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Emulating Odysseus? Ancient History and Modern Politics

Emulating Odysseus? Ancient History and Modern Politics

Last updated on: August 4, 2026 at 2:00 am by Lynneth Renberg

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Emulating Odysseus? Ancient History and Modern Politics 2026-08-03T15:44:31-04:00 Lynneth Renberg

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In a very academic move, a recent date night came with homework. Before going to see Christopher Nolan’s much-discussed adaptation of The Odyssey, Adam and I reread the epic, using Emily Wilson’s translation of the text, cited in early interviews with Nolan as a key source for his rendering. It’s been hard to miss the buzz around Nolan’s film, both before and after its July release. The BBC, in its June 27 article on the film before its release, described Nolan’s Odyssey as “the most contentious film of the year,” citing casting controversies (particularly the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and her twin Clytemnestra), American accents and the use of modern language, and historical inaccuracies in armor and boat design. Much of the pre-release criticism of the film came from far-right voices like Matt Walsh and Elon Musk, but after the film’s release, a scathing review from Emily Wilson, the classicist who translated the version of the Odyssey Nolan has explicitly named as his inspiration, added to the contention, especially as other classicists like Theo Nash and authors like Joyce Carol Oates weighed in to criticize Wilson’s review.

I really enjoyed both Wilson’s translation and Nolan’s adaptation– which clearly take very different approaches to the world of Odysseus yet are both thought-provoking and moving in their own ways. Reading (and watching) them back-to-back, while also following the online discourse about “historical accuracy” or fidelity to the Homeric epic, I was struck by how much our current cultural moment wants to claim a Greek past that matches our current political priorities. I think it’s worth walking through some of the complexity that separates Greek figures, texts, and cultures from our own, as well as thinking about historical adaptation and appropriation. There are a number of excellent scholarly monographs and articles that do this, but often in such detail that they’re inaccessible for all of us who are not classicists. So, here, I’m engaging with public-facing essays from classicists and with the introduction to Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey to think about what it means to interpret Odysseus and his world. In a moment where modern politicians continually talk about “Western values” and “Western civilization,” how do uses (and misuses) of Greek history help us understand both the past and our present?

Interpreting Odysseus’s World

To start, it’s worth clarifying when exactly we’re talking about when we talk about Odysseus’s world: are we talking about the world in which Odysseus likely lived, or the world in which the poem The Odyssey was composed? While there’s quite a gap between us and the epic, there was also a huge gap between the events it described and when it was composed, likely by the late seventh century. As Emily Wilson notes in her introduction to her translation, “the Homeric poems existed by the late seventh century BCE, and they quickly claimed a canonical place all over the Greek world. By the sixth century, they had acquired a central place in the cultural institutions of ancient Athens . . . from that time onward, if not before, The Iliad and The Odyssey acquired a central place in the cultural and educational life of ancient Greece and Rome.” (Wilson, “Introduction,” The Odyssey (W.W. Norton: 2018), pp. 15-16). Yet the culture and institutions of classical Greece, the era of the polis (city-state) of the sixth century BCE looked very different than the palace networks of the Minoan and Mycenean world in which Odysseus traveled. And in the epic, we see both traditions and customs from the time of its composition and imagined histories from the past. As Wilson summarizes, “The Odyssey looks back to a lost heroic age, the time before the Greek dark ages, when elite Mycenean families, living in great palaces, dominated the surrounding regions, clashed with each other, and maintained power through wealth, military prowess, and a traditional way of life. But the poem also meditates on the social and geographical changes undergone by Greek society in the late eighth century.” (Wilson, “Introduction,” p. 23). From its start, The Odyssey was not strictly historically accurate in its depiction of a single time and place: it reflected both stories about the past and the contexts of its composition.

The Odyssey was also always an adaptation: “The Homeric epic was already an adaptation. The poem used a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions, reshaping the story of a veteran’s homecoming to resonate with the complex concerns of Greek-speakers in the archaic period, an era of migration, colonisation and urbanisation.” (Emily Wilson, “An Uncomplicated Man,” London Review of Books 48.14 (August 2026)). Much of the online furor around Nolan’s adaptation (and even Wilson’s own review here) has seemed most frustrated at this point: critics have assumed a stable text that can be tweaked, but not changed beyond a point, lest the original Greek perspectives and voices be lost.

I don’t think historical accuracy in Greek perspectives and voices was one of Nolan’s goals in producing the film, but it was certainly one of Emily Wilson’s goals in her translation. Some of the most interesting parts of her translators’ notes and introduction point out assumptions we’ve read onto the epic: assumptions about what type of language is closest to ancient Greek (p. 83-87), assumptions about morality and gender that a Greek audience would not have shared (pp. 37-54, 88-90), and interpretations of household and social hierarchies that a Greek audience would have found surprising (pp. 54-57). Clearly, incredibly problematic approaches to gender, race, status, and power weave throughout The Odyssey– but often in ways that don’t map neatly onto current ways of thinking about gender, race, status, and power. Tim Whitmarsh’s 2018 essay “Black Achilles” and Maria Michele Sassi’s essay “The Sea Was Never Blue” show that criticisms of Nolan’s casting fundamentally misunderstand both the Greek world and Homer’s language. Wilson’s translators’ notes explain that the Greek words used to describe women in the text are nowhere near as sexually derogatory as the translations used by the epics’ modern male translators, leading her to use more literal translations of the Greek: “I try to avoid importing contemporary types of sexism into this ancient poem, instead shining a clear light on the particular forms of sexism and patriarchy that do exist in the text, which are only partly familiar from our world” (p. 89). Modern categories for difference rely heavily on assumptions about bodies, about gender, and about virtue that simply did not exist in the Greek world of the Odyssey or of Odysseus– and yet, many film critics and modern politicians claim that a singular, historically accurate Odysseus (and Greek cultural legacy) exist, justifying policies and approaches through that assumed framework.

Modeling Odysseus

While there is much to say around the use and misuse of assumptions about Greek history, perhaps most strikingly at this moment, the imagined Greek models of virtue and power so often cited by modern politicians as part of “Western civilization” under attack are significantly different than the historical versions presented in The Odyssey or in the societies it formed. Key in any version of The Odyssey is the idea of xenia, or (as referenced in Nolan’s film without much explanation), of Zeus’s law: as explained by Wilson, “Zeus’ law is a version of archaic Greek xenia: the idealised relationships between strangers, hosts and guests, who must treat one another with mutual respect, thereby forming multi-generational bonds between unrelated families” (Wilson, “An Uncomplicated Man”). In Odysseus’s Mycenean Greece, virtue from those who had wealth was shown in welcoming individual strangers.

In The Odyssey’s classical Greece, the era in which the epic reached its stable form, the wealthy and powerful like Odysseus also showed their virtue in more systematic ways. As Thomas Martin highlights, “only the very wealthiest people paid direct taxes,” funding the navy and religious observances of Athens. A wealthy Athenian who hoarded his wealth lost the respect that would have come with their elite status. (Thomas Martin, “Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes – and they bragged about it,” The Conversation, November 3, 2020; updated December 2022). In Nolan’s film, “xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity: wealthy people should be gracious towards the poor and hungry in their midst (without necessarily doing anything to mitigate their poverty).” (Wilson, “An Uncomplicated Man”). None of these versions of virtue – welcoming the stranger, funding the state through taxes gladly given by the wealthy, or individual philanthropy – show up in the visions of Greek heritage and Western civilization so often cited by Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, and Elon Musk.

Instead, what these modern politicians emphasize is a particularly militant version of masculinity: a masculinity based on physical power and violence, meant to benefit the individual and not the society. To be fair, this is not an idea foreign to The Odyssey or its audiences: “the poem traces the tension between the needs and desires of groups of men – Odysseus’ comrades or the suitors of his wife, Penelope – and those of a single powerful and cunning man, who wants to rule them all and win eternal fame for himself” (Wilson, “An Uncomplicated Man”). Homer’s Odysseus often shows a totalizing violence that, Wilson suggests, we are meant to be uncomfortable with: Odysseus, for a Greek audience, is the clear hero of the epic, but one presented as problematic and meant to raise questions about what true virtue might look like (Wilson, “Introduction,” pp. 65-71). Nolan’s Odysseus is arguably a more sympathetic character to modern audiences, seemingly more aware than the poem’s Odysseus of the cost of violence. But yet, as Wilson astutely points out, “We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point” (Wilson, “An Uncomplicated Man”). Both Homer’s and Nolan’s Odysseus seem to be serving as models for contemporary American politicians –but both versions of Odysseus, as summarized and simplified in the exultation of Greek culture as a foundation for American culture, present an Odysseus disconnected from historical nuance, decontextualized and used as a foil for the ambitions, biases, and desires of individual men.

Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, and others frequently appeal to “Western civilization” as the vision and values system they’re defending in their policies and actions. Yet the Western civilization they’re defending is one Odysseus would have found barely recognizable, not just because of its heavily Christian Nationalist emphasis, but also because of its distortion of Greek masculinity. Odysseus was what Hegseth would term a “war fighter”– but he certainly recognized rules of engagement (even if today we find those rules horrifying). Odysseus would have also recognized the importance of welcoming the stranger (no matter who) as a hallmark of virtue and civilization; to Odysseus and his community, the true test of civilization was not closing it off to immigrants and refugees, but how these individuals were welcomed when they arrived.

Context matters– and it matters that we’re in a moment right now where history is being selectively deployed to support the power and wealth of a few rather than the whole. The more we know about the ways that political figures are distorting and misusing history, the more we can effectively work for the good of the many. Homer’s epics reflect a world of heroes and gods: Odysseus gets to come home, while the entire rest of his crew (and many other people, both villains and innocents) die. Few of us want to live a world where just one “hero” gets to flourish– let’s not allow the creation of a fantasy historical narrative that supports that.

History and Religion

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Lynneth Miller Renberg

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