Who gets to own the classics? Right now, Christopher Nolan has a sizeable claim: his epic adaptation of the Odyssey grossed $264m in its first weekend. The film’s success defies the whining of the chronically online right led by Elon Musk, who accused Nolan of having “desecrated” Homer and railed against supposed historical inaccuracies, such as casting a black actress as Helen of Troy. Audiences disagreed, perhaps aware that man-eating, one-eyed monsters and witches who turn men into pigs probably aren’t strictly historically accurate either. Oh, and technically she’s Helen of Sparta.
But the manufactured outrage serves its purpose. Thanks to Musk’s spat with Nolan, cinema-goers have gained access to debates that have animated scholars of antiquity for generations. Want to argue about what Helen looked like? OK, but first go back to basics: was Homer’s Odyssey (and its prequel, the Iliad) trying to be historically accurate? Would the original audience of this oral poem and the later Greeks who wrote it down have considered it as such? Who was Homer anyway, and what authority did he (or she) claim to have? What sort of hero is Odysseus, who (spoilers ahead) wins a ten-year war with a dirty trick and manages to lose every single one of his crew on the journey home? Do his heroic deeds cancel out his arrogance, unfaithfulness and deception? Is it really worth going to war over a woman, however beautiful she may be? And what does war do to a civilisation, both the losers and the winners?
The wonderful thing about all these questions is that there is no definitive answer (though classicists are welcome to write in with their assessments). That ambiguity is partly what drew me to ancient literature as a teenager. I’d barely mastered the Greek alphabet before I was being asked to parse the hidden meanings of a text written 2,700 years ago – a magical invitation compared with the memorising of dates, facts and equations required by the rest of my studies.
Even more intoxicating was realising that ancient authors were having these debates, too. Take the sack of Troy, the chronological start of the Odyssey story. A small band of Greek soldiers tricks their way beyond the city walls by hiding in a wooden horse, which the Trojans are led to believe is an offering for the gods. Once through the gates of the city, the soldiers proceed to ransack, burn, kill or enslave everyone and everything inside. The glory! The horror! Three hundred years after Homer, the Athenian dramatist Euripides condemned this excessive violence, and the devastation of war more generally, through the eyes of the Trojan women, in his play Troades. Four hundred years after that, the Roman poet Virgil returned to the scene of Troy in the Aeneid, voicing similar doubts about the cost of war and the treachery of Odysseus.
None of this prevents Odysseus from being one of the most renowned, celebrated heroes of Greek myth. Later writers have grappled with the contradictions of this polytropos man – a word that literally means “much-turning”, reimagined as “complicated” by Emily Wilson in her 2018 translation. That decision sparked its own controversy. Justifying “complicated”, Wilson has argued: “I’ve felt that students frequently assume that these poems and their ‘heroes’ will be simple… I liked the word as a way of reminding the reader right away to reconsider that assumption.”
This might not fit the Musk worldview, in which good guys are good guys and beautiful women are white, but Odysseus is a complicated figure. He always has been. The Odyssey is a complicated poem. Nolan’s version leans in to some of those complexities – zooming in on the psychological toll these adventures took on Odysseus, for example – while eschewing others, like the hero’s trickster nature. In my view, the film is a roaring triumph and somewhat disappointing at the same time. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Odysseus is yours too. Read the poem (pick any translation you like) and make up your own mind.
[Further reading: The Odyssey is more Hollywood than Homeric]