August 2026 | Vol. 14.8
By Alex Joffe
What is The Odyssey, really? Is it an accurate historical depiction of the travails of a hero returning to his island home on the west coast of Greece after a war against a city in northwestern Anatolia? Does it describe palatial competition in the Late Bronze Age at the end of the second millennium? Or does it describe the palaces of the first centuries of the first millennium BCE, when the epic was first composed?
Is The Odyssey a poem recited by bards at elite dinners which lauds heroes and their adventures, their bravery and cunning, dedication to a cause and ultimately to their homelands? Or is it a tale of existential crisis about a brave man drawn into a foolish and destructive war, who gains insight into his failures only at the expense of his comrades? What, of all this, is “historical”?
Or, is The Odyssey a new film by Christopher Nolan?
The Odyssey is of course all those things and more; a touchstone of Western literature, a transposable tale that could be set anywhere there is war and a home to return to, and a source of endless speculation and conflict among scholars, critics, and a global public that has been bombarded with carefully crafted media controversy long before Christopher Nolan’s movie actually appeared.
The shape of expectations is the shape of The Odyssey. The oldest known fragments of the text are from 3rd-century BCE Egypt, but the scholarly consensus is that it was composed in the 8th century BCE and recited orally for hundreds of years. The themes of brave and cunning heroes, adventures with faithful companions, ruses and disguises, sacrifice, gods transgressed against, destructive wars, and wisdom gained at great price, are vastly older.
There is good reason to believe that as with much Biblical literature the epic’s composition was fundamentally shaped by Mesopotamian literature. That Homer is the Bible’s secret sharer has long been recognized by scholars, less so by the public. The debates surrounding the “Homeric Question” — the historicity of Homer, the question of single or multiple authorship, and the milieu being represented — parallel precisely those which have dominated Biblical exegesis since the 19th century. Legions of scholars have poured over a static text to discern the hands of one or more authors, its descriptions and settings, and compared it with contemporary literature (including from the ancient Near East), generating a mountain of erudition.
Christopher Nolan is unlikely to have consulted much or even any of this. Much was said before the film’s appearance regarding the colloquial, “feminist,” and “woke” translation Nolan consulted, that of classicist Emily Wilson. Complaints regarding her reshaping of the story via translation were loud and immediate. The freeness of her language appears to have deliberately subdued the heroic dimensions of Odysseus and is reflected in the film. But even she seems disappointed that Nolan chose to downplay Odysseus’s cunning and swagger.
At the same time, the existential anguish expressed by Odysseus and Nolan through star Matt Damon resonates with ancient Near Eastern prototypes like Gilgamesh.
Consider Gilgamesh’s lament for his true companion Enkudi, detained in the nether world while on a trivial mission for his master. “He did not fall in battle on the field of manhood, but the nether world has seized him,” Gilgamesh cries to the god Enki. Moved, Enki retrieved Enkidu:
They hugged and kissed. They wearied each other with questions: “Did you see the order of the nether world? — If only you would tell me, my friend, if only you would tell me!” “If I tell you the order of the nether world, sit down and weep! I shall sit down and weep! ……, which your heart rejoiced to touch, is ……, worms infest it like an old garment (?); like …… of (?) a crevice, it is full of dust.” “Alas!” he said and sat down in the dust.
The parallels between The Odyssey and texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh are not merely thematic but precise: when Penelope learns of Telemachus’ journey and the suitors’ plot to kill him, she cries, changes her clothes, and then takes barley in a basket and goes to an upper story of her palace to offer prayers. When Gilgamesh leaves the city with his Enkidu to fight Humbaba, his mother Ninsun laments, changes her clothes, gathers a special herb, and climbs the stairs to offer a prayer to Shamash.
That the literary forms of ancient Greece have Near Eastern origins, perhaps transmitted via the Phoenicians, should not be surprising. But it puts a different shape to what The Odyssey “really” is.
One may object to Telemachus calling Penelope “Mom” (as happens in Nolan’s version) on the basis that such familiarity reduces the gravitas of their relationship and situation, a palace beset by rapacious suitors eager for her hand and the throne, but this is a minor quibble. However, it leads to a larger problem which besets Nolan’s film and any based on an historical (which to say “ancient”) text, namely the literal versus the interpretative. Indeed, this is a problem that underpins a vast conundrum in the process of translation itself.
The second is a 1956 epic, accurate to a T (at least with respect to the historical and archaeological knowledge of the time) featuring the exotic Yul Brynner as Ramses and the stolid Charlton Heston as Moses. It is a mid-century tale told in lavish and exacting detail, which is at its heart a fundamentally American Cold War story of the triumph of liberty.
Which is more accurate? Visually there is no comparison, grainy black and white versus mighty VistaVision, but the story is meant to speak to the audience of the time. So, too, with Ridley Scott’s 2014 Moses: Gods and Kings, which casts Christian Bale as the leader of a terrorist movement who hears God after receiving a traumatic head injury. Nolan’s film is no different. Nolan’s Odysseus is a veteran who suffers from PTSD, who avoids facing the reality of the wife and child he left behind for as long as possible, including through drug abuse.
But all these elements are present in the ancient texts, more or less, and for this reason every “historical” film must be seen as a midrash, an elaborative gloss on a text.
Many pixels have been spilled about the casting of a black woman as Helen or the appearance of an Asian in Odysseus’s crew. While these elements deviate from the literal text, they hint at the multiracial nature of the Late Bronze Age and especially the Iron Age. Ancient eyebrows would perhaps have been raised by their appearance but such phenomena were probably not unknown, at least in elite circles where emissaries and traders from far off lands appeared, or in harbors where ships from who knows arrived bearing exotic cargos. The recent discovery that tin, the secret life blood of the Late Bronze Age, likely originated in Cornwall raises the possibility, however far-fetched that a proto-Welshman may have appeared in the Mediterranean. In any case what is the literal depiction of a Siren or a cyclops? License will be given.
But the devil is not in the details. Ancient sieges did not last ten years. Another new discovery from Middle Bronze Age northern Mesopotamia appears to confirm a conquering king’s text that the city was taken in ten days. A literal depiction of that would be dramatic but unheroic. And a useful rule of thumb when dealing with numbers in any ancient narrative text is to knock off a couple of zeros.
Nolan’s depiction of ancient warfare purports to capture the horror of slaughter by the sword, rape, and pillage, forms of destruction commonplace in all ancient societies. In fact, ironically, they are key engines for creating the archaeological remains on which a truer understanding of the past relies. But again, there are questions of scale, and of reality. The great Israelite destructions of Canaanite cities described in the Book of Joshua appear to be little more than local patches of burning, or nothing at all.
Do we even want such knowledge, which takes away from the heroic version that texts so assiduously depict, incorporated into film? Truth is frequently stranger than fiction, but it is also often more prosaic if not boring.
Occasionally Nolan goes too far. One of his most egregious projections was “Zeus’s law,” an interpretation of the Greek concept of xenia or ritualized hospitality towards strangers. This has been enlarged into a ludicrous Golden Rule-style Judeo-Christian foundation for Mediterranean society which is all too Western and moralistic. This is his McTavish moment.
And about the last two minutes of dialogue, the less said the better. Odysseus proclaiming “we are the peoples of the sea,” the unseen villains of the film and a Late Bronze Age piracy-migration phenomenon, is one of the silliest “we have the met the enemy and he is us” moments in modern film history.
Similarly, Odysseus’s “our age of bronze is ending” statement is a silly “do fish know water is wet” moment; ancient years didn’t have names except for kings and their deeds and “ages” had none. A simple rephrasing, “our age is ending, our bronze and ships and kings,” or something stirring to that effect, would have expressed a self-awareness that would not have caused historians and archaeologists to fall from their seats laughing.
Maybe we shouldn’t take movies so seriously. They are mechanical reproductions, interpretations of stories that took shape over centuries. But where does the original aura actually lie? In the tale as first told, as canonically accepted, or written on parchment? Beginnings as old as The Odyssey are remote and obscure; we stand in a long line of reproductions, huddling around a text that is periodically retranslated and reenacted, sometimes with greatly varying results.
But the attention being focused on The Odyssey suggests that the specific text and its story — the allure and costs of war, the draw of home, traversing adversity, and confronting folly — remain at the remain at the heart of the human experience. They are likely to remain there as long as we are human.
Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian. He co-hosts the podcast This Week in the Ancient Near East.
How to cite this article:
Joffe, A. 2026. “Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, A View from the East”, The Ancient Near East Today 14.8. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/christopher-nolan-odyssey/
Joe Zias
Well stated Alex, impressive piece of writing, you have to do more of this writing