the same is true there, but my guess would be that it is.
I believe you’re talking about whether this is or is not a good movie.
The problem is, does it have any connection to the well known piece of writing? Or it it just some hollywoodian movie with a thin “Odyssey skin”?
The article reminds me of people defending the Foundation series. Yes, it may be a pretty good scifi movie. Baffles me why they decided to call it Foundation. Maybe it should have been named The War Against the Clone Emperors?
The Odysseus in the movie has little or no connection with the Odysseus in the book, doesn’t he?
There have been a half dozen interpretations of the Odyssey in the last few decades, and at best maybe one or two of them (the miniseries) are somewhat accurate to Odysseus as a character from the play. Most divergent are Epic the musical and O Brother Where Art Thou, which are incidentally the most popular by a country mile last I checked.
There’s no reason to expect an adaptation to follow the character of the original. There’s not even a reason to expect it to follow the themes. That you can link the themes between these works, such as the importance of guest right to moral decay, is by itself an indication of accuracy that most interpretations don’t follow.
I mean, hell, the *Romans* started the train of reimagining Odysseus for their culture, this ain’t new. They even had a sneering contempt for him.
The difference between this and the foundation series is that profit motive is more clearly at play with the foundation series; people will watch Odyssey movies that have basically no relationship to the text and Nolan movies about damn near anything, but the Foundation series needed to steal a fan base to make money while also being relatively accessible to non fans. The part that’s clearly bad is when profit motive directs decisions that cut into the messaging or art of the work, absent any artistic concerns. But that’s not what’s happening here, I don’t think.
I wonder two things. None of this is directed at you, to be clear; I think you and I agree on most of it.
First, why is that some myths need treated with kid gloves and others can be hammered into whatever shape our culture needs/wants? I don’t personally see any pattern in which myths can be altered. Myths that the majority of our culture hold to be sacred can be adapted (see “Robocop”) and while the usual voices will sing out against it most people accept that this is how things work. But alter “The Odyssey” even a little and people complain about it.
I find it curious that so many other myths are not subject to this. No one would look at “Camelot” and claim it’s bad because it deviated from the original. The “Merlin” TV series didn’t so much take liberties with Arthurian legend as it did ignore everything but the names, and people accepted it. Disney’s “Hercules” did the same thing, and while people weren’t as accepting of the movie the deviation from the myth wasn’t the issue. No one looks at “The Lion King” and says that the deviations from Shakespeare make it bad. For that matter, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” being a retelling of The Odyssey was considered a reason to praise it. “The 13th Warrior” wasn’t a great movie (though it had some amazing lines), but deviation from Beowulf wasn’t a criticism that I ever heard.
Second, why does THIS myth need to be “accurate” (in as much as a story can be said to be accurate)? The foundations upon which to build anything we can call “accuracy” are incredibly shaky, to the point where I think a reasonable argument can be made that there’s nothing there to begin with.
“The Iliad” was something like the equivalent of a Greek “Saving Privat Ryan”–a story within a well-established conflict that focuses on a few characters that may or may not have been real in order to say some things about the nature of war and human kind. “The Odyssey” was pure fiction when it was written, almost the equivalent of “After M*A*S*H”–taking a character from what was already a story and making up stories about him getting home. It wasn’t real to begin with, and people have been changing it probably since the first time the writer gave an oration of it. That’s not to say that the poem is bad, of course, just that arguing about accuracy when we’re dealing with a sequel of this nature doesn’t seem to be a strong position.
I suppose a third question is, what do we mean by “accurate”? I remember a review of “Kingdom of Heaven” that highlights this point. At the time of whatever crusade was going on in the movie a big debate was whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father TO the Son or from the Father THROUGH the Son. People died over this. But in today’s world it’s such an obscure theological question that most of us wouldn’t even understand it if we were presented with it. So the director updated the theology to something we can understand: A man doubting the existence of God under harsh circumstances (“There’s your burning bush!”). This presents the question: Do we want to show the story as accurate to its time, or do we want to accurately convey the ideas of the story to the audience? These are two very different things, and often are mutually exclusive. This is why I’ve harped on the visual language of film–ask any reenactor about their reaction to historically accurate costumes and you’ll see why the director put Greeks in rather drab outfits.
Combine #3 with #1 and you can easily use a well-known story as a vehicle to discuss a variety of themes. And really that’s the most accurate thing you can do. That’s literally what these stories were FOR in the past. Updating the details, the themes, and the characters is part of the storytelling tradition. There are some common threads (Arthur will always be noble to the point of stupidity; the Jesus stand-in will die for our sins; Odysseus will be tricksy and take a long time getting home), but after that they’re highly adaptable by design.
I would recommend giving it a shot. Mostly just because it’s a very good action-adventure film in its own right. But partially because, to someone like yourself who is clearly interested in ancient history, seeing what the latest retelling of the myth is interesting from a “reception of history” point of view.
As for the Gods, Homer said it bear in a memorable quote (that I first learnt from Civ4): “Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth.”
Oops, that was meant to be a reply to a comment way further up. Please delete.
…and? How does any of that make your point?
I love your cats!
The tailers for The Odyssey turned me right off. I HATE the washed out brown and black color palette that’s so fashionable cinematically. Not to mention kevlar armor and a VIKING ship!!! I’d have forgiven the casting, not one Greek! if it had at least looked good!
I think you’ve been very charitable to Nolan’s piece, though i understand the meta-reasoning of not wanting to generate even more animosity towards the lay audience. I find myself a lot closer to Wilson’s critique, the movie didn’t really impress me. It felt like a hollow boomer vietnam war veteran story with a vaguely Odyssey paint-over and brought forth neither the charm of the poem nor an interesting twist in retelling. But hey if the classics and ancient history fields benefit from a surge in interest generated from this movie then i suppose i can at least appreciate that in some way.
I desperately want a Mycenaean Illiad and Odyssey with flounce skirted women, bare legged men all dressed in brilliant colors moving through colorfully painted interiors and sun washed Mediterranean landscapes.
This was not it.
I was also annoyed that after all the talk of female representation all the female characters except Penelope were minimized and two, Anticlea and Nausica cut all together.
I feel as though part of the reason Wilson’s review is phrased, as you put it “more cutting than necessary” is that her work was brought up as inspiration for the movie. She may have felt the need to be harsher on the film than the average watcher to make the distinction between her work and the film more clear. I’ve already seen people (whether praising or criticizing the film) attribute some of the changes Nolan makes to his being inspired by Wilson.