This season’s skirmish in the Culture Wars is over filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s DEI re-do of the Odyssey, following Hollywood’s new rules about Oscar eligibility, that straight white men must be replaced with certain percentages of people of color and alphabet people (the LGBTQwerty).
The two main actors cast that have raised ire are Lupita Nyong’o, a Mexican citizen of Kenyan descent who previously played a female Urkel in the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Elliot (nee Ellen) Page, a transsexual best known for playing a pregnant teenager in Juno.
Nyong’o’s cast as Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman who’s ever existed, described in Homer as pale and blonde, and so depicted by artists like 19th-century painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Page, who stands at five-one, plays the warrior demigod Achilleus, whose “wrath” is the subject of the other Homeric epic, the Iliad, whose opening lines command a goddess to sing of this wrath that left so many men as the delicate feasting of birds on the battlefield.
One of the funny things about this debate is that Helen and Achilleus are big stars in the Iliad, but they’re very minor dramatic personae, making the briefest of cameos, in the Odyssey. Achilleus appears briefly as the wraith of Achilleus in only one book (Book 11) of the Odyssey’s 24 books (or chapters) when Odysseus visits Hades. Helen also appears in only one book (Book 4) as an alcoholic aging queen, back on her throne in Sparta with husband King Menelaus, drinking to forget her adultery and how she caused a world war, visited by Odysseus’ son Telemachus, who searches for news of his never-returned father. Nyong’o and Page are bad casting choices—but for such small parts it hardly matters.
What will be more interesting to see is how Odysseus is portrayed. Recently academics and translators have made choices that diminish him. To get Homer you have to understand how patriotic and chauvinistic his poems are, how they’re “nationalistic” even though there weren’t yet nation-states. Since nationalism, patriotism, and chauvinism were until recently bad, no one could see how Homer is all of these.
We don’t know how director Christopher Nolan will change the 12,000-line story of Homer’s Odyssey, beyond casting a trans actor as the wraith of Achilleus in Hades. Cinematic depictions of what are Western Civ’s founding stories (along with the Pentateuch) include a 1997 mini-series with Isabella Rossellini and Armand Assante, and Troy—a retold Iliad with the meddling Olympian deities left out. There have been other re-tellings of Homer’s poems in book form. The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood wrote The Penelopiad to supplement the Odyssey with the story of what Odysseus’ wife Penelope was up to while he suffered his adventures.
A fresh translation of The Iliad, by UPenn classics professor Emily Wilson, rivals the popularity of the long-used translation by Bryn Mawr classicist Richmond Lattimore. Wilson’s the first woman to translate Homer into English, so a lot of talk concentrates on that. Her translation is much easier to read than Lattimore’s, but I suspect she’s not conveying the essentials of the story.
In her New York Times interview she says the problem with the polytropos, the Greek adjective used for Odysseus, is that we don’t know whether to think of Odysseus as passive or active—is he “many turning” or “many turned.” It’s Athena’s term for Odysseus, and it isn’t “complicated” (Wilson’s innovation) from the context, nor is it “many turned.” It’s “clever” or “devious.” It’s virginal Athena’s somewhat eros-infused word of appreciation for Odysseus, like someone singing about the blue of her lover’s eyes.
The repetitive use of the hyphenated epithets (in English, which were in Greek just compound words)—“Swift-footed Achilles,” “Rosy-fingered Dawn,” Bright-helmeted Hector,” “Many-turning Odysseus,” “Sound-minded Telemachus,” “Gray-eyed Athena,” “Wine-blue sea”—makes it easier to remember 12,000 lines.
Another mnemonic device is lists. The last several hundred lines of Book 2 of the Iliad answers a question: “Who were the lords and leaders of the Greeks?” It’s just a list of the Greek kings and princes in the war party to Troy, where they are from, their genealogy, and how many ships, men, and horses they’ve brought with them, and then all the Asia Minor kings and princes who’ve come to fight on the side of the Trojans. Some of these people are never mentioned again, though some appear in similar long lists in other chapters of people fighting or people killed in battle. Lists can be memorized. As you recount them you think to yourself, “Did I miss a place? Did I miss a person?”
More importantly, a list of people who represent cities or regions also has a function we see when our modern bards, e.g. stand-up comics engage—or honor—audiences by calling out the city they’re performing in, even naming its local celebrities, politicians, or sports figures. The Iliad recognizes and honors certain audiences.
The plot of the Iliad is that a Trojan prince, Paris, with the aid of a goddess, Aphrodite, has “abducted” a willing woman, the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, from her husband, Menelaus, a Greek king. A loose consortium of Greek kings and princes (the aforementioned list), sail to Troy (a city in what is now the Asia Minor part of Turkey). Troy has strong walls and the Greeks can’t penetrate them nor can they quickly defeat the Trojans and their Asia Minor allies. So the battle goes on for years.
Olympian gods are fairly evenly divided between the two warring camps. The Greeks have more articulate gods, Athena and Hera, while the Trojans are supported by less verbal and more emotion-driven gods, Ares and Aphrodite (and also Apollo). Zeus isn’t committed to a quick and easy victory for either side. On the Greek side, their best warrior, Achilleus (a demi-god whose mother is a goddess) sits out the battle during the first half of the story, because a Greek king, Agamemnon (brother of Menelaus), disrespects him. This allows the Trojans to move toward defeating the Greeks, because their best warrior, Hektor, begins to wipe out Greek warriors in large numbers.
Hektor is the brother of Paris. At one point he leaves the battle to see, he fears for the last time, his wife Andromache and their infant son, and to persuade his brother Paris to return to the battle field (Aphrodite has stolen him away to save his life). Hektor worries that the Greeks might win, and that if they do they’ll kill all the Trojan males and their sons, all pregnant women, and take the remaining women and girls back to Greece as slaves.
But at no point does Prince Hektor argue with his father King Priam (or his brother Paris) that they should return Helen, and give the Greeks other payments to leave them alone. Perhaps if he had, Troy would’ve been saved. Or Priam would’ve refused, and Hektor might’ve considered killing his father (and brother) as many royals have used regicide to take control of the dynasty into which they were born.
But Hektor doesn’t do this. Hektor isn’t “complicated,” or more precisely, his mind is not “many turning.” He just follows the role set for him. He’s a prince of Troy and must lead men in battle. But just performing his role means his child will die, his wife will become a slave, and his city and family will be destroyed.
You’re likely familiar with the story of the Trojan horse. This isn’t actually in the Iliad, which ends before telling us how the war ends. But in the story Odysseus comes up with the idea of pretending to leave while leaving behind a large statue of a horse (the Trojans are equestrians—“breakers of horses”). The Trojans assume this is a tribute to apologize for the war, bring it into their city behind the strong walls, and are defeated when the Greek soldiers come out of the giant horse in the night.
But the Trojans could’ve returned Helen to the Greeks, and also given them slaves and tributes (they discuss doing that). If they were a people who had “many turning” (not “turned”) leaders like Odysseus, the slaves would’ve been disguised saboteurs, the tribute flammable or explosive, and as the Greek ships left the shore to return to Greece, they would’ve been set afire and sunk, and the Trojans could’ve retrieved Helen.
The Iliad depicts the Greeks as superior in important ways to other cultures. Odysseus is a representative of this superiority, because of his cleverness. To call him complicated rather than clever, devious, or many-turning covers this up.
The Culture Wars had another battle recently, over a cinematic redo of Animal Farm wherein the story becomes a critique of capitalism, not Stalinism. But perhaps Nolan’s Odyssey will be more like the movie, Gnomeo and Juliette, public high schools use to teach Shakespeare to illiterate students. Nolan’s Odyssey could be a Trojan horse, delivering Western civilization to the unenlightened even as it attempts to erase it. As Cambridge/Princeton/Chicago educated classicist and philosopher Zena Hitz asks “<clears throat> I think it's good to have a blockbuster movie based on Homer, even if it turns out to be lousy.”