Fireside Friday, July 31, 2026 (On The Odyssey) – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
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.
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.
