“Tell me the story of a complicated man,” opens Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey.
Odysseus, the epic’s hero and complicated man in question, is returning home from the Trojan War when he is waylaid by the gods. For 10 years, the king of Ithaca endures shipwrecks, enslavement, monsters and seduction to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.
“The Odyssey is a story of how hard it is to come home,” said Emily Austin, an associate professor of classics at the University of Chicago. “This is a supremely relatable human experience.”
Attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, the epic has been retold, retranslated and readapted countless times. At UChicago, the Odyssey is a foundational text in the undergraduate Core curriculum.
On July 17, director Christopher Nolan’s sweeping, A-list-studded take on Odysseus’s journey home will be released in theaters. Even before its release, the film, shot on massive IMAX cameras, sparked an equally outsized internet backlash on everything from the armor to the dialog to the casting choices.
We spoke with UChicago’s Assoc. Prof. Emily Austin, an expert on Homer, Prof. Patrice Rankine, who studies the intersection of ancient Greco-Roman classics with contemporary issues of race, gender and politics, and the Divinity School’s Prof. Carolina López-Ruiz, a scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions, to understand why we remain so invested in this ancient tale and what this version might say about our current culture.
The following Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
Why has the Odyssey persisted for nearly 3,000 years as a foundational text in the Western canon? What can we still learn from it?
Austin: The poem is not simply an adventure story, but asks us to really think about what it’s like to be away from home for 20 years—and then to come back.
When Odysseus finally returns, he has lost all his men, arguably through his own fault. His house is no longer in his control; he is at risk of losing his wife, his property, the life he once had as king of Ithaca. And in addition to the 10 years of trying to get home, Odysseus was at war for another 10 years before that.
The poem devotes half of its narrative to the process of Odysseus reintegrating, revealing himself little by little to his loved ones, testing them—and, in the case of his wife, being tested himself—and trying to reestablish his life.
Whether or not we’ve been at war, or in exile, or forced to move, we can relate to this longing for home, for belonging, and the difficulty of achieving it.
Why is Odysseus so compelling as a character and hero?
Austin: Odysseus is often described as “long-suffering” or “much enduring.” Although he has moments where he proves his excellence, the Odyssey also suggests that Odysseus is a different kind of hero.
He is different not only because he is clever and comes up with famous tricks to get him and his companions out of tight spots (the Trojan Horse being the prime example!).
But also, because he suffers a lot, for a long time.
It is telling that the Odyssey begins with Odysseus on Calypso’s island facing a choice between a luxurious, immortal life with the goddess and the continuation of a mortal life, with its suffering.
He chooses a mortal life.
How would people have experienced the poem when it was first composed? What is gained or lost when adapting it into a visual medium?
Rankine: These were so-called occasional poems, oral in composition. Some scholars speculate that their purpose was not only entertainment but also didactic.
We have to imagine the occasion of an epic performance, although common among the elite, for the average person significant. In the case of a major poet known across elite circles in the Mediterranean, as we imagine with a poet of Homer’s sophistication, his presence within your island, your community, your festival, would have been memorable.
What the cinematic medium gives us—and why Nolan undoubtedly would want to film this—is something like the scale and immersiveness that the epic must have had for early audiences. The aesthetic experience is entertainment, but I am certain that speculations about the ‘message’ in the movie will dominate the cultural discussions.
What does it mean, for example, to cast characters in the way that Nolan has?
That’s a great question. Nolan’s choice to cast non-Greek actors, for example, or Helen of Troy (the most beautiful woman in the world) as a Black woman sparked internet chatter and backlash. What might casting choices of a classical text—and the public’s reaction to them—say about contemporary culture?
Rankine: It’s a poorly guarded secret that the return to the classics is always as much about us as it is about the past.
It is no surprise that the internet backlash would inevitably center on race, ethnicity and sexuality. These are the battlefields of our contemporary culture wars, and we project those concerns onto antiquity.
Not only were previous Odysseys decidedly not Greek—Armand Asante was New York-born, of Irish and Italian descent—but we would have to question what it would mean to be Greek in the first place, a term which did not exist at the time of the Trojan War, and was only a vague possibility when the poem was first composed.
Antiquity often is a blank canvas for our projections—or if not entirely blank, certainly with enough space for us to cast ourselves.
Can we read the Odyssey as a religious text?
López-Ruiz: Though the Odyssey is still a very human-centered poem (the first word of the epic is andra or “man”), it is all driven by the will of the gods. Think about how Poseidon sets Odysseus back after he blinds the Cyclops, the god’s son, or how Athena transforms Odysseus so he can reenter his palace in disguise.
In the opening of the poem, Zeus himself says something to the effect of: People always blame the gods, but it is human folly that brings their demise when they knowingly or unknowingly transgress divine laws or cross the gods.
What challenges might a film face when depicting the stakes and norms of an ancient religion?
López-Ruiz: When you put these stories on screen, you have two choices.
Either you make the gods more theologically modern—aloof, abstract entities that characters interact with only by praying, cursing or performing some ritual. For instance, Ridley Scott's Troy (2004) followed this path, but it made the plot almost unrecognizable.
Or, you can go fully Homeric and show them as in the poems—involved, sometimes visible, quarreling among themselves and changing the plot in very specific ways. The risk here is that the gods appear so anthropomorphic that they seem less divine to our modern eyes.
I personally prefer this approach even if it requires more cultural translation. It has more magic, charm and better reflects the theology of the epics.
