Posted on 08/02/2026 6:57:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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.
Bookmark.
I agree!
Does the replica Viking ship have a piece of the action?
Well, the film has made $900 mil in two weeks, so must be some kind of a small problem
Richmond Lattimore is correct. He was a famous classicist and the younger brother of Owen Lattimore.
Thanks for the correction. Not the first time I shot my mouth off in ignorance. and it will probably not be the last.
I had his name in my mind as Richard.
I just finished the Odyssey and I see no sign Odysseus had PTSD. Not all vets do, and I suspect its modern prevalence has to do with MODERN ground combat.
For example, I can find many cases of PTSD-like results for Civil War vets but almost none among vets of the Indian Wars. I know 2 Marines who suffered from it after the Gulf War but never met a PILOT flying in the Gulf who did.
I flew combat missions over Iraq and could not conceive of it but the combat I experienced was extremely different from the 2 Marines in infantry! My experience was also GREATLY different from the guys who flew B-17s over Europe. Flying straight and level into WW2 AAA would be vastly different from my experience. I never saw anyone shot down, never saw planes burst into flames and people falling to their deaths, never experienced the helplessness of being fed into a AAA inferno where mathematics and LUCK determined the outcome.
Artillery seems to cause it in huge numbers, probably because there is really nothing you can do to protect yourself from an artillery barrage. That “no way to defend yourself” helplessness combined with the constant exposure seems to be important.
In any case, Nolan is inserting it into the Odyssey - unless I just missed it while reading the book this month. Odysseus was EAGER to take revenge on those abusing his family and eager to take charge. He is more “Captain Kirk” than “Rambo”.
Those who made this movie a “success” are dupes, who never read a good translation of “The Odyssey”, and who don’t realize that the movie’s “Helen of Troy” is really an African Jezebel!
I read it, studied it, taught it. Particularly the Fagles translation and the Derek Jacobi audio
And I like what Nolan did. So did the other westerners who have put in close to a $billion over the past two weeks. Nest week when it comes out in Asian markets it will be more clear
Here’s one fact- VDH can say Nolan chose casting based on whatever, but he has no basis for knowing. He has not interviewed Nolan
His reasoning is of a level equal with a middle school girl set on becoming popular
Why the scare quotes around "success"? Are we still not sure it's been a successful film yet?
I can’t imagine what people think is a success if this isn’t. But- whatever
From screen rant:
“Per Variety, as of Sunday morning, [2 Aug] The Odyssey is projected …box office gross of $911 million...
…it has already more than surpassed its estimated break-even point of $625 million (which is two and a half times its reported budget of $250 million).
… stellar Rotten Tomatoes scores of 94% from critics and 97% from audiences”
Box office numbers have COLLAPSED after the showings that sold out before there was any controversy, possibly due to poor word of mouth. It got absolutely crushed by Spider-Man. It might break even, but I think big blockbusters these days need to more for studios to consider them a success. I dought Nolan gets this much money to make a film again.
Incorrect. I suggest looking it up. Variety has industry numbers. It has made &911 billion, surpassing the $625 break even, and within only 2 weeks
Nolan is used to studio competition
Oppenheimer had to compete with Barbie
He walked away from Warner Brothers
Actually, the word is that no one will say no to Nolan and much more so now
He pulls in profits
These are not my opinions.
What?
That's what it took for Nolan to meet the qualifications for the Oscar awards.
The film has made $900 bil plus in 2 weeks. Profits are $300 million in 2 weeks
No one cares.
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