Part One of this essay argues that Nolan’s Odyssey, while embodying a negative view of the Greek civilization depicted in Homer’s epic, is not therefore an oikophobic criticism of the West writ large. Instead, it falls well within a tradition of cultural self-criticism peculiar to the West. Far from being a rejection of the Western tradition, this brilliantly shot, clever retelling of a classic tale evinces one of that tradition’s best characteristics.
To begin with the auteur himself: as far as one can tell, Nolan’s portrayal of Homer’s Greeks isn’t in any obvious way meant as a condemnation of classical Greece or the later Western tradition built upon it. We can’t accuse him of echoing the shallow anti-Western wokerati of recent times who try to discredit our tradition by focusing myopically on its militarism, imperialism and slaveholding practices. In fact, at the end of the film, Nolan points to a brighter future for the West by having the sun set behind ravaged Ithaca and the Greek-dominated Aegean Sea, while the most injured and victimized character in the film, Penelope, and Odysseus, the character who has undergone the most significant moral transformation, sail off together towards the West, where the sun may someday rise on a better civilization.
What Nolan doesn’t allow us to accept is that the Greeks of the Homeric Age had much in the way of positive moral qualities to redeem them. A liberal-minded historian of Mycenaean Greece might well agree. Mycenaean Greeks bore little resemblance to the freedom-loving, wealth-seeking and explosively creative Greeks of the Classical Age. Bronze Age Greece was a stagnant society with a palace-based command economy. The principal source of wealth was agriculture. The land was worked by serfs kept under control by bronze-armored thugs. Its religious life was strictly controlled by the palace, instrumentalized to justify redistribution of farm produce from the workers to the powerful.
The only way the Bronze Age warrior-class had of enriching itself was through raiding rich cities and ‘militarized trade’—seizing control of trade routes and entrepôts. The Homeric epics are adventure stories built about the boldest and most famous of such attacks on a rival, ethnically distinct power. Modern scholars believe the Trojans of Mycenaean times likely belonged to the Hittite ethnic and cultural sphere of Asia Minor.
To be sure, most scholars now believe the Homeric epics were composed from legendary materials in the Archaic Age in the eighth century BC, after the Dark Age and before the classical era. There is an ongoing dispute as to whether Homer, or whoever shaped and edited the poems between the eighth and the sixth century, knew much about Mycenaean Greece, or whether Homer’s poems preserve any genuine features of that time. Like most peoples, the Greeks romanticized their past and invented stories about their ancestors. Their princes and leading families claimed ancestry from gods and heroes. Most Greeks loved Homer and eagerly attended performances at religious festivals of his works. These were chanted by famous rhapsodes, professional reciters of poetry. (Their performances are described in Plato’s Ion.) Nevertheless, it is not only Nolan who might reasonably bring into question whether these great epics, the most canonical texts of the West, should still be canonical for us today. Indeed, the Greeks themselves, as early as the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–478 BCE), were criticizing Homer for his anthropomorphic portrayals of the gods, whose actions are presented as though they were those of flawed human beings: thieves, adulterers, lying fraudsters. That was a natural temptation.
If oxen and horses and lions had hands
And could draw with their hands and do what men do,
Horses would draw gods to look just like horses
And oxen like oxen, and each would mold
The bodies of gods in the same shape as theirs.1
Xenophanes, like later philosophers, lamented the bad example set for the common people by misbehaving gods. In that respect, he was a bit like critics of glittery Hollywood stars today, few of whom are models of upright behavior.
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