Once more, though my comment will again fall on deaf ears.
The idea that a weeping, war-traumatized Odysseus who suffers under the weight of Troy is a modern invention completely overlooks Book 8 of the Odyssey.
When the bard Demodocus sings of the Trojan Horse, Homer explicitly describes Odysseus weeping piteously—comparing his tears to a woman falling over her slain husband as she is dragged into slavery (Odyssey 8.521–531). Homeric heroes were not unfeeling, invincible caricatures; their capacity for grief and trauma over the horrors of war is precisely what gives the epic its timeless human depth.
Blaming Nolan or Wilson for depicting Odysseus's psychological burden ignores what Homer actually wrote in the ancient text.
So what is this culture war you're so desperate to push on us? Why?
I liked the movie, and agree that this moral complexity is present in the original, the problem is that the modern versions actually reduce the moral complexity. In the original you have honor and glory juxtaposed against sorrow and suffering. Wilson does her best to downplay the honor and glory, leave the sorrow and suffering in place, and even introduce an element of shame which was not present in the original. Why? Not because she believes that it is truer to the original Homer, but because she believes it is truer to life. She rejects the Greek view of Kleos and Timé, in favor of her own, and she has every right to do so- but not the right to pass off those ideas as being faithful to the original work by calling her work a translation rather than a re-write.
"Wilson does her best to downplay the honor and glory... because she believes it is truer to life, rejecting the Greek view of Kleos and Timé."
That sounds sophisticated, but it completely misrepresents what Wilson actually did.
Wilson didn't "reject" kleos or timē; she rejected 19th-century Victorian romanticism.
When 18th- and 19th-century translators (like Alexander Pope or Victorian scholars) translated Homer, they inflated the text with grand, ornate, pseudo-biblical jargon to make the heroes fit an idealised, chivalric standard of European aristocracy. That wasn't Homer—that was Victorian gilding.
Homer’s original Greek isn't written in elevated, Latinate pseudo-prose. It is lean, direct, rhythmic, and brutally honest about violence, grief, and social hierarchy.
By matching Homer line-for-line (12,110 lines in Greek, 12,110 lines in English) and using unrhymed iambic pentameter, Wilson didn't "rewrite" the text to impose shame, she stripped away two centuries of ideological makeup to let Homer's actual meter and words speak for themselves.
If stripping away Victorian euphemisms makes kleos look different than it did in a 19th-century schoolbook, that isn't Wilson rewriting Homer. That's just Homer without the polish.
Translating the first line of the Odyssey
This video is relevant as it directly discusses how different classicists—including Emily Wilson—approach translating key Homeric concepts like polytropos from the original Greek text.
"Homer’s original Greek isn't written in elevated, Latinate pseudo-prose. It is lean, direct, rhythmic, and brutally honest about violence, grief, and social hierarchy."
Sorry, but the way the heroes speak is often very elevated and ornate. I've been studying Homer for decades, and have taught myself enough Homeric Greek to be able to read a good bit of it myself.
"By matching Homer line-for-line (12,110 lines in Greek, 12,110 lines in English) and using unrhymed iambic pentameter, Wilson didn't "rewrite" the text to impose shame, she stripped away two centuries of ideological makeup to let Homer's actual meter and words speak for themselves."
Homer wrote in dactylic hexameter, meaning he's got 16 or 17 syllables to work with in each line compared to ten for Wilson. Her version is sort of like someone doing an abridgement of War and Peace by making each sentence 40% shorter. The leanness is Wilson, not Homer.
A great modern translation that makes a genuine effort to recreate Homer's flowing expansive rhythmn is Daniel Mendelsohn (2025).
"When 18th- and 19th-century translators (like Alexander Pope or Victorian scholars) translated Homer, they inflated the text with grand, ornate, pseudo-biblical jargon to make the heroes fit an idealised, chivalric standard of European aristocracy."
This is all babble, by the way. Nobody reads 18th or 19th century translations, although Pope is still around. There are a lot of great modern translations, starting with Lattimore, and none of them are false to the text.
Modern versions reduce the moral complexity because understanding the moral complexity of the original by the average movie goer cannot be done in a 3 hour sitting.
The Odyssey is not about morals it’s about virtues. The fact that people cannot understand what that difference means is part of the problem.
The distinction between ancient ‘arete’ (virtue/excellence) and modern moral frameworks is a valid classical distinction, but treating them as mutually exclusive is a stretch.
Homeric virtue—whether metis (cunning) or andreia (courage)—was always bound up with moral duties like xenia (hospitality) and dike (justice). Odysseus isn't just demonstrating abstract virtues; his actions test the ethical fabric of Bronze Age society.
Reducing the debate to "audiences can't handle complex virtues in three hours" underestimates both Homer's oral storytelling efficiency and the intelligence of cinema audiences.
Another thing that's often incredibly funny to me is that for modern audiences when Odysseus' admission of breaking xenia against Polyphemous and his subsequent egotistical boasting is often seen as fine because Polyphemous is a man eating monster. In fact people misinterpret the scene as Polyphemous breaking xenia against Odysseus.
However when Odysseus does this again in a worse way against the suitors , in a scenario he's effectively revisiting. When he's ultimately stopped by the gods. It's again seen as fine because he's "getting his wife back".
Greek heros have the morality of Polyphemous in comparison to the majority of modern audiences, and yet people literally cannot comprehend it.
> Homeric virtue—whether metis (cunning) or andreia (courage)—was always bound up with moral duties like xenia (hospitality) and dike (justice). Odysseus isn't just demonstrating abstract virtues; his actions test the ethical fabric of Bronze Age society.
You're preaching to the choir.
> Reducing the debate to "audiences can't handle complex virtues in three hours" underestimates both Homer's oral storytelling efficiency and the intelligence of cinema audiences.
There are reams and reams of text on this site alone with people who believe that there is no serious interpretation of the Odyssey that aligns with Nolan's and that Odysseus is a purely virtuous hero and that any interpretation of him feeling anything but righteous glorious bloodlust at the conquest of Troy is categorically wrong. This isn't the only one.
Both of these statements are ironic and uneducated, because the view of Odysseus as a purely virtuous hero becomes subverted by the Hellenistic period and extinct by the Augustinian.
Social media is even worse. You give the average American too much credit.
That's a popular reading, but I don't think it's correct. Odysseus weeps in the same way earlier in Book 8 when Demodocus sings the song of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles (not in the Iliad) and Agamemnon looks on joyfully, because the quarrel has been prophesied to cause the fall of Troy. Odysseus cries a lot. So do the other heroes. The stiff upper lip was a later innovation.
Sympathy in Homer's characters (unlike Homer himself) is circumscribed, and it's always personal. In the Iliad it's the death of Patroclus that wrecks Achilles, and he's able to feel sympathy for Priam by thinking of his own father. In the Odyssey, the survivors of the war – Menelaos, Odysseus, Nestor – all mourn for their lost comrades, but none ever expresses any sympathy for the Trojans they defeated and massacred. In the underworld, from the war Odysseus sees Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, and Antilokhos, but no Trojans. And even in this scene you're discussing, Demodocus dispatches the sack of the city in a couple of lines, but ends with Odysseus' defeat of Deiphobus, described as his greatest battle. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's the Trojans Odysseus is crying for. A few minutes after this, Odysseus gets up in front of the king and his court and begins his long account of his journeys by saying (paraphrase) "my name is Odysseus Sacker of Cities, renowed for every kind of craft, and my fame reaches heaven." What's he famous for? The Trojan horse and the sack of Troy. What's the first stop he describes on his way home? Sacking the city of the Kikones.
I think the simile of the weeping woman is Homer putting in a reminder of what the capture of a city really meant, which is the sort of thing he does often. His sympathy for the Trojans in the Iliad is so evident that one of the traditions about him was that he was a Trojan hostage brought back to Greece after the city fell. The breadth of his sympathy is very wide. Even for the serving-women that Telemakhos hangs. When Homer describes them dangling from the rope, he compares them to doves or thrushes with slender wings returning home to their nests, but who instead land in a loathsome snare hidden in a bush. It affects the reader, but I don't think we're supposed to think that Odysseus and Telemakhos feel any regret.
Great thread, I'm eager to watch the movie. Interestingly enough, when compared to the original author's critique we should note--some reaearchers believe Homer may not have existed.
Which begs the question, what is the work of art deprived of an author, deprived of it's cultural milieu?
This deeply human story belongs to all of us regardless of race, birthplace, or creed. The ability to tell and re-tell such ancient stories (with necessary artistic discretion), to a modern audience speaks to the power of the original story. It is timeless precisely because we can apply, adapt, and re-interpret it. This is the beauty of the story telling tradition Nolan is participating in, and a nod to the oral format it was originally spread through.
I thought the last completely unnecessary shot of the arrow following their escape from the cave was an adequate representation of Odysseus's hubris triggering Poseidon's wrath.
Hi, to me it seemed. That the "avenge" of Nolans Odysseus for his mates, wasn't serious reason, but with the undertone: I'm a slayer, get lost. So it gets quite close to a loud proclamation: I killed P. and am proud of it. It's different, but the effort is there and is legitimite and respectful
In 1603, Thomas Kyd looked down from heaven into the Globe theatre and declared, “what utter butchery! Confounded upstart Shakespeare! That’s not the Hamlet I wrote!” To which the unknown Dane skald chimed “and your Christian Hamlet was nothing like the real one!” And so it goes. Every poet a thief.
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. Bad poets deface and good poets improve - T.S. Eliot.
Maybe we can discuss the difference between exegesis and mythopoesis sometime—because treating ancient myth as a static museum piece rather than an ongoing act of myth-making misses how Homeric tradition worked in the first place.
Spot on, Lamont. As someone who spent years working in professional theatre—which often included analysing, directing, and performing in classical plays—I can tell you that the notion of a single "sacred, unalterable text" only exists in academic armchairs, never on stage.
When you stage Shakespeare, the Greeks, or the Jacobeans, you quickly realize that drama is an active conversation between the past and the present. Directors cut, adapt, re-contextualise, and emphasize different facets of a classical text not to "destroy" it, but to make it *live* for the audience in the room.
Homer himself wasn't a static archivist, he was an oral performer responding to his listeners. The moment we treat ancient myth like a dusty museum display rather than a living narrative framework, we kill the very thing that made it last 3,000 years.
Preface: I agree with nearly everything stated in this review. The movie is good, the Homer is mid.
A bit of color that I'll add- one of the biggest problems that Wilson's translation presents is with is that many of the moral issues are present within the poem or broader Greek and Roman culture. Rome was sceptical of Ulysses for being deceptive and dishonorable. Dante puts him in hell for being a fraudster. The Trojan Women is incredibly sympathetic to the people he helped take captive.
The problem is that this isn't treated as a moral complexity in the Wilson translation (and by extension Nolan's film,) the thrill of glory being tempered by moments of recognition of the humanity of your enemy. The tragedy of war isn't shown to be the incompatibility of two conflicting goods (represented by the gods). Instead, the glory is stripped away and you are left with a more unidimensional character who is incapable of returning home, because the lack of conflicting imperatives means that on some level he's the bad guy.
It’s fascinating to watch the argument shift. First, Wilson was accused of inventing a traumatized, weeping Odysseus out of thin air. When Book 8 (lines 521–531) clearly proved Homer wrote that exact grief into the original poem, the goalpost moved to claims about 'Christian moral lenses' or 'stripping away kleos.'
Homer was never a flat, heroic cheerleader for unvarnished slaughter—the Greeks themselves recognised the tragic, devastating cost of kleos. Wilson didn't Christianise Homer; she just refused to pretend the Odyssey is a 19th-century schoolboy adventure story.
My sister and I have been thoroughly discussing this topic, solely based on your thoughts of it. I am deeply sided with you while she doesn't see it the same way. It's been interesting.
I also read the part about Polyphemus calling to Poseidon and I was like "I sure hope there isn't another Odysseus who sacks cities in the world because his head might be on the chopping block." I think one of the reasons they added the Ithaca part is because the commonality of names, it sets him apart from other Odysseus's.
There is a comedy to be written about an ancient Greek named Odysseus who sells sacks city to city, and happens to have a home in Ithaca, and what goes wrong in his life as a result of Poseidon screwing with everyone sharing that name, just in case. Poor Ody never even knows why.
Spot on regarding the Polyphemus hubris, Eddie—that egotistical taunt is the exact turning point that unleashes Poseidon’s wrath and drives the narrative engine.
As for anxiety and psychological burden: ancient survival and total war were precisely *why* grief and trauma run so deep in classical epic. Homer didn’t have modern clinical terminology, but he knew psychological exhaustion intimately—from Odysseus weeping piteously over Trojan war songs in Book 8 to Achilles pacing the beach in torment.
Directing and playing these classical roles shows you very quickly that the ancients weren't unfeeling statues—the visceral terror, grief, and mental toll of survival were written right into the text for the actor to embody.
"Homer never wrote such an Odysseus." Well, in all fairness, he never wrote anything.
And like all historical story telling the narrative changes over time. Mr. Nolan is working in a different medium and in a different time. Grant him some latitude.
Brilliant opening line, Chris. It cuts through so much of the modern purist anxiety.
The idea of a 'fixed, canonical text' is a post-Gutenberg invention. Homeric bards were oral performers constantly tweaking, improvising, and adapting their songs for the room they were performing in. Cinema is just the latest medium in a 3,000-year chain of performance.
I am disappointed in how many people whose opinions I value liked this movie. Yes it looks great. I would have cast virtually every major part differently, but most of all it is a woke pomo pacifist take on a martial poem and culture. Nolan/Wilson deconstructed Homer. So instead of being stirred and thoughtful and energized and inspired, we are left kind of shamed and ambivalent. Feh.
Calling an epic where a man spends twenty years weeping for his home, losing his entire crew, and suffering war trauma 'woke pomo pacifism' says a lot more about modern political buzzword fatigue than it does about Homer.
Homer’s world wasn't a Marvel movie or a Victorian chivalry manual—it was direct, brutal, and deeply acquainted with grief. Labeling human vulnerability in Bronze Age myth as 'woke' just flattens 3,000 years of literature into a 24-hour news cycle.
@Brian: Grief, weeping, and the psychological toll of war aren't 'Christian psychology'—they are literally on the page in Homer. When Achilles sits by the ships weeping for Patroclus, or when Odysseus hides his face to cry during Demodocus's song, that isn't New Testament sentimentality. That is Bronze Age penthos (grief) and achos (distress). The ancient Greeks didn't need Christianity to feel the crushing weight of loss.
@D D Wise: The Bronze Age Mediterranean was literally a crossroads of diverse cultures, trade routes, and foreign peoples—from Phoenicians and Aethiopians to Egyptians and Phaeacians. But more importantly, cinema and theatre are performance arts, not museum dioramas. If casting non-white actors in a 3,000-year-old myth breaks your immersion, that sounds like a 21st-century anxiety, not a Homeric one.
Yes, Odysseus laments many things. But he also glories in many of those same things. Homer's Odysseus is ambiguous, like real people. Nolan's movie is not.
I believe the difference is that modern man has lost the ability to glory in martial greatness. He is not torn: war is always a tragedy. Alexander's line from Hamilton comes to mind: "I wish there was a war where we could prove that we're worth more than anyone ever bargained for." Odysseus would see Hamilton's logic, but it's a very un-modern (un-WEIRD) sentiment.
Odysseus and Achilles are also weeping for their own tribe, not for some universal brotherhood of man. Achilles slaughters Hector's brother in vengeance. Doesn't he burn a bunch of Trojan teenagers (alive? it's been a few years for me) with Patroclus' body? Yes, when he finally meets Priam he connects to him as a father figure and treats him fairly, but that's individualized, not universal. Odysseus is even worse; does he ever give more than a fleeting thought to the Trojans humanity?
Homer's narration is different. He does treat Greek and Trojan equally in his eulogies. To me this reads as a broad respect for (even defeated) warriors though, not some universal human dignity. But I don't even see that in Homer's main characters.
Nolan is free to execute his vision to appeal to current trends, especially since the academy mandated dei quotas for consideration for an oscar, but it is postmodern and pacifist and woke and not Homer. Trade routes may have been diverse, the suitors and warriors in the Odyssey were not described as such. But lets go ahead and deconstruct all the Western canon, what could possibly go wrong.
I guess he didn’t see Penelope’s feminist speech, not to mention the DEI casting, nor the incredibly diverse warriors and suitors, because of course equal and respectful representation of foreign cultures was top of mind for Homeric bards.
Penelope's speech stuck out to me because it was so out of period. But that's 20 seconds of the movie. Homer's Penelope is hardly a wimp either.
As for DEI casting, most of the Greek warriors are white. A black rapper as the narrator made sense -- he's the nearest thing we have to a bard today. Black Helen was little more jarring, but I can live with it. I'm just not that hung up on skin color. And sacrificing the one (obviously not-buff) trannie "Achaean warrior" in the first 20 seconds is a distinctly non-woke statement about the value of trannies in the military.
I recently saw a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet reset onto a 19th century pirate colony. It wasn't Verona, but it was still good and it worked. I guess I feel the same way about Nolan's movie: it's not Homer but it doesn't need to be either.
I think he chickened out by not making a truer Odysseus who could have put the audience in touch with a truly foreign moral code (ala Apocalypto or Northman) but I still enjoyed what he did make.
@Brian: Grief, weeping, and the psychological toll of war aren't 'Christian psychology'—they are literally on the page in Homer. When Achilles sits by the ships weeping for Patroclus, or when Odysseus hides his face to cry during Demodocus's song, that isn't New Testament sentimentality. That is Bronze Age penthos (grief) and achos (distress). The ancient Greeks didn't need Christianity to feel the crushing weight of loss.
@D D Wise: The Bronze Age Mediterranean was literally a crossroads of diverse cultures, trade routes, and foreign peoples—from Phoenicians and Aethiopians to Egyptians and Phaeacians. But more importantly, cinema and theatre are performance arts, not museum dioramas. If casting non-white actors in a 3,000-year-old myth breaks your immersion, that sounds like a 21st-century anxiety, not a Homeric one.
Odysseus did not have a heart of stone. The odyssey literally shows him shedding tears as the bard sings of the sack of Troy. The tension between glory and grief exists and Nolan’s adaptation chooses the grief aspect to focus on and in a way that reflects contemporary morality. The reason this story has survived this long because it kept being told and this is yet another attempt at that. I personally have stopped expecting adaptations to be completely accurate to the original ESPECIALLY when you’re adapting a text older than the bible itself. There is a lens, an interpretation, a world view that goes into it and I liked the anti-war interpretation. Is it accurate? No. Does it downplay the moral complexity of Odysseus ? Yes. Is it an interpretation worth discussion? Yes. I don’t get why the film being anti-war is such a big issue. It isn’t any less of moral lesson than the consequence of hubris is. Therefore I do feel this debate is somewhat of a non issue and for the record, Helen was hatched from an egg after a god in the form of swan impregnated her mother. I’m SURE it’s fine if she’s black🤦♀️ she could be purple for all it matters. Why are we picking on certain cast members knowing that NONE of them look Mediterranean. This is the stuff that makes conservatives look more obsessed with casting and people of colour than the DEI people. I assure you no terrible casting decision has been made that would actually negatively impact your experience. As far as Athena goes I think zendaya was completely fine and the fact that you mention only the POC and the trans person as examples of casting you weren’t happy with just tells me that more than the quality of the film and the actors you care about it subscribing to your own ideology, which is something you tend to criticise a lot in the left
"The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he's done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrised way – and needs drugs to do so! He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much warrioring ... Nolan makes the protagonist a likeable, all-American hero; Homer's Odysseus wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory."
Isn't the concern with Wilson in that passage more that she says "through dreadful violence"? That makes it sound like the line is referring to the violence perpetrated by Odysseus, rather than the violence of the situation which is how the Greek appears in my beginnerish poking and prodding..
I don't know Homeric Greek at all, but the best I can tell from linguistic sources, αἰνότατον does indeed mean either "dreadful" or "terrible", as Wilson has translated it.
In the Loeb, which I understand tries to stay close to the original, it is translated to "There it was, he said, that Odysseus dared the most terrible fight and in the end conquered by the aid of great-hearted Athene."
You’re right on the money with αἰνότατον (ainotaton)—it’s the superlative of ainos, meaning 'most dreadful' or 'most horrific.' In Homer, ainos almost always characterizes the environmental terror or sheer grimness of war/grief (like ainon achos—terrible sorrow) rather than assigning individual moral blame.
The challenge for any translator is that English prepositions like 'through' can easily imply agency ('done by him through violence') when the Greek neuter superlative is simply describing the brutal, harrowing nature of the ordeal itself. It’s a great example of how subtle choices in English syntax can inadvertently shift the thematic weight.
I think an accurate retelling of the Odyssey would've been less interesting. Everyone knows the original story. Changing the role of Odysseus while keeping the journey similar to the original one is what I'd call a well made adaptation.
Just got back from seeing it. Nolan made an an Odysseus as seen through a Christian moral lens.
Homer's Odysseus would never have been haunted by a poor, innocent, vestal virgin he helped slaughter in Troy. Women were only slightly above property. Enemies were never innocent. Temple virgins were acolytes of an enemy god. The universalist humanitarian lens is an invention of Christianity (and to a lesser extent Judaism.)
Nolan likely thought if he made an Odysseus true to the pagan moral lens, modern audiences would never have cheered for him. I'm not sure he's correct: Eggers Northman and Gibson's Apocalypto allow you to inhabit true pagan moralities without losing their humanity. Nolan could have done the same, but chose not to.
I guess the best we can hope for is that some small percentage of movie-goers will be interested enough to pick up Fagle, encounter the otherness of the real pagan morality, and be thankful for the God who demonstrated an alternative.
Conflating Roman 'Vestal Virgins' with Homeric Troy aside, you fundamentally misunderstand classical pagan theology.
The idea that ancient Greeks felt no guilt or spiritual horror over war atrocities until Christianity invented it is historically false. The entire premise of the Nostoi (the returns of the Greeks) is that the pagan gods themselves cursed, shipwrecked, and destroyed the Greek fleet precisely because of the desecration, rape, and slaughter they committed during the sack of Troy (most notably at Athena's altar).
That isn't 'Christian universalism' retrofitted onto myth—that is classical miasma (moral/spiritual pollution) and divine retribution. Greek tragedy (The Trojan Women, Aeschylus' Oresteia) spent centuries exploring the horrific psychological and spiritual hangover of Trojan atrocities long before the birth of Christianity.
I acknowledge your point, and yes, perhaps I'm being a little too trite. However the Greek Gods cursed people for all kinds of reasons, most of them rather petty. Ask Cassiopeia or Arachne or Niobe. Midas' ears come to mind.
The Gods are conspicuously absent in Nolan's movie. However, in Homer's telling, the Gods were angry not about the slaughter but, as you say, the insult to Athena. Women raped to death, babies burned beyond recognition, men decaptitated (sounds like Oct 7) none of that bothered the Gods. But trampling on the altar of one of their own... Ajax raping a priestess of Athena... that must be punished! That's personal! The Gods don't reject the overall slaughter, and neither does Homer's Odysseus. In fact, as our host here says, his glory in the sacking of Troy is the source of his pride that is his downfall.
It will take Plato and Aristotle (a little) and Saint Paul Augustine (mostly) to make human dignity a universal (instead of tribal) concept.
I’m wondering whether the karmic reversals are acknowledged in her revision because that’s where the morality comes in in Homer’s version.
They sack Troy and Odysseus declares victory and says it’s time to go but the men defy his orders and run amok sacking Troy further.
This immoral act brings on karmic punishment later. For each error in judgment there is a karmic reversal; much of early literature carries this trope. Hubris is a strident theme, making the revision utterly pointless!
It sounds like she is oblivious to that, and that leadership is always at risk of bad decisions along with troops who won’t listen like when they open the bag of wind.
Again it sounds like the author of this New Testament version missed the nuances.
That mixes up two distinct episodes in the epic—the raid on the Cikones at Ismarus (where his men refused to leave) and the actual Sack of Troy.
In the Homeric cycle, Odysseus wasn't an innocent commander overridden by unruly troops at Troy; he was a primary architect of its brutal fall. And Odysseus’s ultimate "karmic reversal" with Poseidon isn't caused by his men disobeying him, but by his own hubris in shouting his name to Polyphemus.
The idea that a leader or hero carries psychological and moral weight for the horrors of war isn't a 'New Testament' invention, it is the very essence of classical Greek tragedy.
Thanks. I’ll take another look. On the last assertion, I wouldn’t deny that he carries the psychological and moral weight at all. That is what I’m asserting, actually.
The determination to demolish the values in our classic stories is unnecessary. This destructive force will crush our humanity. It will delete our ability to understand and respect other cultures from the past and the present.
Comparing syllable counts across inflected and analytic languages is a false equivalence. Ancient Greek requires multiple syllables for case endings, verb inflections, and metrical particles that English expresses in single monosyllables or pure word order. A 10-syllable iambic line frequently carries the exact same semantic payload as a 15-syllable dactylic line without dropping a single narrative detail—it simply forces the English to be as economical as Greek syntax.
The issue with earlier translations isn't just Pope; it's the inherited habit of confusing Homer's noble, direct oral register with Latinate, Victorian ornamentation. When mid-20th-century translations consistently rendered words like dmōaí as 'handmaids' rather than 'enslaved women,' that wasn't ancient Greek elevation—it was modern sanitisation. Wilson’s line-for-line constraint doesn't abridge Homer; it strips away two centuries of ideological padding to recover the unvarnished speed of the original.
First of all, "αἰνότατον " is not only awe inspiring it means some thing that's both dreadful and awe striking just like a scene of horror leaves you cold. The root AINOS means horrific, dreadful. The passage in both ancient (foνon kai khra ferontes: murder and violence bringers) and modern Greek talks of murder, pillaging and a rabid fight (war). So Wilson is actually correct. Nolan has studied the classics and didn't only rerer to Wilson. He understood Homer and Odysseus so well he did so more than others....case in point. He just chose to emphasize this in addition to the other things. Its also important to note that Nolan is well versed in all things ancient Greek so that means the myths and the tragedies as well as the Homeric Cycle that includes many many things Homer left out. In fact Nolan has reworked it all and made he most Homeric piece since, Homer.
Once more, though my comment will again fall on deaf ears.
The idea that a weeping, war-traumatized Odysseus who suffers under the weight of Troy is a modern invention completely overlooks Book 8 of the Odyssey.
When the bard Demodocus sings of the Trojan Horse, Homer explicitly describes Odysseus weeping piteously—comparing his tears to a woman falling over her slain husband as she is dragged into slavery (Odyssey 8.521–531). Homeric heroes were not unfeeling, invincible caricatures; their capacity for grief and trauma over the horrors of war is precisely what gives the epic its timeless human depth.
Blaming Nolan or Wilson for depicting Odysseus's psychological burden ignores what Homer actually wrote in the ancient text.
So what is this culture war you're so desperate to push on us? Why?
I liked the movie, and agree that this moral complexity is present in the original, the problem is that the modern versions actually reduce the moral complexity. In the original you have honor and glory juxtaposed against sorrow and suffering. Wilson does her best to downplay the honor and glory, leave the sorrow and suffering in place, and even introduce an element of shame which was not present in the original. Why? Not because she believes that it is truer to the original Homer, but because she believes it is truer to life. She rejects the Greek view of Kleos and Timé, in favor of her own, and she has every right to do so- but not the right to pass off those ideas as being faithful to the original work by calling her work a translation rather than a re-write.
"Wilson does her best to downplay the honor and glory... because she believes it is truer to life, rejecting the Greek view of Kleos and Timé."
That sounds sophisticated, but it completely misrepresents what Wilson actually did.
Wilson didn't "reject" kleos or timē; she rejected 19th-century Victorian romanticism.
When 18th- and 19th-century translators (like Alexander Pope or Victorian scholars) translated Homer, they inflated the text with grand, ornate, pseudo-biblical jargon to make the heroes fit an idealised, chivalric standard of European aristocracy. That wasn't Homer—that was Victorian gilding.
Homer’s original Greek isn't written in elevated, Latinate pseudo-prose. It is lean, direct, rhythmic, and brutally honest about violence, grief, and social hierarchy.
By matching Homer line-for-line (12,110 lines in Greek, 12,110 lines in English) and using unrhymed iambic pentameter, Wilson didn't "rewrite" the text to impose shame, she stripped away two centuries of ideological makeup to let Homer's actual meter and words speak for themselves.
If stripping away Victorian euphemisms makes kleos look different than it did in a 19th-century schoolbook, that isn't Wilson rewriting Homer. That's just Homer without the polish.
Translating the first line of the Odyssey
This video is relevant as it directly discusses how different classicists—including Emily Wilson—approach translating key Homeric concepts like polytropos from the original Greek text.
https://youtube.com/shorts/tElzSy-1h8g?is=bU66P5JQoARwC872
"Homer’s original Greek isn't written in elevated, Latinate pseudo-prose. It is lean, direct, rhythmic, and brutally honest about violence, grief, and social hierarchy."
Sorry, but the way the heroes speak is often very elevated and ornate. I've been studying Homer for decades, and have taught myself enough Homeric Greek to be able to read a good bit of it myself.
"By matching Homer line-for-line (12,110 lines in Greek, 12,110 lines in English) and using unrhymed iambic pentameter, Wilson didn't "rewrite" the text to impose shame, she stripped away two centuries of ideological makeup to let Homer's actual meter and words speak for themselves."
Homer wrote in dactylic hexameter, meaning he's got 16 or 17 syllables to work with in each line compared to ten for Wilson. Her version is sort of like someone doing an abridgement of War and Peace by making each sentence 40% shorter. The leanness is Wilson, not Homer.
A great modern translation that makes a genuine effort to recreate Homer's flowing expansive rhythmn is Daniel Mendelsohn (2025).
"When 18th- and 19th-century translators (like Alexander Pope or Victorian scholars) translated Homer, they inflated the text with grand, ornate, pseudo-biblical jargon to make the heroes fit an idealised, chivalric standard of European aristocracy."
This is all babble, by the way. Nobody reads 18th or 19th century translations, although Pope is still around. There are a lot of great modern translations, starting with Lattimore, and none of them are false to the text.
Modern versions reduce the moral complexity because understanding the moral complexity of the original by the average movie goer cannot be done in a 3 hour sitting.
The Odyssey is not about morals it’s about virtues. The fact that people cannot understand what that difference means is part of the problem.
https://writeonlytheory.substack.com/p/you-would-hate-a-lore-accurate-version
The distinction between ancient ‘arete’ (virtue/excellence) and modern moral frameworks is a valid classical distinction, but treating them as mutually exclusive is a stretch.
Homeric virtue—whether metis (cunning) or andreia (courage)—was always bound up with moral duties like xenia (hospitality) and dike (justice). Odysseus isn't just demonstrating abstract virtues; his actions test the ethical fabric of Bronze Age society.
Reducing the debate to "audiences can't handle complex virtues in three hours" underestimates both Homer's oral storytelling efficiency and the intelligence of cinema audiences.
Another thing that's often incredibly funny to me is that for modern audiences when Odysseus' admission of breaking xenia against Polyphemous and his subsequent egotistical boasting is often seen as fine because Polyphemous is a man eating monster. In fact people misinterpret the scene as Polyphemous breaking xenia against Odysseus.
However when Odysseus does this again in a worse way against the suitors , in a scenario he's effectively revisiting. When he's ultimately stopped by the gods. It's again seen as fine because he's "getting his wife back".
Greek heros have the morality of Polyphemous in comparison to the majority of modern audiences, and yet people literally cannot comprehend it.
> Homeric virtue—whether metis (cunning) or andreia (courage)—was always bound up with moral duties like xenia (hospitality) and dike (justice). Odysseus isn't just demonstrating abstract virtues; his actions test the ethical fabric of Bronze Age society.
You're preaching to the choir.
> Reducing the debate to "audiences can't handle complex virtues in three hours" underestimates both Homer's oral storytelling efficiency and the intelligence of cinema audiences.
There are reams and reams of text on this site alone with people who believe that there is no serious interpretation of the Odyssey that aligns with Nolan's and that Odysseus is a purely virtuous hero and that any interpretation of him feeling anything but righteous glorious bloodlust at the conquest of Troy is categorically wrong. This isn't the only one.
Both of these statements are ironic and uneducated, because the view of Odysseus as a purely virtuous hero becomes subverted by the Hellenistic period and extinct by the Augustinian.
Social media is even worse. You give the average American too much credit.
That's a popular reading, but I don't think it's correct. Odysseus weeps in the same way earlier in Book 8 when Demodocus sings the song of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles (not in the Iliad) and Agamemnon looks on joyfully, because the quarrel has been prophesied to cause the fall of Troy. Odysseus cries a lot. So do the other heroes. The stiff upper lip was a later innovation.
Sympathy in Homer's characters (unlike Homer himself) is circumscribed, and it's always personal. In the Iliad it's the death of Patroclus that wrecks Achilles, and he's able to feel sympathy for Priam by thinking of his own father. In the Odyssey, the survivors of the war – Menelaos, Odysseus, Nestor – all mourn for their lost comrades, but none ever expresses any sympathy for the Trojans they defeated and massacred. In the underworld, from the war Odysseus sees Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, and Antilokhos, but no Trojans. And even in this scene you're discussing, Demodocus dispatches the sack of the city in a couple of lines, but ends with Odysseus' defeat of Deiphobus, described as his greatest battle. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's the Trojans Odysseus is crying for. A few minutes after this, Odysseus gets up in front of the king and his court and begins his long account of his journeys by saying (paraphrase) "my name is Odysseus Sacker of Cities, renowed for every kind of craft, and my fame reaches heaven." What's he famous for? The Trojan horse and the sack of Troy. What's the first stop he describes on his way home? Sacking the city of the Kikones.
I think the simile of the weeping woman is Homer putting in a reminder of what the capture of a city really meant, which is the sort of thing he does often. His sympathy for the Trojans in the Iliad is so evident that one of the traditions about him was that he was a Trojan hostage brought back to Greece after the city fell. The breadth of his sympathy is very wide. Even for the serving-women that Telemakhos hangs. When Homer describes them dangling from the rope, he compares them to doves or thrushes with slender wings returning home to their nests, but who instead land in a loathsome snare hidden in a bush. It affects the reader, but I don't think we're supposed to think that Odysseus and Telemakhos feel any regret.
Great thread, I'm eager to watch the movie. Interestingly enough, when compared to the original author's critique we should note--some reaearchers believe Homer may not have existed.
Which begs the question, what is the work of art deprived of an author, deprived of it's cultural milieu?
This deeply human story belongs to all of us regardless of race, birthplace, or creed. The ability to tell and re-tell such ancient stories (with necessary artistic discretion), to a modern audience speaks to the power of the original story. It is timeless precisely because we can apply, adapt, and re-interpret it. This is the beauty of the story telling tradition Nolan is participating in, and a nod to the oral format it was originally spread through.
I thought the last completely unnecessary shot of the arrow following their escape from the cave was an adequate representation of Odysseus's hubris triggering Poseidon's wrath.
Hi, to me it seemed. That the "avenge" of Nolans Odysseus for his mates, wasn't serious reason, but with the undertone: I'm a slayer, get lost. So it gets quite close to a loud proclamation: I killed P. and am proud of it. It's different, but the effort is there and is legitimite and respectful
In 1603, Thomas Kyd looked down from heaven into the Globe theatre and declared, “what utter butchery! Confounded upstart Shakespeare! That’s not the Hamlet I wrote!” To which the unknown Dane skald chimed “and your Christian Hamlet was nothing like the real one!” And so it goes. Every poet a thief.
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. Bad poets deface and good poets improve - T.S. Eliot.
To All.
Maybe we can discuss the difference between exegesis and mythopoesis sometime—because treating ancient myth as a static museum piece rather than an ongoing act of myth-making misses how Homeric tradition worked in the first place.
Spot on, Lamont. As someone who spent years working in professional theatre—which often included analysing, directing, and performing in classical plays—I can tell you that the notion of a single "sacred, unalterable text" only exists in academic armchairs, never on stage.
When you stage Shakespeare, the Greeks, or the Jacobeans, you quickly realize that drama is an active conversation between the past and the present. Directors cut, adapt, re-contextualise, and emphasize different facets of a classical text not to "destroy" it, but to make it *live* for the audience in the room.
Homer himself wasn't a static archivist, he was an oral performer responding to his listeners. The moment we treat ancient myth like a dusty museum display rather than a living narrative framework, we kill the very thing that made it last 3,000 years.
Loved the T.S. Eliot quote—couldn't agree more!
Preface: I agree with nearly everything stated in this review. The movie is good, the Homer is mid.
A bit of color that I'll add- one of the biggest problems that Wilson's translation presents is with is that many of the moral issues are present within the poem or broader Greek and Roman culture. Rome was sceptical of Ulysses for being deceptive and dishonorable. Dante puts him in hell for being a fraudster. The Trojan Women is incredibly sympathetic to the people he helped take captive.
The problem is that this isn't treated as a moral complexity in the Wilson translation (and by extension Nolan's film,) the thrill of glory being tempered by moments of recognition of the humanity of your enemy. The tragedy of war isn't shown to be the incompatibility of two conflicting goods (represented by the gods). Instead, the glory is stripped away and you are left with a more unidimensional character who is incapable of returning home, because the lack of conflicting imperatives means that on some level he's the bad guy.
It’s fascinating to watch the argument shift. First, Wilson was accused of inventing a traumatized, weeping Odysseus out of thin air. When Book 8 (lines 521–531) clearly proved Homer wrote that exact grief into the original poem, the goalpost moved to claims about 'Christian moral lenses' or 'stripping away kleos.'
Homer was never a flat, heroic cheerleader for unvarnished slaughter—the Greeks themselves recognised the tragic, devastating cost of kleos. Wilson didn't Christianise Homer; she just refused to pretend the Odyssey is a 19th-century schoolboy adventure story.
My sister and I have been thoroughly discussing this topic, solely based on your thoughts of it. I am deeply sided with you while she doesn't see it the same way. It's been interesting.
I also read the part about Polyphemus calling to Poseidon and I was like "I sure hope there isn't another Odysseus who sacks cities in the world because his head might be on the chopping block." I think one of the reasons they added the Ithaca part is because the commonality of names, it sets him apart from other Odysseus's.
There is a comedy to be written about an ancient Greek named Odysseus who sells sacks city to city, and happens to have a home in Ithaca, and what goes wrong in his life as a result of Poseidon screwing with everyone sharing that name, just in case. Poor Ody never even knows why.
Gene Wilder would have been perfect for that role.
🤣
Spot on regarding the Polyphemus hubris, Eddie—that egotistical taunt is the exact turning point that unleashes Poseidon’s wrath and drives the narrative engine.
As for anxiety and psychological burden: ancient survival and total war were precisely *why* grief and trauma run so deep in classical epic. Homer didn’t have modern clinical terminology, but he knew psychological exhaustion intimately—from Odysseus weeping piteously over Trojan war songs in Book 8 to Achilles pacing the beach in torment.
Directing and playing these classical roles shows you very quickly that the ancients weren't unfeeling statues—the visceral terror, grief, and mental toll of survival were written right into the text for the actor to embody.
"Homer never wrote such an Odysseus." Well, in all fairness, he never wrote anything.
And like all historical story telling the narrative changes over time. Mr. Nolan is working in a different medium and in a different time. Grant him some latitude.
Brilliant opening line, Chris. It cuts through so much of the modern purist anxiety.
The idea of a 'fixed, canonical text' is a post-Gutenberg invention. Homeric bards were oral performers constantly tweaking, improvising, and adapting their songs for the room they were performing in. Cinema is just the latest medium in a 3,000-year chain of performance.
I am disappointed in how many people whose opinions I value liked this movie. Yes it looks great. I would have cast virtually every major part differently, but most of all it is a woke pomo pacifist take on a martial poem and culture. Nolan/Wilson deconstructed Homer. So instead of being stirred and thoughtful and energized and inspired, we are left kind of shamed and ambivalent. Feh.
My career military officer father did 2 tours in Vietnam and suffered from it the rest of his life. But go ahead and tell me all about war trauma.
Calling an epic where a man spends twenty years weeping for his home, losing his entire crew, and suffering war trauma 'woke pomo pacifism' says a lot more about modern political buzzword fatigue than it does about Homer.
Homer’s world wasn't a Marvel movie or a Victorian chivalry manual—it was direct, brutal, and deeply acquainted with grief. Labeling human vulnerability in Bronze Age myth as 'woke' just flattens 3,000 years of literature into a 24-hour news cycle.
"Woke" may be a stretch, but I also think you're applying modern Christian psychology to men from 3000 years ago.
Reading something like Homer is intended to put you in contact with a very foreign moral system. On that account, Nolan fails.
@Brian: Grief, weeping, and the psychological toll of war aren't 'Christian psychology'—they are literally on the page in Homer. When Achilles sits by the ships weeping for Patroclus, or when Odysseus hides his face to cry during Demodocus's song, that isn't New Testament sentimentality. That is Bronze Age penthos (grief) and achos (distress). The ancient Greeks didn't need Christianity to feel the crushing weight of loss.
@D D Wise: The Bronze Age Mediterranean was literally a crossroads of diverse cultures, trade routes, and foreign peoples—from Phoenicians and Aethiopians to Egyptians and Phaeacians. But more importantly, cinema and theatre are performance arts, not museum dioramas. If casting non-white actors in a 3,000-year-old myth breaks your immersion, that sounds like a 21st-century anxiety, not a Homeric one.
Yes, Odysseus laments many things. But he also glories in many of those same things. Homer's Odysseus is ambiguous, like real people. Nolan's movie is not.
I believe the difference is that modern man has lost the ability to glory in martial greatness. He is not torn: war is always a tragedy. Alexander's line from Hamilton comes to mind: "I wish there was a war where we could prove that we're worth more than anyone ever bargained for." Odysseus would see Hamilton's logic, but it's a very un-modern (un-WEIRD) sentiment.
Odysseus and Achilles are also weeping for their own tribe, not for some universal brotherhood of man. Achilles slaughters Hector's brother in vengeance. Doesn't he burn a bunch of Trojan teenagers (alive? it's been a few years for me) with Patroclus' body? Yes, when he finally meets Priam he connects to him as a father figure and treats him fairly, but that's individualized, not universal. Odysseus is even worse; does he ever give more than a fleeting thought to the Trojans humanity?
Homer's narration is different. He does treat Greek and Trojan equally in his eulogies. To me this reads as a broad respect for (even defeated) warriors though, not some universal human dignity. But I don't even see that in Homer's main characters.
Nolan is free to execute his vision to appeal to current trends, especially since the academy mandated dei quotas for consideration for an oscar, but it is postmodern and pacifist and woke and not Homer. Trade routes may have been diverse, the suitors and warriors in the Odyssey were not described as such. But lets go ahead and deconstruct all the Western canon, what could possibly go wrong.
I guess he didn’t see Penelope’s feminist speech, not to mention the DEI casting, nor the incredibly diverse warriors and suitors, because of course equal and respectful representation of foreign cultures was top of mind for Homeric bards.
Penelope's speech stuck out to me because it was so out of period. But that's 20 seconds of the movie. Homer's Penelope is hardly a wimp either.
As for DEI casting, most of the Greek warriors are white. A black rapper as the narrator made sense -- he's the nearest thing we have to a bard today. Black Helen was little more jarring, but I can live with it. I'm just not that hung up on skin color. And sacrificing the one (obviously not-buff) trannie "Achaean warrior" in the first 20 seconds is a distinctly non-woke statement about the value of trannies in the military.
I recently saw a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet reset onto a 19th century pirate colony. It wasn't Verona, but it was still good and it worked. I guess I feel the same way about Nolan's movie: it's not Homer but it doesn't need to be either.
I think he chickened out by not making a truer Odysseus who could have put the audience in touch with a truly foreign moral code (ala Apocalypto or Northman) but I still enjoyed what he did make.
@Brian: Grief, weeping, and the psychological toll of war aren't 'Christian psychology'—they are literally on the page in Homer. When Achilles sits by the ships weeping for Patroclus, or when Odysseus hides his face to cry during Demodocus's song, that isn't New Testament sentimentality. That is Bronze Age penthos (grief) and achos (distress). The ancient Greeks didn't need Christianity to feel the crushing weight of loss.
@D D Wise: The Bronze Age Mediterranean was literally a crossroads of diverse cultures, trade routes, and foreign peoples—from Phoenicians and Aethiopians to Egyptians and Phaeacians. But more importantly, cinema and theatre are performance arts, not museum dioramas. If casting non-white actors in a 3,000-year-old myth breaks your immersion, that sounds like a 21st-century anxiety, not a Homeric one.
Odysseus did not have a heart of stone. The odyssey literally shows him shedding tears as the bard sings of the sack of Troy. The tension between glory and grief exists and Nolan’s adaptation chooses the grief aspect to focus on and in a way that reflects contemporary morality. The reason this story has survived this long because it kept being told and this is yet another attempt at that. I personally have stopped expecting adaptations to be completely accurate to the original ESPECIALLY when you’re adapting a text older than the bible itself. There is a lens, an interpretation, a world view that goes into it and I liked the anti-war interpretation. Is it accurate? No. Does it downplay the moral complexity of Odysseus ? Yes. Is it an interpretation worth discussion? Yes. I don’t get why the film being anti-war is such a big issue. It isn’t any less of moral lesson than the consequence of hubris is. Therefore I do feel this debate is somewhat of a non issue and for the record, Helen was hatched from an egg after a god in the form of swan impregnated her mother. I’m SURE it’s fine if she’s black🤦♀️ she could be purple for all it matters. Why are we picking on certain cast members knowing that NONE of them look Mediterranean. This is the stuff that makes conservatives look more obsessed with casting and people of colour than the DEI people. I assure you no terrible casting decision has been made that would actually negatively impact your experience. As far as Athena goes I think zendaya was completely fine and the fact that you mention only the POC and the trans person as examples of casting you weren’t happy with just tells me that more than the quality of the film and the actors you care about it subscribing to your own ideology, which is something you tend to criticise a lot in the left
100%. And to add that the ILLIAD is also an anti war piece if you really get into its heart.
Comically, even Emily Wilson agrees with your criticism of Nolan's movie: https://x.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/2079887117618946245
"The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he's done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrised way – and needs drugs to do so! He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much warrioring ... Nolan makes the protagonist a likeable, all-American hero; Homer's Odysseus wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory."
Isn't the concern with Wilson in that passage more that she says "through dreadful violence"? That makes it sound like the line is referring to the violence perpetrated by Odysseus, rather than the violence of the situation which is how the Greek appears in my beginnerish poking and prodding..
I don't know Homeric Greek at all, but the best I can tell from linguistic sources, αἰνότατον does indeed mean either "dreadful" or "terrible", as Wilson has translated it.
In the Loeb, which I understand tries to stay close to the original, it is translated to "There it was, he said, that Odysseus dared the most terrible fight and in the end conquered by the aid of great-hearted Athene."
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
You’re right on the money with αἰνότατον (ainotaton)—it’s the superlative of ainos, meaning 'most dreadful' or 'most horrific.' In Homer, ainos almost always characterizes the environmental terror or sheer grimness of war/grief (like ainon achos—terrible sorrow) rather than assigning individual moral blame.
The challenge for any translator is that English prepositions like 'through' can easily imply agency ('done by him through violence') when the Greek neuter superlative is simply describing the brutal, harrowing nature of the ordeal itself. It’s a great example of how subtle choices in English syntax can inadvertently shift the thematic weight.
Thank you for your assessment!
exactly! the actual text we have in ancient Greek and the modern Greek translation says dreadful violence.
Thank you!
I think an accurate retelling of the Odyssey would've been less interesting. Everyone knows the original story. Changing the role of Odysseus while keeping the journey similar to the original one is what I'd call a well made adaptation.
I really liked Nolan's adaptation and I wrote about it here: https://giuliofaldetta.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-breaking-trust?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8pja2c
Just got back from seeing it. Nolan made an an Odysseus as seen through a Christian moral lens.
Homer's Odysseus would never have been haunted by a poor, innocent, vestal virgin he helped slaughter in Troy. Women were only slightly above property. Enemies were never innocent. Temple virgins were acolytes of an enemy god. The universalist humanitarian lens is an invention of Christianity (and to a lesser extent Judaism.)
Nolan likely thought if he made an Odysseus true to the pagan moral lens, modern audiences would never have cheered for him. I'm not sure he's correct: Eggers Northman and Gibson's Apocalypto allow you to inhabit true pagan moralities without losing their humanity. Nolan could have done the same, but chose not to.
I guess the best we can hope for is that some small percentage of movie-goers will be interested enough to pick up Fagle, encounter the otherness of the real pagan morality, and be thankful for the God who demonstrated an alternative.
Conflating Roman 'Vestal Virgins' with Homeric Troy aside, you fundamentally misunderstand classical pagan theology.
The idea that ancient Greeks felt no guilt or spiritual horror over war atrocities until Christianity invented it is historically false. The entire premise of the Nostoi (the returns of the Greeks) is that the pagan gods themselves cursed, shipwrecked, and destroyed the Greek fleet precisely because of the desecration, rape, and slaughter they committed during the sack of Troy (most notably at Athena's altar).
That isn't 'Christian universalism' retrofitted onto myth—that is classical miasma (moral/spiritual pollution) and divine retribution. Greek tragedy (The Trojan Women, Aeschylus' Oresteia) spent centuries exploring the horrific psychological and spiritual hangover of Trojan atrocities long before the birth of Christianity.
I acknowledge your point, and yes, perhaps I'm being a little too trite. However the Greek Gods cursed people for all kinds of reasons, most of them rather petty. Ask Cassiopeia or Arachne or Niobe. Midas' ears come to mind.
The Gods are conspicuously absent in Nolan's movie. However, in Homer's telling, the Gods were angry not about the slaughter but, as you say, the insult to Athena. Women raped to death, babies burned beyond recognition, men decaptitated (sounds like Oct 7) none of that bothered the Gods. But trampling on the altar of one of their own... Ajax raping a priestess of Athena... that must be punished! That's personal! The Gods don't reject the overall slaughter, and neither does Homer's Odysseus. In fact, as our host here says, his glory in the sacking of Troy is the source of his pride that is his downfall.
It will take Plato and Aristotle (a little) and Saint Paul Augustine (mostly) to make human dignity a universal (instead of tribal) concept.
I’m wondering whether the karmic reversals are acknowledged in her revision because that’s where the morality comes in in Homer’s version.
They sack Troy and Odysseus declares victory and says it’s time to go but the men defy his orders and run amok sacking Troy further.
This immoral act brings on karmic punishment later. For each error in judgment there is a karmic reversal; much of early literature carries this trope. Hubris is a strident theme, making the revision utterly pointless!
It sounds like she is oblivious to that, and that leadership is always at risk of bad decisions along with troops who won’t listen like when they open the bag of wind.
Again it sounds like the author of this New Testament version missed the nuances.
That mixes up two distinct episodes in the epic—the raid on the Cikones at Ismarus (where his men refused to leave) and the actual Sack of Troy.
In the Homeric cycle, Odysseus wasn't an innocent commander overridden by unruly troops at Troy; he was a primary architect of its brutal fall. And Odysseus’s ultimate "karmic reversal" with Poseidon isn't caused by his men disobeying him, but by his own hubris in shouting his name to Polyphemus.
The idea that a leader or hero carries psychological and moral weight for the horrors of war isn't a 'New Testament' invention, it is the very essence of classical Greek tragedy.
Thanks. I’ll take another look. On the last assertion, I wouldn’t deny that he carries the psychological and moral weight at all. That is what I’m asserting, actually.
The determination to demolish the values in our classic stories is unnecessary. This destructive force will crush our humanity. It will delete our ability to understand and respect other cultures from the past and the present.
Comparing syllable counts across inflected and analytic languages is a false equivalence. Ancient Greek requires multiple syllables for case endings, verb inflections, and metrical particles that English expresses in single monosyllables or pure word order. A 10-syllable iambic line frequently carries the exact same semantic payload as a 15-syllable dactylic line without dropping a single narrative detail—it simply forces the English to be as economical as Greek syntax.
The issue with earlier translations isn't just Pope; it's the inherited habit of confusing Homer's noble, direct oral register with Latinate, Victorian ornamentation. When mid-20th-century translations consistently rendered words like dmōaí as 'handmaids' rather than 'enslaved women,' that wasn't ancient Greek elevation—it was modern sanitisation. Wilson’s line-for-line constraint doesn't abridge Homer; it strips away two centuries of ideological padding to recover the unvarnished speed of the original.
First of all, "αἰνότατον " is not only awe inspiring it means some thing that's both dreadful and awe striking just like a scene of horror leaves you cold. The root AINOS means horrific, dreadful. The passage in both ancient (foνon kai khra ferontes: murder and violence bringers) and modern Greek talks of murder, pillaging and a rabid fight (war). So Wilson is actually correct. Nolan has studied the classics and didn't only rerer to Wilson. He understood Homer and Odysseus so well he did so more than others....case in point. He just chose to emphasize this in addition to the other things. Its also important to note that Nolan is well versed in all things ancient Greek so that means the myths and the tragedies as well as the Homeric Cycle that includes many many things Homer left out. In fact Nolan has reworked it all and made he most Homeric piece since, Homer.