R.Chasm

Ur analysis on the importance of the phaeacians + oral tradition was incredible. Damn I need to reread the Odyssey but n e ways,,

I have been mulling over in my head as to why blockbusters like Nolan's Odyssey and Troy feel the need to reduce the roles of the gods. I respect creative choices, but turning them into concepts that are implied to exist but never truly shown (Nolan's Athena is a gray area in this case) has never sat right with me.

Personally, and this is a crazy claim to make I know, it feels like in an attempt to make their adaptations more 'realistic' they turn to a monotheistic, all encompasing idea of what a god can be. Like Nolan's Zues is genuinely treated like capital G God with how Zues' lightning lakes the place of the other gods in parts of the story. For example, how lightning is used in scenes with Calypso. She looks to the sky with understanding that Zues is telling her to let him go when in the og it's Athena who commands Zues who commands Hermes to do the grunt work. Basically, if it can be reduced to Zues, it is. And Troy is it's own things since there are literally no gods more real than statues.

Have you ever noticed this? is it a thing or am I being dramatic?

I do think a HUGE part of why modern adaptations of Greek myths often reduce the role of the gods is because the directors/writers of those adaptations are deeply Christian, or at least monotheistic, in their own cultural backgrounds. They have an idea of a singular capital-G God and need to maintain that, so they shoehorn Zeus into that role. Even when it doesn't work.

Zeus absolutely isn't a moral paragon — even those who believed he would punish evil also knew about the thousand or so times he cheated on his wife, the cruelty he showed his own children, the whole thing with Prometheus and fire and humanity being unnecessarily burdened, etc. He was perceptive and powerful, to be sure, but he does whatever he wants not what's just. At best, a rules for thee and not for me kind of guy.

Also, perhaps more importantly — Zeus isn't infallible. I wrote a paper about this in undergrad, but his role comes from the fact he is the god of kingship, and therefore the leader of the gods.

Zeus very much isn't more powerful, necessarily, than any of the other gods — even Hesiod, an ancient author who loved Zeus-glazing in his myths, acknowledged that! He addresses the myth of Zeus being imprisoned and dethroned by Poseidon, Hera, and Athena's cooperative efforts; he gets his throne back because Thetis summons one of the hecatoncheires to help free him. (That's why Zeus owes Thetis a debt and is nice to her during the Iliad.) Athena regularly manipulates the shit out of him using her favorite child status. It's stated outright that Zeus becoming king is because Gaia and Rhea put him in that position as the only kid who wasn't swallowed by Kronos and therefore the de facto leader of the rebellion; he was chosen to lead based on circumstance and keeps that position based on merit.

Arguably, the implication is that Zeus is king of the gods and rules them thanks to the consent of the governed, which...you can totally explore and validate in modern adaptations, but it's very much making Zeus more palatable as a powerful king. As a god, he can be uncomfortable for people, because despite being the most supreme of the Greek gods, Zeus still often does terrible shit and it goes largely unpunished, with the consequences usually falling on the women and children around him.

Like, if your idea of god has always been something distant and mysterious and unknowable but unquestioningly good, you ARE going to find the Greek gods hard to swallow! They will not match your own definition of what the divine should be! Because rather than a distant, all-knowing being, who seeks to create a just world...Greek gods are constantly intermingled with mortal lineages and daily life, completely capable of being deceived by mortals as well as one another, and are not interested in the greater good so much as in personal benefit/enjoyment and perhaps protecting their own domains and people.

And I think many people, when given a story about imperfect, flawed, fallible, human deiites — when shown a paradigm for holiness that has zero moral requirements, and therefore the possibility that gods and many other powerful people might just frankly suck and have unlimited power anyway — reject that. As a moral or concept to include in a story, or just as lore for certain characters, the idea you can be born powerful and do nothing to deserve it and have no sense of noblesse oblige and it won't matter is...depressing. That's probably why some stories featuring the Greek gods try hard to moralize them, to sand down their edges, or else condemn them outright — even in ancient times!

Ovid is a huge example of an anti-divine mythological author, but it goes back even further. Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos is (arguably; nothing is consensus among classicists) all about how you simply cannot defy a fate set for you by the gods, and how miserable that can make you. Euripides' Bacchae sees Dionysus scolded for his vengefulness, being told that "gods should not be like mortals in temper," AKA that he should rise above rather than chase petty revenge against his maternal relatives like he did. Plato did that in the Phaedrus, describing the gods as idealized concepts when we know they very much aren't. And he actually lived in the culture that worshipped the Greek gods!

TL:DR making the Greek gods more obscure and/or more ethical is absolutely a thing people from monotheistic (usually Christian) religious backgrounds do, because the idea of multiple gods, let alone that god could be fallible and immoral, is deeply uncomfortable for them. BUT. It's not just uncomfortable for religious reasons, but also moral ones. In a very real way, the Greek gods being often bad but still unstoppable is a sad message that many would prefer to subvert in their retellings of myths, and even the ancient Greeks sometimes did so.

And I think the film…oversimplified and understated the functions and importance of xenia. At best.

Please see below the cut for a very detailed explanation of what the film gets wrong about xenia, what the practice actually was, why it doesn’t work for Nolan’s ultimate thesis to the film, and the role xenia played in the original Odyssey.

I get the desire for a story about war and what comes from it, to look at PTSD and trauma and how senseless such conflicts ultimately are. But in a very profound way, so did Homer. It's just that he explored those themes in the Iliad, not the Odyssey. That's why it focuses on both sides of the war, why Hector and Achilles are so often contrasted in their desires and actions — because it begs the question of what a hero, a general, a warrior, really is.

You want a story about the kind of atrocities men at war can commit? You want to cast Agamemnon as the villain? You want a protagonist who's big and strong and does awful things he must learn to regret? That's Achilles' story! Not Odysseus'!

Odysseus is wily. He's a trickster. He's a liar and schemer and talker and thinker. He's also a phenomenal fighter, sure, but that's nobody's first impression of him! His primary epithet is polutropos: literally a man of many turns, many tricks, many tongues.

And that's nowhere to be found in Nolan's Odyssey, which means...it's really not a story about Odysseus. He's not winning the day with wits and tricks and disguises — he's certainly not Athena's chosen champion. Nolan wrote a story about a completely different man than the titular protagonist of the original myth. That doesn't change just because he borrows a small handful events from the Apologoi and a few more from the Telemachy and Mnesterophonia with a completely protagonist and focus and moral.

But we all know Nolan loves his tortured, tragic, angsty powerful male heroes. And one of Homer's epics did contain that — it just wasn't the Odyssey! The Iliad would've worked so much better, because Achilles at his core is the kind of character Nolan likes to write. He's angry and scared of his own mortality and constantly worried about his own legacy and driven to do terrible things at war due to grief and love!

Nolan presents Odysseus' trick with the Trojan Horse as though it was some kind of Ancient War Crime, but the Greeks would not have given a shit and certainly wouldn't have considered it a violation of xenia (which the film incorrectly called "Zeus' Law" — more on that here).

But you know which Homeric protagonist did do something that the Greeks considered horrifying and a violation of honorable combat? Achilles! When he desecrated Hector's corpse because the guy had killed his lover and best friend.

There’s discourse (not just among modern academics, Plato’s Hippias Minor is too) about whether wits and tricks should be held as more respectable or valued than pure martial strength in Homer’s eyes — whether Odysseus or Achilles is the greater Homeric hero. Nolan's Odyssey claims to be about Odysseus, but its values clearly state that Achilles is the better hero and protagonist. This movie gave almost zero credit to tricks and wits and disguises and lies, instead focusing on his sense of duty towards his men, his martial strength, and his leadership.

The latter is notably distinctly missing from Odysseus' canonical journey; his relationships with his comrades (summachoi) are almost completely absent, because the Odyssey is instead a story about marriage, about partnerships between men and women. (Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa are all notably love interests for Odysseus whom he rejects in favor of Penelope; the former two are too dominant and powerful, the latter too young and impressionable. The woman he loves is his equal partner — by Greek standards — Penelope.) But Nolan's misogyny means he was never going to correctly rate the significance of the female characters in the Odyssey correctly, which further hampers the film. He'd likely have done better with the Iliad, where Chryseis and Briseis simply have to cry beautifully and he can paint Helen as a bitch or whore and Andromache as the tragic wife, like he prefers.

And if Nolan really wanted to get into the horrors of war, the things men can do when convinced of their righteousness and their strength is unchallenged...Neoptolemus in the Aeneid would be a fantastic lens to view that through. The Iliad is the war itself, and I think Nolan would prefer the battles to their aftermath, but you can look at the trauma and abuse that occur at war through both the spear-wives of the Iliad and the entirety of the Aeneid.

Notice how there are so many different styles of helmets down?

Arguably you hardly see some handfuls of people have similar helmets. The rest of it almost looks like some people grabbed helmets from random vestiary. Is this laziness? Budget?

In my opinion it is brilliance and some nice historical touch.

Not only did Cacoyannis bring up the sense that we have many different Greek cities of different fashions together but also shows simultaneously how back in the day military was not exactly what we think today. It is not that people in bronze age would have free equipment from the state. In a great number of cases the soldiers had to make and maintain their equipment themselves aka with their own expenses to hire someone to make it for them and then maintain it.

We can expect individuals going to the same armor blacksmith and ask for an armor so we can expect similarities with each other but at the same time some modifications or customizations might be expected depending on the economical state of each fellow. More economically privileged soldiers could afford more elaborate helmets or better armors or better weapons. The vast majority of foot soldiers were light armored compared to the elite that could afford a full set of armor or swords and shields. A large number of soldiers might as well fight with slings and stones opening the way for the armored warriors.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their actual cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the port with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.