Everybody's Odyssey

Welcome to the The Ancient Mystic Society of Any and All Homers

When it comes to attaining a lasting artistic and cultural legacy, Homer has done as well as anybody who ever lived in the time before our yellow sun swells to vaporize its solar system, only to collapse into a white dwarf, leaving the charred remains of its orbital family to freeze in the unending inkwell of space.

So if somebody translates The Iliad, The Odyssey or any of the Homeric hymns in ways that offend your sensibilities, be strong. Homer’s place in storytelling history is as assured as anybody’s. Even William Shakespeare is jealous. And don’t get me started about Ben Jonson, who is appalled to be so obscure that I first spelled his last name with an “h.”

There is no way that in 2026 Christopher Nolan can ruin The Odyssey unless you let it. Oh no, his Helen of Troy wouldn’t launch your ship of the thousand? Sorry. She has 999 problems, but your ship ain’t one. Elon Musk might have complaints about Nolan’s casting but in Greece, where The Odyssey remains a natural treasure, reinventions of the story are celebrated for extending the life of such an important story: “‘What we want children to understand is that every new creation is exactly that — a new creation,’ Filippos Mantzaris, who teaches “The Odyssey” to seventh graders, told The Associated Press.”

I haven’t seen the Nolan movie yet as it doesn’t open until July 17th. It doesn’t matter. I am going to enjoy it. I’ve already decided that. The Odyssey is the first challenging book that I read as a child, struggling to pronounce the names and missing most of its themes, though not its events. It is, if you’re a follow of Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, a formative story in Western thought, about a hero who leaves home on a quest, is transformed by the journey and then returns home, generally to find that home is not what had been left behind.

When Odysseus returns home after 20 years, he finds his land overrun by suitors to his wife, Penelope. Each are would be tyrants, in the oldest sense of the word, as they would become kings of Ithaca from outside of Odysseus’ bloodline, bypassing Odysseus’ son Telemachus, to form a new heritage of leadership.

When Odysseus returns to Ithaca he has nothing. He has lost all of his ships and all of his soldiers to the misadventures of his journey home. He washes up naked on the shores of his home country and nobody but a blind shepherd, who may be a stand-in for Homer, the blind storyteller, recognizes the once and future King. To end his quest, Odysseus has to recapture his identity and scour his country of the suitors who sought to replace him.

This last bit shows up in another epic quest, by the way, written 2700 or so years later, called The Lord of the Rings. Though, like Tom Bombadil, this does not show up in Peter Jackson’s masterful film adaptations, the third book of The Lord the Rings ends with the “scouring of the Shire.” Our Hobbit heroes return home after having destroyed the one ring only to find that the evil Wormtongue, who had been previously corrupted by the ring’s power, had conspired to turn their home town into a miniature dictatorship. Before they can rest, the Hobbits have to drive this evil from their land. It’s not enough just to get home from a quest, the hero has to use their new skills, confidence and power to restore their homes to glory.

No interpretation of these stories, however flawed, can damage them and complaints about the true history of the Odyssey seem as pointless to me as complaints about the true history of J.R.R. Tolkien’s middle earth. These places don’t exist in the world, they exist deep within us. While archeologists have struggled to find the site of the Trojan War, what Troy means to us is far more important than the clay and marble that the city might have been. We don’t value these stories for what they tell us about history, but for what they tell us about being human and how to live together.

The Illiad and The Odyssey provide a great example. Imagine yourself living in that time, perhaps as a citizen of one of the Greek city states that has declared war on Troy. You’ve been cajoled or conscripted into fighting. You’ll ;eave your family and risk your life for maybe the chance at bringing home some treasure, if Agamemnon, as the greatest among equals, doesn’t declare himself the favorite of Zeus and take all of the spoils for himself.

Imagine discussing the prospects of invading Troy as a politic, economic or social issue. On one hand, you might say, all of our leaders, who all wanted to marry Helen, swore that they would go to war to defend her marriage to Menelaus, King of Sparta. That marriage had been arranged by Helen’s stepfather, the politically savvy and influential Tyndareus. None of the kings who vowed to go to war to protect the Menelaus/Helen union consulted with their citizens before swearing their oaths. All of these Kings also got consolation prizes, like marrying Helen’s sisters, who were also very beautiful, powerful and descendants of the gods.

You might also ask if the Trojan people really have this coming and, indeed, there’s some implication in The Iliad that you should feel some sympathy for Troy’s heroes and citizens, who had nothing at all to do with abducting Helen. The circumstances of Helen’s abduction were not normal at all. Three powerful goddesses got into a fight over possession of a golden apple and they chose Paris to adjudicate the dispute. He could not refuse and he could only answer honestly. Paris was an aesthete and so he chose love over military cleverness or political power. Aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful woman on Earth. This is love as an affliction, as something that happens to two people. It’s the opposite of the calculated marriage of Helen to Menelaus. It’s true love. Even if you think the worst of Paris, everybody else in Troy is a totally innocent victim of an unprovoked attack. As for Paris, he didn’t set out to kidnap anybody. The goddess of love, the actual embodiment of the idea of love, led Helen to love him. That’s not a choice.

So, if you lived in one of those Greek city states and had been called to war, you might wonder if it was a just call. If your name is something like Cynicus or Skepticus, you might doubt the whole darned Helen and the Golden Apple story and just think that Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Achilles and Nestor were a bunch of greed heads just looking for an excuse to sack that fine city full of “other people.”

While these questions are rarely explicit in the text, they are embedded in it. Homer takes pains to show the heroism and nobility of the Trojan side, particularly when dealing with the champion Hector and his father King Priam. he also shows the Greeks being sometimes gratuitously cruel. For example, in Chapter 10 of The Illiad, Odysseus and Diomedes go on a mission to spy on the Trojan camp. They encounter the Trojan Dolon, who has been sent by Hector to spy on the Greeks. Now, Dolon is presented as a coward and he betrays his people quickly when Diomedes and Odysseus capture and torture him. But after Dolon has told them what they want to know and after he has promised that his father will pay a handsome ransom for his return, Diomedes chops the unarmed man’s head off, reasoning that he might be a nuisance later on.

I bring all of this up because Emily Wilson, who has endured all sorts of criticism for daring to translate Homer into a readable, living and contemporary meter, has also suggested a lot of answers to these questions in her scholarship. The oaths taken by the kings, for example, cannot be broken because the Greek nation-states would all slide into war and chaos if one ruler could not rely on the word of another. This isn’t ancient world superstition or even feudalism because it matters today. This is why we worry about Ukraine joining NATO and why we fret about what our promises to that country met when it became independent from the Soviet Union 35 years ago.

Similarly, we sometimes as society seek to put limits on true love between people, if those relationship disrupt social, economic or political order. Ask any corporate Human Resources professional if true love has practical limits. Finally, when it comes to the interrogation and execution of Dolon, I know that many leaders in the United States, from both sides of the political spectrum, would have no regrets and that some of them see being born the enemy as something of an invitation to a beheading.

It took Wilson’s Homeric works to help me better draw connections between the ancient and contemporary worlds. As the Greek schoolteacher tells us, every new creation invites us to draw new connections and to see new things. We should not be like Medusa, cursed to make unchanging statues out of everything we encounter, nor should we be like King Midas, who turned everything he loved into static gold. Change and evolution are at the heart of Greek myth. When Ovid collected the old greek stories he called them Metamorphoses because each narrative explores change and all of its fearsome or beautiful consequences.

I haven’t seen Nolan’s film yet, but I know I’m going to enjoy it. Your mileage may vary, but if you go into it angry that this or that character doesn’t look the way you think they should, based on how you remember the story from middle school, I am going to suggest that you don’t understand the living canon at all. Fret not. The Middlebrow is always here to help.