History and the Odyssey

History and the Odyssey

The Odyssey is coming out soon, a feature film starring Matt Damon, and directed and written by Christopher Nolan.

Various online pundits have already criticised it, focusing on historical authenticity — faithfulness to some preconceived idea of how the world in the film ought to look. Why isn’t Odysseus’ armour consistent with Bronze Age armour? Why does his ship look like a viking longship? And above all, how dare they cast some actors of non-northern-European extraction!!

John Waterhouse, ‘Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses’ (1891; image source: Wikimedia). This is not a Bronze Age scene: the cup is a Type C kylix no earlier than the 400s BCE; glass mirrors weren’t commonly made until the 1st century CE; Doric columns put us in the Archaic period or later (700s BCE onwards). Have you ever heard anyone blast this painting for its anachronisms? I haven’t.

Two kinds of response:

1. There’s no sense in which the Odyssey is set in the Bronze Age. It is set at some indefinite point in a fictional past, but it’s totally flooded with classical-era motifs and preoccupations, with a smattering of archaic touches for decoration.
2. Myths are always tailored to contemporary audiences. They always have been — including Homer. There’s no canon of how things and characters ought to look: Homer wasn’t ‘authentic’ in that sense, and if Homer isn’t, no one is.

1. There’s nothing Bronze Age about the Odyssey

Recently a popular religious historian on Youtube said: ‘the Odyssey is set at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE’ (Henry 2026). Andrew Henry is a deeply knowledgeable scholar, but for this point he made the mistake of relying on common wisdom.

Many people are taught that Homer ‘remembers’ a story that was repeated over generations. There was an Odyssey tradition: a story transmitted orally over centuries, and containing a fossilised core of Bronze Age elements.

The trouble is, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that. It’s entirely based on an analogy with the metrical formulaic system. The formulaic system did indeed exist for some period before 700 BCE: the style of language reflects a tradition that was probably more than a hundred years old at the time, possibly even older. But the same thing doesn’t automatically apply to the story.

There’s nothing Bronze-Age-specific about the Odyssey. By contrast, there’s a torrent of material that is 8th/7th-century-specific. So I don’t just mean it’s Iron Age: it’s classical era. There are reasons to think the story is a little bit older than the Odyssey itself, but probably not by much: some aspects of the Trojan War story presuppose the existence of the 8th century BCE Greek colony at Troy.

Note. For clarity: here ‘classical era’, with a small c, means the historical era, starting in the early 700s BCE with the development of the classical alphabet. This includes the Archaic period (traditionally 776–480 BCE) as well as the Classical period proper (480 BCE onwards).

Even if we granted the idea of a long-standing ‘Odyssey tradition’, no material can be shown to have entered that tradition earlier than the late 700s BCE. The Iliad does have a handful of Bronze Age motifs — the Odyssey has none at all — but even in the Iliad cases, we can be extremely confident that those motifs entered a purported ‘Iliad tradition’ at a late date.

The most famous example is a boar’s tusk helmet described in Iliad 10.261–265. Boar’s tusk helmets are a real Bronze Age thing, associated especially with the 15th–14th centuries BCE. But Iliad 10 was inserted into the Iliad after the rest of the epic was already in place, probably in the decades on either side of 600 BCE. This Mycenaean boar’s tusk helmet is in the latest part of the Iliad. And because it’s an insertion, it tells us nothing at all about the setting of Iliad 1–9 and 11–24.

Note. See e.g. West 2011: 233–235. Recently I covered a bunch of other supposedly Bronze Age elements in the Iliad in more detail.

How to make sense of a Mycenaean artefact in that context? Well, there’s a conversation to be had about that, but here and now, the point is this. However that artefact or that description was transmitted, it wasn’t as part of an Iliad tradition. There are no elements that can be shown to have entered an Iliad tradition at an early date.

The Odyssey has no notion of what the Mycenaean palace culture was, nor of a Bronze Age. (‘Bronze Age’ is a modern periodisiation: it was invented in the early 1800s CE.) But it is stuffed with story elements, cultural trends, and preoccupations that are firmly embedded in the classical era.

• The story of Penelope and the Suitors dramatises a problem with classical-era inheritance law, specifically a practice which in Athens was called the epiklerate. When a man died without a male heir, his wife would become epikleros (‘attached to the estate’) so that the estate could be passed on by marrying her off to a male relative. The Odyssey creates an intractable legal situation by closing off all standard inheritance scenarios. Telemachos cannot inherit because he’s a minor (or treated as one), so Penelope becomes epikleros. But Odysseus has no brothers or male uncles that Penelope can be married off to (Od. 16.116–120). The Suitors are the only people available to marry her: and they’re unrelated to the household, and vicious thieving murderers. But because there’s no alternative, Penelope’s father and brothers want her to marry one of the Suitors (Od. 15.16). The standard inheritance model is only salvaged by Odysseus’ surprise return.
• Metal artefacts in the Odyssey are normally made of iron (axes, weapons, arrowheads, ploughs, shepherds’ tools, etc.). The exceptions are a handful of prestige items. A couple of passages in the Odyssey treat the iron trade as commonplace, and describe aspects of iron production processes.
• Bronze, by contrast, is a prestige material. And it’s only in the centuries after 900 BCE that both of the following were true: (a) bronze was a prestige material, and (b) iron was not a prestige material. For fuller details, and for a full listing of references to iron, see this piece, in the section ‘Bronze weapons and armour’.
• Frequent references to Phoenician traders require a setting after 800 BCE, after the rise of Phoenician trading dominance. Trade in the Odyssey generally has a colonisation-era look and feel.
• The assembly plays a key role in civic life and government, meeting in the agora: see especially Odyssey 2.1–259, 8.4–25, 16.361–406, 20.144–146 (there are also multiple assemblies in front of Odysseus’ house). The assembly and agora are distinctively classical-era political features.
• In Odysseus’ wanderings, most stopovers are envisaged as fictional prehistoric versions of Greek colonies founded in the 700s and 600s, notably in Sicily and up the west coast of Italy. This has the effect of making Odysseus an archetype for real colonists, paving a mythical path for them.

Now, there are archaising elements too. But the archaification is mostly artificial.

Imagine it’s 2026 and you’re watching a fantasy movie set in a quasi-mediaeval past. You don’t expect to see authentic mediaeval warfare, because film-makers have no idea what that looked like. You don’t expect to see 2026-style warfare either, because drones blowing things up would ruin the atmosphere. What you expect is warfare that’s archaic in flavour, without being authentic; but which is still cool according to 2026 tastes.

And that’s exactly what Homer provides. A faux archaic flavour, but completely framed around contemporary practices and motifs.

Naturally this creates lots of anachronism. In book 2, when Telemachos presents his case against the Suitors before the assembly, he’s taking part in a 7th century political process, with heralds and standardised seating arrangements. But in book 3 when he goes on a voyage in search of his father, the idea is that we’re in ‘olde times’: there are no modern mechanisms for travelling between cities or finding housing in a different city. The story transitions back and forth between the contemporary and the purely mythical.

The world-building is comparable to that of Game of Thrones. They’re both versions of an imaginary past, but the archaism is inconsistent, anachronistic, and there’s a hefty dose of fantasy. (Except Homer is the more unreal of the two — George R. R. Martin at least had the option of being more ‘authentic’, if he felt like picking up a book about the Wars of the Roses.)

2. Myths are always contemporary

A myth is a story with a purpose. It’s has to be contemporary. If it isn’t, if it has no contemporary purpose, then it’s just a sterile relic behind glass.

Every iteration of the story of Odysseus has always looked wildly different, and has been tailored to the time the story was being told. I’m aware of 27 previous screen versions of the story of Odysseus, extending from Georges Méliès’ L’île de Calypso (1905) to Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024). Some reproduce aspects of the epic relatively literally, like Piavoli’s Nostos: il ritorno (1989), and the US TV mini-series The Odyssey (1997). Others transplant it into a different setting, like the anime series Ulysses 31 (1981–1982) and season 5 of Prison Break (2017). Some take a metaphorical approach, alluding to Homer’s epic in a metatheatrical way, like Godard’s Le mépris (1963) and the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Then there are the musical versions, like Rivera-Herrans’ Epic: the Musical (2022–2024), Symphony X’s The Odyssey (2002), and a bunch of classical operas.

Not even the most literal of these is ‘faithful’ by the standards of 2026 pundits. The thing is, even Homer isn’t ‘faithful’, in the sense of being historically realistic. It’s turtles all the way down.

Isabella Rosselini in two Odyssean roles: left, as Athena in The Odyssey (1997); right as Hyacinth, a Penelope analogue, in Keyhole (2012).

Every iteration has looked wildly different. As the Homer scholar Joel Christensen pointed out earlier this year, in Euripides there’s a Helen made of clouds; in the 6th century BCE poet Stesichoros, Helen is a pornographic painting, which Paris used to ‘assuage his passion’.

Stesichorus in his poetry tells that when Alexander had seized Helen and was making his way through Pharos [in Egypt] he was robbed of her by Proteus and received from him her portrait [eidōlon] painted on a panel, so that he could assuage his passion by looking at it.

Note: Euripides, Helen 29–36; Stesichoros, Palinode fr. 192 ed. and tr. Campbell (= scholion on Aelius Aristides, Oration 1.128; iii.150 ed. Dindorf).

Homer’s Helen is human, but she’s also a contemporary figure. She’s tailored to a 7th-century-BCE story about inheritance law. Her marriage with Menelaos holds up a mirror to Odysseus’ household: Odysseus’ estate is in legal limbo because of a lack of heirs, but when we first see Helen’s and Menelaos’ family in the Odyssey, they’re celebrating their daughter’s wedding — they’re ensuring continuity to the next generation. There will be someone to inherit their estate. This is a very classical-era preoccupation: it’s contemporary. There’s no such thing as ‘historical Homer’ (as Christensen also pointed out).

Exactly the same is true in all the modern treatments. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Poseidon is a ruthless American sheriff. In Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), the Cyclops is a statue of Lenin carried up the Danube on a barge. In The Odyssey (1997), Teiresias is Christopher Lee sitting in a fiery cave next to a river of lava. In Keyhole (2012), the Suitors are ghosts that haunt Odysseus’ house. In Epic the Musical (2022–2024) Aiolos lives on a floating island in the sky. In Fauré’s Pénélope (1913), Penelope is friends with Eumaios, and Eumaios is a shepherd.

None of these are faithful to Homer. And these seem to matter a lot more than the kinds of axes that 2026 pundits like to grind.

In the Odyssey, Aiolos’ island floats in the sea; in Epic: the Ocean Saga (2023) it floats in the sky. Influence from Skypiea in One Piece (2002–2004), maybe?

No treatment could or should try to reproduce Homer with complete fidelity. That’d be crazy. Even if they wanted to, what should they emulate? Which period? You need to find a period when Phoenician merchants dominated international trade, when implements were standardly made of iron, Greek sailors were venturing as far as the Atlantic Ocean, and Greek cities were governed by assemblies. That’ll be in the 600s BCE, then. So no Bronze Age gear please, and Troy had better look like the 7th-century-BCE Greek colony. (Which is what the Iliad envisages, anyway: it has the Greek cult of Athena Ilias.)

Does it also have to be a period when there are monsters and cannibals traipsing about in Sicily, mermaid-monsters lurking on the islands off the coast of Campania, and witches turning people into pigs in Lazio? That’ll be a little trickier.

The upshot is that, even when an artist puts a high priority on authenticity — and most of the time, that isn’t the case — even then, the arrangement of priorities is entirely an artistic choice. And every artistic choice is motivated by contemporary priorities. Certain 2026 pundits really really want everyone’s top priority to be skin colour, because that’s the thing they care about most. Fortunately, there are plenty of artists out there who have very different ideas about how old stories can relate to a contemporary audience.

References

• Henry, A. 2026. ‘What the Odyssey gets wrong about Bronze Age Greek religion.’ ReligionForBreakfast (Youtube channel). [Youtube]

For further references to support the claims made here, see this two-parter from April.