Thanks for a balanced review of the film, acknowledging its problematic aspects while highlighting its virtues. A friend of mine who is half Greek (but also all American) practically frothed at the mouth online about the casting choices.
Re: The Christian Odysseus is also regretful about the violence unleashed on civilians at Troy, and the destruction of a civilisation. The Odysseus of Homer not only doesn’t feel bad about this
To be fair to the ancient Greeks, by the classical era at least some twinges of conscience were being felt. Euripides, in the fifth century BC, wrote The Trojan Women which is a furious indictment of Greek cruelty to the women of Troy, and traditionally seen as an indirect slam against the Athenian massacre at Melos. IMO, it is still the most potent antiwar work we have. Two generations later Plato expressed disapproval against the traditional mythical treatment of the gods as corrupt adulterers. Some of this (especially Plato) would feed into early Christianity, where the original Judaic strain (which had its own bloodthirsty moments too) was partially eclipsed by late Hellenic elements. I am surprised to hear the film omits Odysseus' affair with Circe and tries to muddy his long lasting stint as Calypso's boytoy. That sort of thing is hardly shocking to modern culture.
A minor note: The Bronze Age collapse was broader than just the Mediterranean world. Shang China also went under.
" ‘Colour-blind’, implying some artistic devotion either to meritocracy or box office profit, is not an accurate term; the Mexican Anthony Quinn playing Antinous the suitor in the 1954 epic, or Colombian-American John Leguizamo in the current film, is ‘colour-blind’, in the sense that a big-name star can overcome a slight physiognomic inaccuracy."
Latin Americans were not considered "non-white" until Marxian activists sought to create the "Hispanic" category in the 1960s in order to cash in on the benefits being doled out to Blacks.
When I visited Greece a couple of years back I couldn't help but notice many blue eyed Greeks. In antiquity at least some Greeks were blond and light eyed. Alexander the Great, not fully Greek admittedly, was blonde and heterochromic -- one green eye and and one blue eye. However Homer does seem to want us to picture Odysseus as stocky and dark rather than tall and fair.
Bowie wasn't heterochromic. Both his eyes were blue, but because the left pupil was permanently dilated and stuck wide open (due to the schoolboy fight) they could look different colours due to anisocoria.
Latin American is a bit of strange ethnic group. If an African American and white man with ginger hair from Northern Ireland were to migrate to Spain, they wouldn't think of themselves as being the same ethnic group.
However a black Cuban and someone like Jorge Garcia are meant to be the same ethnic group (to be honest, if Jorge Garcia had changed his name to George Brown, I would never have realised his family weren't Anglo Saxon).
I am not entirely sure this would benefit Latin Americans - if they were recorded as an ethnicity - they might be seen as receiving more social housing as other groups - which would not benefit them.
We need to resist the attempts to balkanize us into racial and ethnic groups. Our shared humanity, as well as our cultural hinterland is what should unite us. It is a cynical and unprincipled attempt to divide and rule.
Yes although for health reasons it can be useful to look at people's races. Prostrate cancer is more common in black men, so the cost/benefit for screening black men for prostrate cancer is different.
Absolutely. I'd recommend a book I'm beginning to read: The weirdest people in the World by Joseph Heinrich on how literacy, among many other factors associated with Western (indeed Anglo Saxon/Germanic/Scandinavian) culture, have changed our brains and ways of thinking and being.
I’m not sure that quite captures it. In Australia in the 1980s Italian immigrants were outsiders (w*gs). It’s not hard to imagine Hispanics in the USA being also seen that way by the dominant anglos.
And then, slowly, they assimilate, just like the Irish, the Jews, the Poles, Scandinavians and Germans, Chinese and Japanese, Caribbeans and Nigerians. If you embrace the culture and values of your new home (but still retaining respect for and understanding of your heritage and roots), then you can take advantage of the opportunities of the "dominant anglos". Indeed, it can be said that for many of those immigrant groups I mentioned above, they have flourished beyond those from the original home countries.
I studied the Iliad at school and in Latin translation rather than in Greek. I did not study the Odyssey at all. I'm hoping that, in any future family conversations about the film, this lends some gravitas to any opinion I might offer but simultaneously provides an escape route once they all realise, yet again, that dad doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
Classical scholar Gordon P. Kelly notes that, in the Iliad, half a dozen vanquished enemies appeal for mercy on the battlefield to Menelaus, Agamemnon or Achilles, and that in each case the appeal is denied and the defeated man promptly slain (Menelaus does wobble a bit, but Agamemnon pushes him to be stern). He notes that this fact has caused discomfort to many modern scholars, who "see this lack of mercy as an indication that the Trojan War grew more bitter and brutal by its tenth year." Kelly takes these claim apart, analysing the text closely to show that there was no norm of showing mercy to a defeated enemy, and that Homer's authorial voice appears at times to approve of his heroes' ruthlessness. He concludes:
"Despite the persistent claims of modern scholars, nothing in the Iliad depicts the killing of battlefield suppliants as unethical. Why then have such assertions been so common in the scholarly community despite the lack of supporting evidence? Conceivably, our own societal norms that value mercy have colored the views of recent commentators. [...] It makes sense to us that some extraordinary circumstance must be causing the characters in the Iliad to reject pleas for mercy. Such an approach, however appealing to our values, is anachronistic and reflects our ethics rather than those of the society described in the text."
Having said that, I think there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, the Mycenean civilisation that Homer depicted and the archaic Greece in which he wrote, and, on the other, classical Greece. The latter, while not unproblematically aligned with "our" (post-)Christian values, contained various elements that were somewhat closer to them. One of your other correspondents mentions The Trojan Woman as an expression of the classical Greek capacity for conscience. I would name Antigone - still the most piercing literary account of the conflict between authority and individual conscience (and probably the best political play ever written). And Socrates, Plato and Aristotle surely did arrive at insights that are striking anticipatory of Christian thought. Aristotle, indeed, was of vital importance to Catholic theologians for many centuries.
Yes that is certainly true. I wonder how widespread the views of the great classical thinkers would have been in 5th/4th century Greece. Would this represent a widespread cultural change or been confined to a very small urban elite? (I don't know). But yes I'm not denying the influence of ancient Greece on our own culture.
Very interesting question - one to which we probably can't know the answer at this remove. Of course, one thing we do know for certain is that, even within the urban elite, the views of the philosophers were controversial. Socrates paid with his life for them.
I'm surprised by Kelly's comment. When Achilles kills Lykaon despite the latter's plea for mercy in Book 21, it's a departure from his prior course of ransoming Trojan captives, caused by his grief and rage at Patroclus' death at Hector's hands, as he explains: "Before the day of fate reached Patroclus, it is true,/until then my heart chose to spare/the Trojans, and many I took alive and sold. /But now there is no one who will escape death, whom god/puts into my hands before the gates of Ilion,/of all the Trjoans, but especially the sons of Priam." (Caroline Alexander trans. 21:100-105.) In fact he's captured and ransomed Lykaon once already.
In Book 1, in the midst of his argument with Agamemnon, Achilles notes that he has no quarrel with the Trojans, that to him they are "blameless" and that he and the other Greeks followed Agamemnon to Troy only "to win recompense for Menelaos and for you, dog-face" (1:159).
In the course of his rampage in Books 20-22 Achilles captures 12 Trojans and later sacrifces them on Patroclus' pyre. It's one of the few times Homer unequivocally condemns an action ("evil were the deeds his heart intended," 23:176); another is when Achilles plans to let the dogs devour Hector's corpse (23:19-26). Conversely, when Achilles shrouds Hector's body so Priam won't see the wounds, and then lifts it into Priam's wagon so the king can take his son home, it strikes us (and I think Homer expected his hearers to feel) that Achilles is acting nobly. And yet he apologizes to Patroclus for releasing Hector's body to his father. (24:582-595).
Homer does have a moral standard, and I think he tells us pretty clearly that grief and rage for Patroclus caused Achilles to violate that standard, but in Book 24 he recovers. In fact, back in the days when Analysts ruled Homeric studies, many believed that there was originally an Achillead in which Achilles' revenge on Hector and desecration of his corpse was presented as fully satisfactory and just, and closed the poem, and Achilles' subsequent ransom and return of Hector's body was bolted on later. I doubt that's true, but I'm confident that if there was only an Achillead then Homer would be a lot less popular today than he actually is.
One other thing I didn’t mention because I only became aware of it while rereading a part of the Odyssey yesterday. In one of his made-up backstories, Odysseus recounts leading a raid on Egypt that went disastrously awry, as Egyptian soldiers defeated his men. He says that when it was clear that all was lost, he threw aside his helmet, put down his sword and shield and ran to the Egyptian king and grabbed his knees and kissed them. And the king spared him and took him into his chariot and brought him to his home. Odysseus says that many Egyptian soldiers wanted to kill him, “[B]ut [the king] defended me, since he felt a proper awe for the wrath/Of Zeus, Protector of Strangers, who is outraged by evil deeds.” (Mendelsohn translation, 14:283-284.) I wondered if Kelly addressed this.
Now no one in the Iliad who is trying to surrender invokes Zeus in this way, and Odysseus’ statement seems to imply a much broader conception of a host’s obligation to succor strangers than I can recall seeing in the Iliad (or elsewhere in the Odyssey, for that matter). Kelly could just say that the Odyssey is somewhat later than the Iliad and this is an example of the moral and social differences between the poems, and I’d buy that. But I’m curious whether he addressed it at all.
After going to the Peloponnese a couple of months back, I've been on a bit of a Greek-related reading binge, and just finished The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault. Published in 1958, it is the fictional (but scrupulously researched) story of a young man growing up in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War. The main focus is on the hero, his feats in the stadium and at the battlefield, and his relationships with his male lover and his family, but Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and other historical figures are secondary characters. The book is really interesting because Renault seems to be genuinely striving to capture the way an Ancient Greek might have thought and felt, and in some ways is keen to validate Greek values (not least in their acceptance of homosexuality; she was herself a lesbian) against those of the twentieth century. But she also makes her hero something of a rebel against Athenian social norms, and thereby gently modern, and sometimes quasi-Christian, in his attitudes. He's pro-democracy, when many of the other characters are in favour of oligarchy; he treats his stepmother with the respect and affection due to a biological mother, to the scorn of some of his other relatives; he protects his baby sister when a message arrives from his father telling him to expose the newborn child if it is a girl; and he makes a truly noble personal sacrifice to save his lover's young wife from having to prostitute herself. Renault also puts an explicit proto-Christian sentiment into Plato's mouth.
Great review (just like the one you did for Tom Holland's Dominion; yes, NOT the actor!).
I would say that both Left and Right, rather inevitably, have not understood, or perhaps even read, Homer, the Greek classics, their Roman masters or about the worlds they inhabited. As you rightly say, history is indeed a foreign country about which we know nothing, or rather we find it exceptionally hard to transport ourselves both physically or mentally. If we cannot do it for the 18 and 19 centuries, how can we do it going b ack two millennia odd.
It was, generally speaking, nasty brutish and short., unbelievably smelly, violent, noisy. Gods were capricious because so was nature- and so were the men and women who inhabited this world. Human need to establish patterns (or is this a WEIRD - see Joseph Henrich - cultural adaptation?) meant that they had to rationalize, appease, or think and show that they did. Might was right, and, as the Romans did, when conflict stopped they made a desert and called it peace. While there was great beauty, there was immense, systemic cruelty. Slavery was of a magnitude greater than anything the West was involved in (Islam and African kingdoms were far more analogous to the ancients), though manumission was a common occurrence for house and business slaves.
And they told stories, rich, strange, beautiful, meaningful across space and time, to make sense of their world and to teach them and their children lessons. The Western canon (and I include the Torah and Gilgamesh here) is such an enormous wellspring of inspiration and fascination. I find it utter intellectual Luddism for anyone to reject it in favour of . . . well, what? "Decolonizing" the curriculum is a desire to condemn future generations to the soft bigotry of low expectations, ignorance, and unmooring from our cultural and intellectual hinterland. But maybe that's what they (identitatians/critical theorists/intersectionalists/Frankfurt school/the new Left) want!
If Nolan has done anything, as you point out, he has reignited an interest in our cultural memory as highlighted by the Homeric tales. Whatever the merits of the film itself, if this is the only thing that comes of it, we should thank him for an imperfect palimpsest.
My take on the Lupita Nyong'o controversy: it doesn't matter who plays Helen, provided that she's a beautiful woman, but it's definitely wrong for her to double up as Clytemnestra. They were, according to the myth, sisters, and according to some tellings, twins. But they can't have been identical twins, since Helen is meant to be the most beautiful woman in the world, not one of two equally beautiful women!
Helen was born of an egg, while Clytemnestra was born human. Basically, Leda slept with her husband Tyndareus of Sparta and Zeus (in the form of an injured swan) on the same night and bore twin girls (one human, the other semi-divine) and boys (Castor and Pollux, similarly with different fathers). What I cannot understand is why/how the progeny of Zeus came from eggs when Leda was the human and Zeus the swan. But maybe I'm being too literal!
Leaving the theater I turned to my friend and said it was interesting Odysseus was a proto-Christian rather than a man of his time. A classical tale with a classical worldview would be inexplicable to most viewers. It leaves something on the table though.
I'm going to happily cast my lot with the wokes on the Lupita N'yongo casting. She has an exotic beauty that jumps off the screen and makes small part(s) feel big. The movie makes it clear there's plenty of realpolitik driving the Trojan War anyway not just her beauty.
I think I'm actually of the view that wife-stealing is as plausible as a trade war. It's such a huge cause of wars in many societies. it's also true that women often fall in love with their captors.
Agree that N'yongo is striking, and this isn't about her attractiveness necessarily. Mendelson was actually quite interesting on the podcast, saying that if he directed a film he wouldn't actually show her face. good idea I thought
Instead of showing her face, you could do a quick cut to scene of a thousand ships being launched, as in "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"
Clever last paragraph: the interloper abusing hospitality and overstaying their welcome.
Yup Pakistani rape gangs and sharia law are not neighbourly behaviour. Meanwhile, perplexed, whitey from blighty looks on as his 7th PM in 10 years takes office with a new plan to stop the rot.
I put the over under at 18 months for Andy. As for your civilization, I’ll take the under. It’s a shame. Or is it a crime? And, is collapse inevitable?
I say yes. It’s gonna take another seven Prime Minister‘s and then it’ll be too late.
"pre-release controversy provoked by the casting..."
Nolan has always been weird with casting; he gets people you thought had been relegated to straight to video stuff to appear in his films (Rutger Hauer in one of the Batman films, Tom Berenger in Inception, Josh Hartnett in Oppenheimer). Sean Avery, a Canadian hockey player has appeared in a few of his films. Tim Booth - the lead singer of the band James - is in Batman Begins. Harry Styles in Dunkirk, which also features a small role for the woman who played Helga in Allo Allo (she's Nolan's aunt).
"When Julius Caesar declared that he had killed a million people in Gaul, it was a boast; a thousand years’ later William the Conqueror, another continental warlord who stepped foot on Britain, exited the world expressing remorse about the horror he had inflicted on his victims, worried about his eternal soul."
It's most extraordinary how killing hundreds of thousands of an entire ethnic group is something one would actually boast about to praise in the ancient world.
Even Heinrich Himmler wanted to keep conduct the Final Solution as secretly as possible.
Caesar wasn't trying to commit genocide against all Celts, many of whom were already thoroughly Romanized (in Italy and Iberia and southern Gaul). He was trying to crush all possible resistance to Roman rule. William the Conqueror may have had regrets-- but a couple centuries later Genghis Khan had none.
Another odyssey, that of Captain Cook in HM Bark ENDEAVOUR - the inspiration for Captain Kirk’s five year mission to explore strange new worlds in the USS ENTERPRISE - and then in HMS RESOLUTION also ended when the visitor outstayed his welcome - in the Sandwich Islands, sometimes known as “Hawaii”.
I am not sure a more 'true to ancient values' film might not have been better. Certainly more memorable and terrifying. Lean into it! But I hugely enjoyed it even while finding tons of things I thought were done wrong. Nudity for example. Has Game of Thrones taught us nothing? And who wears a helmet while rowing?? I could go on. At length!
"The Odyssey opens with the American rapper Travis Scott playing Phemius, the court bard in Ithaca, knocking on the floor rhythmically as he tells the story of Troy. ‘Woke nonsense!’ I screamed from the fourth row as my children crawled into their seats in embarrassment and shame."
I guess one can yell in a crowded theatre to use the hypothetical many use to describe the "limits" of free speech!
Thanks for a balanced review of the film, acknowledging its problematic aspects while highlighting its virtues. A friend of mine who is half Greek (but also all American) practically frothed at the mouth online about the casting choices.
Re: The Christian Odysseus is also regretful about the violence unleashed on civilians at Troy, and the destruction of a civilisation. The Odysseus of Homer not only doesn’t feel bad about this
To be fair to the ancient Greeks, by the classical era at least some twinges of conscience were being felt. Euripides, in the fifth century BC, wrote The Trojan Women which is a furious indictment of Greek cruelty to the women of Troy, and traditionally seen as an indirect slam against the Athenian massacre at Melos. IMO, it is still the most potent antiwar work we have. Two generations later Plato expressed disapproval against the traditional mythical treatment of the gods as corrupt adulterers. Some of this (especially Plato) would feed into early Christianity, where the original Judaic strain (which had its own bloodthirsty moments too) was partially eclipsed by late Hellenic elements. I am surprised to hear the film omits Odysseus' affair with Circe and tries to muddy his long lasting stint as Calypso's boytoy. That sort of thing is hardly shocking to modern culture.
A minor note: The Bronze Age collapse was broader than just the Mediterranean world. Shang China also went under.
yes that is true. i think we may have done that at A-Level.
" ‘Colour-blind’, implying some artistic devotion either to meritocracy or box office profit, is not an accurate term; the Mexican Anthony Quinn playing Antinous the suitor in the 1954 epic, or Colombian-American John Leguizamo in the current film, is ‘colour-blind’, in the sense that a big-name star can overcome a slight physiognomic inaccuracy."
Latin Americans were not considered "non-white" until Marxian activists sought to create the "Hispanic" category in the 1960s in order to cash in on the benefits being doled out to Blacks.
https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/the-invention-hispanics-what-it-says-about-the-politics-race
When I visited Greece a couple of years back I couldn't help but notice many blue eyed Greeks. In antiquity at least some Greeks were blond and light eyed. Alexander the Great, not fully Greek admittedly, was blonde and heterochromic -- one green eye and and one blue eye. However Homer does seem to want us to picture Odysseus as stocky and dark rather than tall and fair.
just like David Bowie.
Bowie wasn't heterochromic. Both his eyes were blue, but because the left pupil was permanently dilated and stuck wide open (due to the schoolboy fight) they could look different colours due to anisocoria.
I mentioned a friend who is half Greek (his mother is of Quebecois stock a few generations back). He has blue eyes.
I once worked with a guy with a Greek name who was blond, though he noted himself that his ancestry was more Macedonian Slav than Greek.
I had a Greek professor of Greek philosophy who had blue eyes.
Latin American is a bit of strange ethnic group. If an African American and white man with ginger hair from Northern Ireland were to migrate to Spain, they wouldn't think of themselves as being the same ethnic group.
However a black Cuban and someone like Jorge Garcia are meant to be the same ethnic group (to be honest, if Jorge Garcia had changed his name to George Brown, I would never have realised his family weren't Anglo Saxon).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Garcia
"Hispanic" is really more of a linguistic category like "Slavic" or "Celtic".
You are right although most speakers of Celtic languages are alike racially.
There is however a campaign for Latino to be an ethnic category in the UK, which I don't think is logical
https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/news/21052026-latin-americans-in-the-uk-campaigning-for-recognition
I am not entirely sure this would benefit Latin Americans - if they were recorded as an ethnicity - they might be seen as receiving more social housing as other groups - which would not benefit them.
We need to resist the attempts to balkanize us into racial and ethnic groups. Our shared humanity, as well as our cultural hinterland is what should unite us. It is a cynical and unprincipled attempt to divide and rule.
Yes although for health reasons it can be useful to look at people's races. Prostrate cancer is more common in black men, so the cost/benefit for screening black men for prostrate cancer is different.
Absolutely. I'd recommend a book I'm beginning to read: The weirdest people in the World by Joseph Heinrich on how literacy, among many other factors associated with Western (indeed Anglo Saxon/Germanic/Scandinavian) culture, have changed our brains and ways of thinking and being.
Indeed.
I’m not sure that quite captures it. In Australia in the 1980s Italian immigrants were outsiders (w*gs). It’s not hard to imagine Hispanics in the USA being also seen that way by the dominant anglos.
And then, slowly, they assimilate, just like the Irish, the Jews, the Poles, Scandinavians and Germans, Chinese and Japanese, Caribbeans and Nigerians. If you embrace the culture and values of your new home (but still retaining respect for and understanding of your heritage and roots), then you can take advantage of the opportunities of the "dominant anglos". Indeed, it can be said that for many of those immigrant groups I mentioned above, they have flourished beyond those from the original home countries.
I studied the Iliad at school and in Latin translation rather than in Greek. I did not study the Odyssey at all. I'm hoping that, in any future family conversations about the film, this lends some gravitas to any opinion I might offer but simultaneously provides an escape route once they all realise, yet again, that dad doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
Classical scholar Gordon P. Kelly notes that, in the Iliad, half a dozen vanquished enemies appeal for mercy on the battlefield to Menelaus, Agamemnon or Achilles, and that in each case the appeal is denied and the defeated man promptly slain (Menelaus does wobble a bit, but Agamemnon pushes him to be stern). He notes that this fact has caused discomfort to many modern scholars, who "see this lack of mercy as an indication that the Trojan War grew more bitter and brutal by its tenth year." Kelly takes these claim apart, analysing the text closely to show that there was no norm of showing mercy to a defeated enemy, and that Homer's authorial voice appears at times to approve of his heroes' ruthlessness. He concludes:
"Despite the persistent claims of modern scholars, nothing in the Iliad depicts the killing of battlefield suppliants as unethical. Why then have such assertions been so common in the scholarly community despite the lack of supporting evidence? Conceivably, our own societal norms that value mercy have colored the views of recent commentators. [...] It makes sense to us that some extraordinary circumstance must be causing the characters in the Iliad to reject pleas for mercy. Such an approach, however appealing to our values, is anachronistic and reflects our ethics rather than those of the society described in the text."
Having said that, I think there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, the Mycenean civilisation that Homer depicted and the archaic Greece in which he wrote, and, on the other, classical Greece. The latter, while not unproblematically aligned with "our" (post-)Christian values, contained various elements that were somewhat closer to them. One of your other correspondents mentions The Trojan Woman as an expression of the classical Greek capacity for conscience. I would name Antigone - still the most piercing literary account of the conflict between authority and individual conscience (and probably the best political play ever written). And Socrates, Plato and Aristotle surely did arrive at insights that are striking anticipatory of Christian thought. Aristotle, indeed, was of vital importance to Catholic theologians for many centuries.
Yes that is certainly true. I wonder how widespread the views of the great classical thinkers would have been in 5th/4th century Greece. Would this represent a widespread cultural change or been confined to a very small urban elite? (I don't know). But yes I'm not denying the influence of ancient Greece on our own culture.
Very interesting question - one to which we probably can't know the answer at this remove. Of course, one thing we do know for certain is that, even within the urban elite, the views of the philosophers were controversial. Socrates paid with his life for them.
I'm surprised by Kelly's comment. When Achilles kills Lykaon despite the latter's plea for mercy in Book 21, it's a departure from his prior course of ransoming Trojan captives, caused by his grief and rage at Patroclus' death at Hector's hands, as he explains: "Before the day of fate reached Patroclus, it is true,/until then my heart chose to spare/the Trojans, and many I took alive and sold. /But now there is no one who will escape death, whom god/puts into my hands before the gates of Ilion,/of all the Trjoans, but especially the sons of Priam." (Caroline Alexander trans. 21:100-105.) In fact he's captured and ransomed Lykaon once already.
In Book 1, in the midst of his argument with Agamemnon, Achilles notes that he has no quarrel with the Trojans, that to him they are "blameless" and that he and the other Greeks followed Agamemnon to Troy only "to win recompense for Menelaos and for you, dog-face" (1:159).
In the course of his rampage in Books 20-22 Achilles captures 12 Trojans and later sacrifces them on Patroclus' pyre. It's one of the few times Homer unequivocally condemns an action ("evil were the deeds his heart intended," 23:176); another is when Achilles plans to let the dogs devour Hector's corpse (23:19-26). Conversely, when Achilles shrouds Hector's body so Priam won't see the wounds, and then lifts it into Priam's wagon so the king can take his son home, it strikes us (and I think Homer expected his hearers to feel) that Achilles is acting nobly. And yet he apologizes to Patroclus for releasing Hector's body to his father. (24:582-595).
Homer does have a moral standard, and I think he tells us pretty clearly that grief and rage for Patroclus caused Achilles to violate that standard, but in Book 24 he recovers. In fact, back in the days when Analysts ruled Homeric studies, many believed that there was originally an Achillead in which Achilles' revenge on Hector and desecration of his corpse was presented as fully satisfactory and just, and closed the poem, and Achilles' subsequent ransom and return of Hector's body was bolted on later. I doubt that's true, but I'm confident that if there was only an Achillead then Homer would be a lot less popular today than he actually is.
This is an absolutely fantastic response! Thanks for all this detail. An amazing riposte to Kelly.
One other thing I didn’t mention because I only became aware of it while rereading a part of the Odyssey yesterday. In one of his made-up backstories, Odysseus recounts leading a raid on Egypt that went disastrously awry, as Egyptian soldiers defeated his men. He says that when it was clear that all was lost, he threw aside his helmet, put down his sword and shield and ran to the Egyptian king and grabbed his knees and kissed them. And the king spared him and took him into his chariot and brought him to his home. Odysseus says that many Egyptian soldiers wanted to kill him, “[B]ut [the king] defended me, since he felt a proper awe for the wrath/Of Zeus, Protector of Strangers, who is outraged by evil deeds.” (Mendelsohn translation, 14:283-284.) I wondered if Kelly addressed this.
Now no one in the Iliad who is trying to surrender invokes Zeus in this way, and Odysseus’ statement seems to imply a much broader conception of a host’s obligation to succor strangers than I can recall seeing in the Iliad (or elsewhere in the Odyssey, for that matter). Kelly could just say that the Odyssey is somewhat later than the Iliad and this is an example of the moral and social differences between the poems, and I’d buy that. But I’m curious whether he addressed it at all.
The Iliad, when I read it, came across as incredibly bloody.
After going to the Peloponnese a couple of months back, I've been on a bit of a Greek-related reading binge, and just finished The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault. Published in 1958, it is the fictional (but scrupulously researched) story of a young man growing up in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War. The main focus is on the hero, his feats in the stadium and at the battlefield, and his relationships with his male lover and his family, but Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and other historical figures are secondary characters. The book is really interesting because Renault seems to be genuinely striving to capture the way an Ancient Greek might have thought and felt, and in some ways is keen to validate Greek values (not least in their acceptance of homosexuality; she was herself a lesbian) against those of the twentieth century. But she also makes her hero something of a rebel against Athenian social norms, and thereby gently modern, and sometimes quasi-Christian, in his attitudes. He's pro-democracy, when many of the other characters are in favour of oligarchy; he treats his stepmother with the respect and affection due to a biological mother, to the scorn of some of his other relatives; he protects his baby sister when a message arrives from his father telling him to expose the newborn child if it is a girl; and he makes a truly noble personal sacrifice to save his lover's young wife from having to prostitute herself. Renault also puts an explicit proto-Christian sentiment into Plato's mouth.
She did like the gays, did our Mary!
Great review (just like the one you did for Tom Holland's Dominion; yes, NOT the actor!).
I would say that both Left and Right, rather inevitably, have not understood, or perhaps even read, Homer, the Greek classics, their Roman masters or about the worlds they inhabited. As you rightly say, history is indeed a foreign country about which we know nothing, or rather we find it exceptionally hard to transport ourselves both physically or mentally. If we cannot do it for the 18 and 19 centuries, how can we do it going b ack two millennia odd.
It was, generally speaking, nasty brutish and short., unbelievably smelly, violent, noisy. Gods were capricious because so was nature- and so were the men and women who inhabited this world. Human need to establish patterns (or is this a WEIRD - see Joseph Henrich - cultural adaptation?) meant that they had to rationalize, appease, or think and show that they did. Might was right, and, as the Romans did, when conflict stopped they made a desert and called it peace. While there was great beauty, there was immense, systemic cruelty. Slavery was of a magnitude greater than anything the West was involved in (Islam and African kingdoms were far more analogous to the ancients), though manumission was a common occurrence for house and business slaves.
And they told stories, rich, strange, beautiful, meaningful across space and time, to make sense of their world and to teach them and their children lessons. The Western canon (and I include the Torah and Gilgamesh here) is such an enormous wellspring of inspiration and fascination. I find it utter intellectual Luddism for anyone to reject it in favour of . . . well, what? "Decolonizing" the curriculum is a desire to condemn future generations to the soft bigotry of low expectations, ignorance, and unmooring from our cultural and intellectual hinterland. But maybe that's what they (identitatians/critical theorists/intersectionalists/Frankfurt school/the new Left) want!
If Nolan has done anything, as you point out, he has reignited an interest in our cultural memory as highlighted by the Homeric tales. Whatever the merits of the film itself, if this is the only thing that comes of it, we should thank him for an imperfect palimpsest.
My take on the Lupita Nyong'o controversy: it doesn't matter who plays Helen, provided that she's a beautiful woman, but it's definitely wrong for her to double up as Clytemnestra. They were, according to the myth, sisters, and according to some tellings, twins. But they can't have been identical twins, since Helen is meant to be the most beautiful woman in the world, not one of two equally beautiful women!
Helen was born of an egg, while Clytemnestra was born human. Basically, Leda slept with her husband Tyndareus of Sparta and Zeus (in the form of an injured swan) on the same night and bore twin girls (one human, the other semi-divine) and boys (Castor and Pollux, similarly with different fathers). What I cannot understand is why/how the progeny of Zeus came from eggs when Leda was the human and Zeus the swan. But maybe I'm being too literal!
I think in a mating between a god and a human, the god takes precedence. So if Zeus comes in the form of bird, eggs it is!
Maybe the Zeus that fathered Lupita Nyong'o's Helen came to Leda in the form of a black swan!
Oh, that's a good one!
Leaving the theater I turned to my friend and said it was interesting Odysseus was a proto-Christian rather than a man of his time. A classical tale with a classical worldview would be inexplicable to most viewers. It leaves something on the table though.
I'm going to happily cast my lot with the wokes on the Lupita N'yongo casting. She has an exotic beauty that jumps off the screen and makes small part(s) feel big. The movie makes it clear there's plenty of realpolitik driving the Trojan War anyway not just her beauty.
WOKE
I think I'm actually of the view that wife-stealing is as plausible as a trade war. It's such a huge cause of wars in many societies. it's also true that women often fall in love with their captors.
Agree that N'yongo is striking, and this isn't about her attractiveness necessarily. Mendelson was actually quite interesting on the podcast, saying that if he directed a film he wouldn't actually show her face. good idea I thought
Instead of showing her face, you could do a quick cut to scene of a thousand ships being launched, as in "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"
Clever last paragraph: the interloper abusing hospitality and overstaying their welcome.
Yup Pakistani rape gangs and sharia law are not neighbourly behaviour. Meanwhile, perplexed, whitey from blighty looks on as his 7th PM in 10 years takes office with a new plan to stop the rot.
I put the over under at 18 months for Andy. As for your civilization, I’ll take the under. It’s a shame. Or is it a crime? And, is collapse inevitable?
I say yes. It’s gonna take another seven Prime Minister‘s and then it’ll be too late.
Aren't there some words missing in the Charleze Theron bit? I read it several times, worried that I might have had a stroke.
"pre-release controversy provoked by the casting..."
Nolan has always been weird with casting; he gets people you thought had been relegated to straight to video stuff to appear in his films (Rutger Hauer in one of the Batman films, Tom Berenger in Inception, Josh Hartnett in Oppenheimer). Sean Avery, a Canadian hockey player has appeared in a few of his films. Tim Booth - the lead singer of the band James - is in Batman Begins. Harry Styles in Dunkirk, which also features a small role for the woman who played Helga in Allo Allo (she's Nolan's aunt).
wow, didn't know that about Helga.
This reminds me of the fondness Stanley Kubrick had for Leonard Rossiter.
Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais did uncredited work on The Rock and Pearl Harbour. The British sitcom to Hollywood blockbuster pipeline is real!
"When Julius Caesar declared that he had killed a million people in Gaul, it was a boast; a thousand years’ later William the Conqueror, another continental warlord who stepped foot on Britain, exited the world expressing remorse about the horror he had inflicted on his victims, worried about his eternal soul."
It's most extraordinary how killing hundreds of thousands of an entire ethnic group is something one would actually boast about to praise in the ancient world.
Even Heinrich Himmler wanted to keep conduct the Final Solution as secretly as possible.
Caesar wasn't trying to commit genocide against all Celts, many of whom were already thoroughly Romanized (in Italy and Iberia and southern Gaul). He was trying to crush all possible resistance to Roman rule. William the Conqueror may have had regrets-- but a couple centuries later Genghis Khan had none.
Aren't we the odd ones in the history of world cultures?
In a way yes. Certainly in terms of "civilizations" above the hunter-gatherer level.
Another odyssey, that of Captain Cook in HM Bark ENDEAVOUR - the inspiration for Captain Kirk’s five year mission to explore strange new worlds in the USS ENTERPRISE - and then in HMS RESOLUTION also ended when the visitor outstayed his welcome - in the Sandwich Islands, sometimes known as “Hawaii”.
I liked the last paragraph.
Very clever; it said a lot without saying too much.
I am not sure a more 'true to ancient values' film might not have been better. Certainly more memorable and terrifying. Lean into it! But I hugely enjoyed it even while finding tons of things I thought were done wrong. Nudity for example. Has Game of Thrones taught us nothing? And who wears a helmet while rowing?? I could go on. At length!
Even with Game of Thrones, Tyrion and Jon Snow provide a sort of Christian worldview though. Without them it would be terrible.
I guess I am looking for something more horror filled. A sort of classical Apocalypse Now. Or even Starship Troopers!
"The Odyssey opens with the American rapper Travis Scott playing Phemius, the court bard in Ithaca, knocking on the floor rhythmically as he tells the story of Troy. ‘Woke nonsense!’ I screamed from the fourth row as my children crawled into their seats in embarrassment and shame."
I guess one can yell in a crowded theatre to use the hypothetical many use to describe the "limits" of free speech!