The Real History Behind Homer’s ‘Odyssey’

Homer’s epic poem, “Odyssey,” is in the news lately, primarily because Christopher Nolan has produced a three-hour, and I can use the word impressionistic, retelling of the “Odyssey.” And a lot of people have criticized it; a lot of people like it.

I’m gonna talk about the film later in one of our episodes, because I have now seen the new film, and Jack Fowler and Sami Wink and I have talked variously about it.

But I wanted to today just talk about the “Odyssey” as a work of literature and history. A lot of people, I think, have the wrong impressions.

We hear that Homer wrote this or wrote that. He did not write it. It was composed orally. What do I mean by that? I mean, the actual incident of a Trojan War probably occurred somewhere between 1200 BC and 1100 BC, in the last gasp, so to speak, of the Mycenaean palatial culture in Greece.

Now, the Mycenaeans were Greek speakers, but their mode of economic, cultural, political organization was more Near Eastern, more like the Hittites or the Egyptians.

In other words, they had palaces that, in sort of a totalitarian fashion, parceled out food and shelter and land, and then received taxes and tribute at a central clearing house, all recorded on Linear B tablets: the Greek language, but without the Phoenician-like alphabet, which had not been invented yet.

So when that collapsed, whether it was because of the Dorian invasion or whether it was because of sea peoples who swept in and destroyed these vulnerable, centrally located palaces in Mycenaean civilization, if you decapitated Gla or Thebes or Mycenae or Argos, then the entire structure would have no central direction.

There was not a lot of independent, autonomous people. So this culture vanished right after the Trojan War. And we should remember that because in the poem, a lot of people have trouble getting back from Troy, and when they get back, what they find is not good. Odysseus comes back; suitors are in his house.

Agamemnon comes back; he’s killed. Ajax doesn’t come back. I could go on, and that might reflect the oral poetry’s attempt over subsequent centuries to show that there was an actual Mycenaean event.

So what’s happened is the society collapsed, and we probably saw one-tenth of the population survive, and there was not sophisticated agriculture anymore, monumental building, none of the signs of the Mycenaean prosperity and security.

It was a dark age: a small, scattered, decentralized population, more goat, sheep, and cattle raising than intensive farming, and more confined to the Greek peninsula itself rather than a Mediterranean-wide seafaring people.

During this depression era, I guess we would call it analogous to the European Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth century AD to nine hundred AD, all writing of the Mycenaeans was lost. People lost all knowledge of what had gone on and after, oh, we could say 20 or 25 generations, they magnified what little they remembered about the Mycenaeans, as you would expect.

This was the era of Greek mythmaking. So when a farmer or a herder or anybody walked by a Mycenaean palace in ruins, he said, “The Cyclops must have built it.”

Or if he fell into a tholos tomb, he’d say, “There were great demigods who built this.” And the tales of the Mycenaean lords then became exaggerated when they were carried on generation after generation by schools of bards. Perhaps they were disabled, perhaps they were blind like Homer reputedly was, but they kept the stories alive.

Now, we only have two of them: The “Odyssey,” about the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War, and the “Iliad,” a four- or five-day snapshot of the 10-year-long war. But we know there was probably 20 or 30 tales about the kidnapping of Helen, the sack of Troy, whatever happened to Agamemnon, etc., etc.

In these oral poems, then, Homer would get together with people, and over about a day and a half, almost two days, he would recite 1,200 lines, the entire poetry, by memory.

Now, because things repeat, one-third of the poem is repeated. That’s the way the oral poet composed. So if he wanted to move from the Calypso scene back to a very different atmosphere on Ithaca, then he could just plug in entire type scenes: how to build a raft, how to build a fire.

And these repetitions can be from the noun-adjective, swift-footed Achilles, long-suffering Odysseus, or they can be a whole line or a whole page in a modern text, but it was not written down. Somehow, Homer was probably the last generation in this bardic tradition when the city-state reemerged under a Western concept that we would call Western civilization.

Sophisticated learning, writing returns with a Phoenician alphabet, history, rhetoric, science, all of that starts to reemerge, or get born maybe is a better word, and the last version of Homer is written down, and the bardic tradition ends.

So Homer then is the authoritative text for these stories, and we don’t know his predecessors.

Now, very quickly: Well, what’s the history of it then? The history of, in the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad,” there’s little, tiny memories of Mycenaean civilization five or six hundred years earlier. In the second book of the “Iliad,” there’s a catalog of ships, and they name all the places where the Greeks came from.

And believe me, Homer, in that period when he composed it, 750, had no idea where some of those places were. There’s a mention of a silver-studded long sword or a boar’s-tooth helmet. He doesn’t know what those are. He just knows that they sound old, and they’re carried down generation after generation in the bardic oral tradition.

We know that there are some grammatical forms that are not Ionic, like those that Homer composed when he was probably a resident of what is now western Turkey or the Cycladic Islands, I should say the islands near the coast of modern Turkey or Ionia. And we call that the Ionian dialect. That’s what most of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are composed in.

Remember, twelve thousand lines, but it’s in a hexameter, dactylic hexameter. Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. The line ends don’t rhyme, but they have the same shared meter.

And here and there, there’s what we call Arcadio-Cypriot grammatical signs, and that we know that when the Mycenaean palaces fell, people fled to Arcadia and Cyprus, and maybe some of their dialect got included into the bardic tradition.

So there are Mycenaean relics, and then over those four or five centuries of bardic transmission, there’s a lot of Dark Age things. And that would be primacy of javelin throwing or archery over close combat, or it would be more tales of goat herdsmen and lamb herdsmen and cattle than olive growing or grain growing or grape growing.

And then there’s the majority of it, I would say 55 to 60 percent: Homer being a unique genius and the one bardic poet we know of in that long tradition, the one closest to the city-state and the one whose version was recorded and therefore saved with a written text because writing had reemerged.

We know that he drew on things from his own contemporary world, and there is intensive agriculture. Laertes’ farm is intensively farmed. There are people in assemblies now that vote. We know in the “Iliad” there’s a mention of mass warfare, not just chariot or javelin or archery, but massed heavily armed people with spears that would resemble Homer’s own time, with phalanx or what we call hoplite warfare.

Let me just finish then. What do critics get wrong? They criticize Christopher Nolan because there’s not Bronze Age armor, but there isn’t in Homer either. There are just little traces of evidence from the Mycenaean or Bronze Age. They criticize him because of the dialogue. Well, we don’t know. And that’s from a different translation by Emily Wilson.

There are better translations. Richmond Lattimore’s is the best. But the dialect in Homer is repetitive and, as I said, formulaic, and it doesn’t approximate what most people are speaking.

So if you’re gonna criticize the colloquial verse of Matt Damon, you have a point in that Homer’s own poem, when people heard it in 750 orally recited, or they read it 100 years later when it was composed or redone with a written text, it would have sounded archaic and not necessarily colloquial.

These are just some of the items that are in the background of Homer’s Odyssey, and to the degree that they frame a film version, or to the degree that a director should work within both the poem and the historic realities in which it was composed, I’ll talk about in a subsequent one of our talks.

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They criticize Christopher Nolan because there’s no Bronze Age armor.. They criticize him because of the dialogue.

They criticize him for his casting of a black African as Helen of Troy. They criticize him for casting a tranny as a "brave Greek warrior."

And, IMO, they are right to do so.

They also criticize Nolan from turn Odysseus into a PTSD man filled with regret rather than someone trying to get home and take charge and have his family back. Why? Because love of home and family and wanting to have wealth or power are evil in Hollywood.

I’ve never seen a Nolan film so I don’t have a dog in this fight other than I like SOME movies and am tired of Hollywood shoving demented values down my throat.

There is a place in movies and other artistic endeavors for reinterpretations. Including radical reinterpretations. Directors and writers are famous for re-imagining Shakespear’s plays in different settings and contexts. Ian McKellen’s Richard III, set in 1930s England, was great. I liked Jesus Christ Superstar. And, at the risk of being excommunicated from FR, I saw rendition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a play in New York in the 1990s that has Caesar as a woman (a lesbian no less) and I liked it. And as people have pointed out, even Homer updated the Odyssey from its original telling by including “modern” (for his time) armor and themes. Watch Michael SUgrue’s lecture on Homer on YouTube and you’ll see how Homer used the Odyssey tales to explain current (for his time) concepts. So everyone does it, even Homer. So the idea that Homer was telling a timeless tale is amusing. His tale became timeless but he was updating it.

But back to Nolan - you have to expect harsh criticism with any radical reinterpretation. It just goes with the territory. The Julius Caesar play that I saw was at a small theater and never went anywhere. Nolan’s defenders want to have it both ways - they want a radical, modern reinterpretation with no criticism. Which brings us to the biggest irony of all - Nolan’s reitnerpretation was boring and trope-filled. Emily Wilson even thought so.

Modern day dialogue doesn’t bother me in movies. Imagine if they made a movie using YE OLDE ENGLISH as the language, we couldn’t understand a word of it.

No matter how ancient the tongue, it’s the substance that counts.

As for historical errors of costume, weapons or even ships (I read that they used a Viking era design in the movie) Nobody outside of a small cadre of academicians would even know such things.

As with Homer, the story is the thing................

“Homer being a unique genius and the one bardic poet we know of in that long tradition, the one closest to the city-state and the one whose version was recorded and therefore saved with a written text because writing had reemerged.”

Odd that some self-appointed expert the other day insisted that I was completely ignorant, told me I could not find anywhere that Homer had anything at all to do with writing the Homeric works.

I think I will check back and send this to him.

The audience forgot to consult VDH

7/26/26- Domestic Box Office $359,025,415 Details International Box Office $362,631,000 Details Worldwide Box Office $721,656,415. Opening Weekend: $123,502,900

VDH said a week ago he wasn’t going to see the Odyssey because he doesn’t like Nolan movies

Despite his own incongruency, he takes this on

He starts by complaining about previews

Then he states the reasons why Nolan made particular choices. He does not state how he knows this, one imagines VDH is coming up with this ‘information’ on his own

Middle school girl-level

Then Helen is black, and Circe isn’t pretty, the cyclops isn’t real enough

I expect more from him. Did he set out to do a negative review? That’s. It like him

Nothing is known of Homer’s biography. However IMHO judging from his poignant descriptions of combat , wounds and arms suspect he himself was a veteran who fought long, hard and somehow survived. As demonstrated ever since whether it was French soldiers making their way back to their villages from Siberia, Civil war vererans who tried to renter civilian life or millions of German, Russian, British, Italian, French, Japanese, Chinese and American veterans of the unprecedented 20th century wars “retuning home” and what it had become is not a simple, stright line process. Believe Homer, understood war and its aftermath, was writing about his and his fellow soldiers experiences which sadly are timeless. As long as there are wars the Illiad and the Odyssey contain insights and truths that will keep them meaningful and relevant.

If VDH is a learned man, as I have been led to believe, why are there so many awful mistakes here? Example: “I’m gonna talk about the film later...”

Richmond Lattimore? What? Pretty sure it is Richard Lattimore.

Was this piece poorly transcribed from an interview he gave?

They criticize him because of the dialogue. Well, we don’t know. And that’s from a different translation by Emily Wilson.

The dialogue to me just sounded like typical heavy-handed Christopher Nolan dialogue. If any of it came from Wilson's translation, I would be surprised. Instead, I think he was inspired by the translation and used it very loosely.

My gripe is they used a transsexual as a warrior and an ugly woman as Helen...the woman who launched a thousand ships.

I like Chris Nolan, I think he made one of the best movies of all time with Batman...but he jumped the shark here.

“It was a dark age: a small, scattered, decentralized population, more goat, sheep, and cattle raising than intensive farming, and more confined to the Greek peninsula itself rather than a Mediterranean-wide seafaring people.”

So, in other words, a Sharia world.

I tried to watch the movie, but not really knowing the story made it difficult to follow. Plus the darkened, murky, amber atmospheric tones in EVERY background made me too relaxed.
There should have been more fight scenes. I stayed alert for those.

I stand (sit?) guilty of falling asleep several times before I left after an hour and five minutes. I don’t necessarily blame the director. I’m not really a history buff anyway, so, perhaps I’m the problem in this instance. It reminded me of the many times when someone tried to teach me how to play Chess, thinking I would be ‘lovin it’. Every time, I ended up bored.

The black Helen of Troy gets 3% of screen time and the tranny gets 2% and is so background apparently, that she/he is not even noticed by some.

Anyway, it has made over $700 million worldwide and $370 million in the US and will go north of $500 million domestically and over $1 billion worldwide and will be very profitable.

So someone likes it.

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