These days everyone has an opinion on the classical text of the moment, Homer’s Odyssey.

To be fair, it is difficult to think of a time when The Odyssey has not been the classical text of the moment. Lately, I have been listening to the audiobook of Devil-Land, the author’s appellation for England in the 17th century (and Scotland insofar as it is relevant to the personal union of the crowns in James VI and I). In it, pamphleteers advise James, before he accedes to the English throne, to stop his ears with wax and not heed Spanish overtures to encourage the Scots to aid an invasion. James VI also compared Phillip II to Polyphemus, the Cyclops, during the Spanish Armada.

Educated Britons in the late 16^th century would not have known an Odysseus, however, as the poem was only translated directly into English from the Greek in the 17^th century. They knew Ulysses via Virgil’s Aeneid, which continues the story of Troy where The Iliad leaves off and creates a founding myth of Rome. This version, of course, has staying power in Dante’s Divina Commedia, Tennyson’s poem and James Joyce’s novel.

I digress.

The most opinionated of all, or most prominent, criticism has come from Emily Wilson, the author of the 2017 translation, who has slated Christopher Nolan’s film not once but twice in lengthy essays. She bites the hand that feeds so brazenly it is admirable.

Stubborn as I am, my first encounter with Homer was not the more famous, more culturally impactful Odyssey, but the prequel, The Iliad.

I had to read them in order. Why start on the second of the series? Apparently there were eight epic poems, and these are the only two that survive, so who knows which one I actually began with…

My Iliad odyssey (if you will permit me) did not embark unassisted. As coordinator of the Mitchell Library Classics Book Group, I engineered it so I could benefit from the mutual motivation of the group assignment. Dastardly, though, I let them analyse it without me, for I was in Greece itself when it came around to discussing the poem (not Troy, alas, which is believed to be in modern-day Turkey).

To make up for it, I organised an outing to the film. I learned at the screening that only five turned up to that session, and that they were barred from the room without my attending in person.

Clearly, many had been put off by the poem’s length, its repetitiveness and alien Weltanschauung. My impression of it while reading was of a very violent work whose formulaic, matter-of-factness reminded me of the Norse sagas, as well as their depiction of events taken to be historical realities by the poem’s audience.

Having persevered with The Iliad’s 24 books, I came to a retrospective appreciation of the poem by way of a mid-2000s episode of In Our Time graciously preserved on BBC Sounds. What a resource, by the way. Melvyn Bragg is a living legend.

Anyway, the experience of listening to the programme was for me far more enjoyable than the poem itself. Often I find that my enjoyment of the text directly correlates to the length of the newsletter I put out to the group mailing list in advance of the discussion. This one ran on to a third page, as I recall.

I would describe The Iliad as unreconstructed. By this I mean its characters simply bear the views and opinions of their time, or perhaps more accurately Homer’s time, which was several centuries after the events of the poem are supposed to have happened. There are not really any moments where the persons of the poem are challenged about the way they see the world, and they do not fundamentally change. The deconstruction is therefore left to the scholars, who can bring a depth to the text that it does not inherently contain.

Contrast that with The Odyssey, where you cannot say the main character doesn’t go through a journey.

We witness Odysseus change; we watch him be transfigured and transform himself. What is surprising from a modern perspective is that he is not more altered by his experiences. This is perhaps where Nolan feels the need to fill in the gaps in a text that is not apparently psychological.

Odysseus is wily and has experienced 10 years fighting the Trojan War and seven years trapped on Calypso’s island by the time we meet him. He suffers and is self-pitying, but he doesn’t seem to take a moment to think about what that suffering might mean, and if meaningless, what that might mean for his unwavering beliefs in the gods and customs of his culture. The Odysseus of the poem does not “defy the gods”, unlike Nolan’s.

Not that the film is unconcerned with customs and culture; it is fundamentally concerned with civilisational values. These are, at the same time, present and absent in the original text. Hospitality/guest right, or in Greek xenia, is central to Emily Wilson’s reading of The Odyssey, whose version I understand Nolan to have read before he adapted the poem.

Zeus is, among other things, the god of strangers. The Greeks believed that a guest should always be welcomed and provided for, no matter how lowly or destitute, because they might be a god in disguise. In Nolan’s film, this is translated as “Zeus’s law”, which could be interpreted as shorthand for Greek custom, their code of ethics or morality.

The idea of the “god in disguise” is expressed in the film, and xenia is somewhat reductively explained as “do unto others as you would have others do to you”, in other words, the Golden Rule of Christianity: “love thy neighbour as thyself”.

Greek ethics codes and mysticism certainly shaped Christianity – the New Testament was originally written in Greek – but I do feel there is something of a logical leap here. Xenia could be perceived as containing ethical meaning, but it is not inherently ethical (Emily Wilson theorises that it arose from the Greeks’ seafaring economy needing a guarantee that travellers would receive food and shelter). It is with a view to influencing the wrath or favour that the gods can dole out that the practice of xenia is enacted.

From this analysis, the context in which the “love thy neighbour” dictum arises should not be forgotten. It is part of Jesus’ response to a scribe asking him to sum up in one sentence what he is about. He asks in different versions, something along the lines of, “What is God’s number one rule?”

To Christians, this is seen as superseding the 10 commandments. Not that they no longer have effect, but that they have been deprioritised by this doctrine (and to love God with all your heart, soul and mind).

One can argue that there are elements of xenia in the New Testament that are common to The Odyssey. The washing of “the beggar’s” feet in the latter, Jesus “disguising” himself as a gardener in Gethsemane following his resurrection in the former (not to mention the wounds as a means of recognition).

In The Odyssey (poem), we have several examples of the gods in disguise. In the opening book, Odysseus is referred to but doesn’t appear. Telemachus has a mentor called…Mentor who turns out to be Athena. Another character with crucial hidden god status is Polyphemus (AKA the Cyclops), who it turns out is the son of Poseidon, or at least he says he is.

The Cyclops episode is critical to The Odyssey. In the poem and the film, we learn that the Cyclopes (people living on the island) do not follow Greek customs and do not know their gods. The film translates this to not following “Zeus’s law”.

They also make cheese, which is a bit suss versus the Greek moral value of eating meat and drinking wine as opposed to milk products (there are very few vegetables in The Odyssey).

In the poem we are told that the Cyclopes “do not sow” (in that respect akin to the Greyjoys of Game of Thrones). They are pastoralists (shepherds) and gatherers of what the land provides. Theirs is a different way of life, and the poem invites the reader (or listener) to treat them with suspicion on account of this.

Different methods of production and wealth accrual (i.e. not maritime trade/commerce) as foreboding and ill-omened appears again when Odysseus travels to Hades and is given a prophecy that he will find what he seeks when he travels inland so far that the people he encounters will never have seen the sea and mistake his oar for a “winnowing fan” (agricultural tool for sifting grain).

The Cyclops is a poor host. He eats two of Odysseus’s men and prevents them from leaving the cave by blocking the entrance with an immovable rock.

As we see with Telemachus and his visits to Pylos and Sparta (pronounced “Sparda” in the film), when he arrives at the courts of Nestor and Menelaus, he is first given food and drink before being expected to reveal who he is and tell his story. This is the expectation built up by the tradition of xenia.

Because Odysseus and his men are not provided for and must subsist on stolen cheese, Odysseus refuses to tell the Cyclops his name or, rather, reveals himself to be “No Man”. Hence, when the Cyclops is blinded and calls for aid, crying out, “No Man is killing me!” none of his fellow Cyclopes come to his rescue.

Nolan’s film sadly misses out on this complexity, with the Cyclops really just another massive monster rather than an equally intelligent being from a different culture. We get no sense that he is part of a community with a different way of life, and Odysseus doesn’t get the chance to exchange any of the wit present in the poem.

Towards the very end, we hear the giant speak. However, his voice is incredibly indistinct and is heard merely as a rumble. One of the men cries out, “It can speak!” but before they can have a chat, Odysseus shoots a petulant arrow as he and his men leave the cave, enraging Polyphemus and leading to the first of two very similar sequences involving running back to the ship and the relentless decimation of the crew.

The wit, playfulness, theatricality and cunning of Odysseus are not aspects of his character that shine through in the film. Odysseus the trickster really isn’t present, apart from his one defining trick: the Trojan Horse.

In Nolan’s film, the Trojan Horse has much greater significance than in the poem. It is made very clear in the dialogue that the Trojan Horse is a final, teleological breaking of “Zeus’s law”. The Horse was a gift the Greeks gave to their cultural equals, the Trojans, but that gift was contaminated and disguised an irreparable harm.

Woven into this is a narrative of civilisational decline, if civilisation means shared sacred values. The Trojans appear to belong to this civilisation in a way that the Cyclopes do not.

The viewer learns of a threat to Mycenaean civilisation in the form of the Sea Peoples who threaten to destroy and pillage the homes of the story’s landed personages (Odysseus’s and Menelaus’s families). This theory of the Bronze Age collapse  (quote: “our age of bronze is ending”) is no longer considered credible in academia. It is a compelling narrative if not supported by evidence.

In early reactions to the film when it had barely come out, the Sea Peoples were identified with migrants, which is an understandable comparison given that the contemporary right likes to present themselves as defenders of Western Civilisation against corrupting forces. This seems to be disproved by the film itself when someone says something to the effect of “we were the Sea People all along”. However, the Sea People could be a combination of external forces, i.e. those from a different culture and those who do not sufficiently defend civilisational values/allowing them to corrode/corrupt.

I do think that this narrative of values being under threat reads as a conservative posture. It shows, I think correctly, that the Greek concept of xenia does not extend to everyone. Barring the very obvious societal division between slaves and masters, some people are excluded from the practice. Those outwith the Greek cultural orbit are undeserving of xenia. It is fruitless to extend it to them because they do not understand the nature of the obligation.

To extrapolate, the deceit and swindling of a cultural equal is far worse than that of a cultural foreigner. Being a mean host where your guest does not understand or adhere to your concept of hospitality does not have the moral value of behaving that way when they do.

This is where classical Greek xenia differs from the Christian directive to “love thy neighbour”. Asked to explain who one’s neighbour is, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan belongs to a culturally and ethnically distinct group whom Jesus’ audience held in contempt. Therefore, the new commandment applies as much to cultural aliens whom one might view with hostility as natural cultural equals.

All this is to say: the civilisational ethic that Odysseus appears to destroy isn’t as woke as one might be led to believe. I fully accept that its value is more allegorical. And of course, all art is primarily made for the time in which it was created, not as a reproduction of an ethical world that is fundamentally not our own.

Concluding thoughts on the movie: Circe changing Odysseus’s men into pigs was horrible and unnecessarily prolonged; the Sirens were uninteresting; Agamemnon was depicted in a cool way; I liked how they drew lots to go to war; the design of the Trojan Horse and how that worked practically was good; the ending could have been more satisfying and the revenge-taking mild compared to the poem albeit I recognise the ending had to be different because of what they had built up.