Homer was an ancient Greek writer who wrote The Odyssey. Did you know that even that statement can’t be taken for granted? Some academics believe Homer may never have existed. Or that The Odyssey could have been the product of several hands. As for Homer’s birth and death details – don’t bother looking because that’s a mystery. Yet to hear the trolls who are out in force right now attacking Christopher Nolan over his adaptation of The Odyssey, you’d think we knew everything about Homer and that his story was grounded in real events. In fact, it’s definitely not. Unless you’re a firm believer in the supernatural.
Elon Musk has stepped forward to offer his raging views on Nolan’s movie, lambasting the choice of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and any part – especially that of Achilles – being offered to Elliot Page. I had no idea that Musk was an expert on ancient Greek literature! But let me argue below why Nolan is perfectly entitled to cast Nyong’o and Page in his movie and why he’s not trampling on Homer’s grave, as some trolls have sneered. For the record, we don’t even know the location of Homer’s grave and it doesn’t matter anyway.
So, before I start this blog post, take a look at my video summarising the argument against Musk and the swarm of trolls that have descended on Nolan.
The story of Odysseus has never belonged to any single people, era, or interpretation. From the moment Homer — or whoever Homer was — set down his great poem of wandering and homecoming somewhere around the eighth century BC, the story began its own odyssey: copied, quoted, pillaged, reimagined, translated, mistranslated, and reborn in forms the original author could never have foreseen. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, scheduled for release this July, is only the latest port of call in that three-thousand-year voyage. The outrage greeting it tells us almost nothing about Homer and quite a lot about the bad faith at the heart of contemporary online discourse.
Let us start with what Nolan has actually done. He has assembled one of the most extraordinary casts in recent cinematic memory: Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy.
He is filming on location in Morocco, Italy, and Greece itself, with a $250 million budget and his longtime cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema behind the camera. He has drawn on multiple translations — including Emily Wilson’s celebrated 2017 edition, the first English translation of The Odyssey ever made by a woman — as part of a process of deep scholarly research. And he has explained his choices clearly and directly. Travis Scott, cast as a bard, is Nolan’s deliberate nod to oral tradition: “I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.”
These are not the decisions of a director sleepwalking through a franchise reboot. They are the decisions of an artist taking a myth seriously enough to think about what it means in the present tense.
The Tradition of Creative Reinvention
The critics who demand “historical accuracy” from an adaptation of The Odyssey have made a fundamental error: they have confused a living myth with a museum exhibit. The Odyssey is not a documentary record of Bronze Age Greece. It is not even necessarily the work of a single author. It is, rather, the founding text of the Western literary tradition precisely because it has always been plastic — available to every generation that needed it.
The Romans understood this immediately. Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the first century BC, is an extended, deeply political reinterpretation of the Homeric world, refracted through the founding myths of Rome. Virgil took the war of Troy and its aftermath and repurposed them entirely — not as a story of Greek triumphalism, but as the origin story of a new empire. Aeneas, not Odysseus, becomes the prototype of the stoic, duty-bound Roman hero. The gods behave differently. The moral universe is rearranged. Virgil was not accused of betraying Homer; he was celebrated for honouring him through transformation.
Dante went further still. In the Inferno, written in the early fourteenth century, he places Odysseus — Ulisse — in the eighth circle of Hell, among the fraudulent counsellors, punished for the deception of the Trojan Horse. This is a reading of Homer almost diametrically opposed to the Greek original, filtered through Christian theology and medieval political concerns. And then Dante does something extraordinary: he gives Odysseus a final, undocumented voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules, an invention with no basis in Homer whatsoever, which becomes one of the most celebrated passages in the entire Commedia. Nobody demanded that Dante stick to the source material.
Shakespeare drew freely on the same tradition. His Troilus and Cressida presents Ulysses as a cold, calculating rhetorician — a portrait utterly unlike Homer’s resourceful wanderer, but perfectly suited to Shakespeare’s exploration of honour, politics, and disillusionment. The text that launched a thousand ships here launches a meditation on the bankruptcy of heroic idealism. Again: reinvention celebrated, not condemned.
James Joyce took the whole epic and transplanted it to a single day in Dublin in 1904. Ulysses, published in 1922, is one of the most consequential novels in the English language, a work that maps Homer’s Mediterranean wanderings onto the inner life of Leopold Bloom — a Jewish Irishman, decidedly unheroic, navigating advertisement sales, marital anxiety, and a pub crawl. Penelope becomes Molly Bloom, whose long interior monologue closes the novel. Telemachus becomes Stephen Dedalus. The Cyclops becomes a bigoted Dublin nationalist. The entire Homeric structure is present, but rendered almost unrecognisably strange. And we call this a masterpiece.
Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, published in 2005, retells the story entirely from Penelope’s perspective, and gives voice to the twelve hanged maids — servants executed by Odysseus at the end of the poem, figures whose deaths Homer treats with no more ceremony than a passing simile. Atwood’s reinvention is explicitly feminist, explicitly interested in whose voices the original text suppressed. It is taught in universities. It is admired by classicists. Nobody demanded historical accuracy from Atwood.
And this is before we consider the vast range of stage, screen, and musical adaptations. From the 1954 Italian Ulisse starring Kirk Douglas to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? — set in 1930s Mississippi, with Odysseus as a Depression-era con man — the text has survived every conceivable relocation, reimagining, and reinvention because that is what great myths do. They survive. They adapt. They are always, in some sense, about now.
DISCOVER: The history of Exorcism
Emily Wilson and the Art of Translation
The critics’ hostility to Nolan’s use of Emily Wilson’s translation is equally revealing. Wilson, a British-American classicist at the University of Pennsylvania, published her translation in 2017 to widespread acclaim. It was the first English translation of The Odyssey made by a woman in the poem’s several-thousand-year history of reception — a fact which is, itself, worth pausing on. Scholars praised it for its fidelity to the original Greek metre, its accessible modern English, and its careful attention to words that previous translators had softened or euphemised. The reception among professionals in the field was largely positive.
Wilson has been criticised online for her choice to open the poem with “Tell me about a complicated man” — the famous epithet polytropos being rendered as “complicated” rather than the more traditional “wily” or “crafty.” This is a genuine scholarly debate about a genuinely complex Greek word, one that Wilson addressed at length and with rigorous argument. Nolan told Empire magazine that this opening — “Tell me about a complicated man” — was part of what drew him to the translation. It is, he suggested, the genius of the character made newly legible. That is a director engaging thoughtfully with a scholarly work. It is the opposite of ideological box-ticking.
The charge that Wilson’s translation is a “feminist rewriting” that distorts Homer is largely a caricature. Every translation is an interpretation; every translation carries the assumptions of its moment. Robert Fagles, whose 1996 translation is widely beloved, made choices that reflected his own era’s values. So did Alexander Pope, whose 18th-century verse rendering is a monument of English literature that tells us as much about the Augustan period as about ancient Greece. Translation is not a neutral act of transcription. It never has been. To pretend otherwise is to misunderstand what translation is.
Who Are These Critics, Really?
The backlash to Nolan’s film has been unpleasant to put it mildly. For example, accusing Nolan of casting diverse actors in order to satisfy the Academy Awards’ Representation and Inclusion Standards. Or that the director avoided a white actress for Helen of Troy from fear of being called a racist.
We should scrutinise these criticisms carefully, because they don’t hold water. The Academy’s Representation and Inclusion Standards, which have applied to Best Picture eligibility since 2024, do not mandate specific casting; they establish broad thresholds around representation on screen and behind the camera. A $250 million epic with an international ensemble cast, filmed across three continents, would almost certainly satisfy these standards regardless of any individual casting choice. The idea that Lupita Nyong’o — an Oscar-winning actress of exceptional talent and global fame — was cast as a fig leaf for diversity compliance is not a serious argument. It is an insult dressed as a critique.
More revealing still is the pattern of targets. It is worth noting that this same online machinery mobilised against Black actors in The Rings of Power, against Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid, against the casting of Arabella Stanton and Paapa Essiedu in the new Harry Potter series. The consistency of the target — non-white actors in roles drawn from mythology, fantasy, or fiction — rather undermines the claim that this is a principled defence of historical accuracy.
Ancient Greece was a Mediterranean civilisation trading and fighting with Africa, Egypt, and the Near East. Its myths predate the racial categories we now take for granted by several millennia. The argument that Helen of Troy was definitively white rests on a single Homeric adjective — leukōlenos, “white-armed” — which is a formulaic epithet applied to multiple characters and refers, most probably, to the colour of garments or the fairness of indoor skin rather than any racial classification recognisable to the modern eye. It is not a DNA test. It is a poem.
One might ask why these same critics did not object to the long tradition of non-Greek actors playing Greek mythological figures: Kirk Douglas, an American, as Ulysses; Brad Pitt, an American, as Achilles; Nicole Kidman, Australian, and Orlando Bloom, English, in Troy. The answer, plainly, is that those actors were white. The historical accuracy argument is deployed selectively, which tells us it is not really about history.
Reading some of the nonsense on social media, especially from trolls who are clearly in their teens or early 20s, I’ve concluded that some of them think the (dreadful) 2004 movie Troy is the original source material!!!
Nolan’s Creative Vision
What the backlash obscures is the genuine scale and seriousness of what Nolan is attempting. The director who gave us Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer is not a filmmaker prone to lazy choices. I may not like some of Nolan’s films (Interstellar and Dunkirk get a thumbs down from me), but his research, attention to detail, and passion for the subject are beyond doubt.
Nolan’s casting decisions across his entire career have been driven by performance and collaboration. Matt Damon, Hathaway, Pattinson, and Safdie are all returning collaborators; he cast them because he knows what they can do. The decision to cast Zendaya as Athena — a goddess of wisdom and strategy, patron of heroes — makes intuitive sense for an actor who has demonstrated considerable range. Theron as Calypso, the nymph who detains Odysseus for years with the promise of immortality, is a piece of casting worthy of genuine interest.
The Travis Scott choice is the one most likely to divide opinion on aesthetic rather than political grounds, and it is also the one for which Nolan has offered the most intellectually coherent defence. Homer’s epics were performed — sung, recited, improvised by bards for live audiences. They were oral poetry. Rap is, among other things, a living tradition of oral poetry. The parallel is not facile; it is structurally sound. Whether it works on screen is a legitimate question. It is a question of art, not of culture-war allegiance.
The deeper point is this: Nolan has spent years developing this film. He studied multiple translations. He chose locations in the actual Mediterranean world where the story is set. He built a cast around the greatest stars of the current generation. He is spending $250 million — his biggest budget ever — to bring one of the founding texts of Western civilisation to the widest possible audience. That is an act of reverence, not desecration.
The Stakes
There is something genuinely depressing about the fact that the loudest conversation around one of the most ambitious films of recent years has been conducted by people whose primary goal is not to engage with Homer but to score political points. None of them show any evidence of having read Homer’s original text, even though they claim to be defending it. Their interest in this film began the moment it gave them a weapon in an ongoing culture war.
Homer’s poem is about a man trying to get home. It is about the temptations that delay him, the loyalty that sustains him, the violence waiting at the end, and the question of what “home” even means after ten years of war. It is a poem about identity, endurance, cunning, grief, and the complexity of heroism. It has been retold for three thousand years because each generation finds something new in it. What we find in it now — in this moment of dislocation, political fracture, and technological transformation — may be very rich indeed.
Christopher Nolan deserves the chance to find out. And the rest of us deserve the chance to watch.
Well, that’s my view of the controversy surrounding the movie. And now for something completely different, as Monty Python used to say. If you are interested in the Knights Templar – make sure to get a copy of my latest book: Downfall of the Templars. It’s selling fast on Amazon!
