So a homerist, an archaeologist, and a dentist walked into the bar.
A group of 17 people who had just screened Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on Thursday night spent the evening doing what scholars have been doing for nearly 3,000 years about Homer’s epic poems: debating it.
“We had a really lively discussion,” says Joel P. Christensen, editor of the Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey. Christensen was accompanied by retired Homer scholars (often called Homerists), editors, professors, historians, and various public intellectuals. “And my wife is a dentist,” he added. “So she was the red herring in the crowd.”
The conversation ranges from Nolan’s decision to make Polyphemus (the Cyclops whose eye stabs Matt Damon’s Odysseus) nonverbal to the film’s depiction of language itself. Although each intellectual was committed to a different discipline, Homer’s Odyssey is one of the few works that transcends a single field of literature or history.
“I was surprised at how many scholars liked this book,” says Christensen. “I had to be stopped several times by my wife. We all know I’m the worst audience for this movie.” After a long pause, he continued. “I’ve always said to myself, ‘This is not Homer’s Odyssey.’ “The Odyssey” directed by Nolan. And it needs to be judged from another perspective. ”
There is palpable excitement surrounding “The Odyssey,” which has been eagerly awaited by exhibitors at the cinema. Beyond huge box office expectations, the film is the first full-length feature to be shot entirely on Imax cameras. More than 95% of Imax 70mm screenings (the format Nolan says the film intended to be shown in) have already sold out in the first five weeks. The spectacle is also fueling a cultural renaissance of classical literature in a way that scholars have rarely seen before.
“I’ve been in this business a long time, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this,” says Monica Cirino, a classics professor at the University of New Mexico who has studied the ancient world on screen for decades. “The OG ‘Gladiator’ had an influence, but it still didn’t have the same excitement. Hundreds of academic papers have already been published, but the movie hasn’t been released yet. It’s crazy!”
In the months leading up to its release, Nolan’s film became a flashpoint in online culture war debates. Critics have argued that the “woke” casting of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, as well as certain production design choices, are historically inconsistent with the Mycenaean world traditionally associated with “The Odyssey.” But after Variety spoke with leading classical scholars and historians, it became clear that those issues aren’t what’s driving the debate in academia.
“It’s really upsetting because so much of the conversation has been about how ‘woke’ or progressive this movie is going to be,” Christensen says. “Actually, I think it’s a very conservative movie. There are constraints on the roles women play. The interracial casting is just a woman of color marrying a white man, which is not progressive.”
From a filmmaking perspective, literary and film experts alike would argue that Hollywood epics depicting the ancient world have never achieved complete historical accuracy, but instead reflect the cultural assumptions and audience tastes of the time.
“These are fictional characters,” film critic Alonso Duralde said in his review of “The Odyssey” on the “Breakfast All Day” podcast. “In reality, Helen of Troy probably never existed. In reality, there weren’t that many of these people. And even if there were, the ancient world was much more complex than we think from the Italian sword-and-sandal epics we were given in the 1950s and 60s. There were people from Africa, Asia, and Europe. They had boats, guys!”
When it comes to criticism of the film’s production design, whether it’s the sophisticated Trojan Horse or the costumes (many fans claimed online that Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon looked more like the Batsuit than Bronze Age armor), Nolan has described his philosophy as “What is the best thought and how can we create a world with it?” This approach does not seem to have angered classicists, many of whom have tempered their expectations of the entertainment that Hollywood blockbusters are intended for.
“No one cared,” Christensen laughed, speaking on behalf of his fellow academics. “Even the chief archaeologist didn’t care, because the Odyssey is full of anachronisms. Homer’s poems contain many different historical layers. The important thing is that the depiction serves as a vehicle for the audience’s fantasies about the past.”
While most classicists support Nolan’s blockbuster spectacle, opinions begin to diverge when discussing the adaptation of Homer’s words into screenplays. As Harvard University professor of classics Gregory Nagy says, there is no single “original” version of the Odyssey in the modern sense. This is because this poem was born out of oral tradition.
“When Homer’s Odyssey was first composed, it was already a historical novel, a reimagining of the ancient past,” says Richard P. Martin, professor of Greek and Latin literature at Stanford University. “My fellow classical scholars are happy with Nolan’s version, because we all recognize that it is a version. There is no ‘correct’ treatment; each generation creates its own version of the poem through retranslation and revisualization in different media. Any publicity about Homer is good publicity.”
Just as Odysseus took on different identities to survive his difficult journey home, there is long-standing debate over whether Homer is a single author, or whether, as Friedrich August Wolff first claimed in 1795, the poems were the product of “the whole Greek nation” and were edited many times to suit changing modern tastes.
Famously, Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation made “The Odyssey” a text about polite manners and tact, while Richmond Lattimore’s 1960s translation sought to preserve the rhythm and formula of the original Greek. Laura Slatkin, one of the leading Homer scholars, says Lattimore’s translations often feel “old-fashioned” to New York University students because their diction is too old-fashioned and formal.
“None of this is definitive,” Slatkin said. “That tells you something about the problem of translation, but it also tells you something about ‘The Odyssey,’ because it’s not simple enough to be a definitive translation. You’re building on existing resources from earlier songs and earlier poetic traditions, but you’re not just repeating them or summarizing them. You’re…assimilating them.”
More recently, Emily Wilson’s translation suggests that The Odyssey was socially progressive for its time, “reflecting on what women (and other oppressed groups categorized by race and economic status) were capable of.” She argues that “Homer is our contemporary, not our contemporary,” and that her translation (along with all other translations) should be contextualized as “a text that exists simultaneously in two different temporal and spatial moments.”
Slatkin said Nolan’s script, which Variety’s awards editor Clayton Davis predicts will compete for Best Original Screenplay at next year’s Academy Awards, is “the latest in a string of film adaptations.” The Odyssey has always been a story with many elements: realism and fantasy, moral certainty and reconciliation, a balance between strangeness and familiarity. Just as the ancient Greeks (and every civilization since) used The Odyssey to express their ideas about morality, Nolan does the same.
“The consensus I’ve heard so far is that this bill is going to spark a lot of discussion in the classroom,” says Justin Alft, a fellow Homarist and associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “With all the omissions and changes, no one is too upset about it. To be honest, we’re all curious — maybe confused at times — but we’re really interested in this as a work of art. Nolan’s movies are works of art, and Homer is a work of art.”
Once the classroom discussion begins, I’m sure scholars will have more to say about all the creative liberties Nolan’s films take. Martin, Christensen, and several other classical scholars accused Nolan of diluting the “sophisticated” morality of Homer’s poems and of devoting too much story time to spectacle, such as the fall of Troy.
“I can speak in both registers, so I understand where the criticism is coming from,” Cirino said. “What they don’t understand is the short- and long-term benefits this has for us as a discipline. Humanities programs, especially classics programs, are being cut everywhere. I’m the dean, and I guarantee you that Greek classes will be better this year!”
“You know what Hollywood does: When one thing is successful, 10 more follow. This is going to be great. As my husband always says, business is booming!” she concluded.
