Modern myths about the ancient world.
There are already tons of reviews of The Odyssey (2026) out there, including many by classical scholars. I’m no movie expert, so this isn’t a review. But I can sometimes spot little details and recognise where they’ve come from. Nolan’s film diverges from Homer in major respects, but there are also points of detail that it treats more carefully than it needs to. And the film doesn’t just draw on
The Phaiakes deliver Odysseus to his home island, Ithake, leaving him asleep on the shore. When he wakes up, he hides their gifts to him in a nearby cave: At the head of the harbour is a long-leafed olive tree; and near it, a cave, lovely and shaded, sacred to Nymphs, who are called Naiads. In it there are jars and amphoras of stone; and bees store honey in them. And there are stone
Odysseus’ wanderings are the most famous sequence in Homer’s Odyssey. The Cyclops, the Lotus-eaters, and Circe are some of the epic’s most memorable parts, even though the wanderings as a whole occupy only one sixth of the poem. On one level, they’re pretty clearly envisaged as taking place in an Otherworld, like a portal fantasy or isekai. On another level, they have strong links to real
A catalogue of onscreen versions of the Odyssey. This list includes metatheatrical versions, parodies, and adaptations of parodies (including James Joyce’s novel Ulysses). Dan Renalds as Telemachus, Kelly B. Jones as Penelope, and Dylan Vox as Odysseus (Troy: the Odyssey, 2017) Year Title Director / medium Country Actors: ‘Odysseus’, ‘Penelope’, ‘
The Odyssey is coming out soon, a feature film starring Matt Damon, and directed and written by Christopher Nolan. Various online pundits have already criticised it, focusing on historical authenticity — faithfulness to some preconceived idea of how the world in the film ought to look. Why isn’t Odysseus’ armour consistent with Bronze Age armour? Why does his ship look like a viking longship?
Eric Cline’s book The Trojan War: a very short introduction (Oxford, 2013) argues that the classical Greek myth of the Trojan War is based on a historical conflict. Previously we looked at chapter 3, where Cline argues that the Homeric Iliad portrays Bronze Age events in a Bronze Age setting. As we saw, all the claims cited as evidence turned out to be unrepresentative, baseless, or simply untrue
Eric Cline’s The Trojan War: a very short introduction (Oxford, 2013) is an appealing book, charmingly written, but inaccurate and misleading in many essential respects. It is designed to be influential, part of a well promoted series. But because it is a short popular book, it was not reviewed in academic journals. Its influence warrants much greater scrutiny than its format suggests. Contrary
A catalogue of citations of scripture in the canonical Christian gospels, by way of a note to myself. Some caveats, terms, and conditions: The gospels don’t quote the Hebrew Bible. They quote Greek texts. They don’t exactly quote the Septuagint either, because there were multiple ‘Septuagint’ recensions, but we can call it ‘Septuagint’ so long as we’re clear that it’s a Septuagint and not the
Video review/fact-check of the IBM short film ‘Eratosthenes’ (1961).
Ever wondered where the weekday names come from? The answer may go back a bit further than you think. But it’s also incomplete. The easy part of the answer is that the days are named after the seven planets. Not the modern solar system, though. The planets as they were known to ancient astronomers like Ptolemy. And in English, six of the seven planet names were swapped out, and Old English words
Hesiod has races of gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron. The biblical book of Daniel has a statue where gold, silver, bronze, iron, and mixed iron and clay represent kingdoms. Coincidence? I think not! Does this mean the author(s) of Daniel knew their Hesiod? Well ... maybe. The Seleucid king Antiochos IV, r. 175–164 BCE. Left: bust of Antiochos, Altes Museum Berlin; right:
Stoicism, the ancient school of philosophy, had some excellent ideas. Here’s their explanation of how sound works. We hear when the air between the sound-emitter and the listener is struck. Then it emits a wave in a spherical shape which spreads and arrives at the ears, in the same way that water in a tank forms waves in circles when a stone is thrown in. Diogenes Laertios 7.158
The earth has orbited around the sun since 1609. At least that’s when Kepler’s book on the subject came out, Astronomia nova (‘The new astronomy’). Copernicus had proposed a heliocentric theory in 1543, but with circular orbits it was a lousy model. The geocentric Ptolemaic system continued to be the better model of planetary motion until Kepler came along. But there was another precedent.
In the Odyssey, the following kind of thing is absolutely normal. For a regular novelist this scene would be a triumph. For Homer, it was Tuesday. Silent silence We’re in Odyssey book 16. Odysseus has been separated from his family for twenty years. He’s back, disguised as a beggar, doing some reconnaissance. At the moment he’s visiting with Eumaios, an enslaved herdsman. Suddenly, with no
The new Percy Jackson and the Olympians series has begun to come out — three episodes, at the time of writing. It makes many changes from Rick Riordan’s book, Percy Jackson and the lightning thief (2005). It adds many new classical references, but it also begins to address some serious problems with the book. Spoilers follow. Percy (Walker Scobell) stands in front of Antonio Canova’s ‘
There’s something almost magical about how papyrologists and editors take tiny scraps of ancient papyrus and turn them into coherent texts. Here’s an example taken from the Hesiodic Catalogue of women. P. Turner 1 Here’s a passage as it stands in one ancient papyrus, Turner papyrus 1, lines 17–24: ]θεαιεξεγενον[ ]τ̣υ̣ρωνκαιαμη . . ν̣ο̣ε̣ργ̣[ ]
Puns may be the lowest form of humour these days, but in early Greek literature, they’re more like word magic. ... τὸν δορίγαμβρον ἀμφινεικῆ θ’ Ἑλέναν; ἐπεὶ πρεπόντως ἑλέναυς ἕλανδρος ἑλέπτολις. (Who was it that named) that spear-bride, that bone of contention, Helen? A fitting name! Ship-destroyer, man-destroyer, city-destroyer. Aischylos, Agamemnon 688–690 In the last
There’s no good evidence that kamilos — supposedly meaning ‘rope’ — was ever even a real word in ancient Greek. The myth we’re looking at is to do with the following passage in the Bible. εὐκοπώτερόν ἐστιν κάμηλον διὰ τῆς τρυμαλιᾶς τῆς ῥαφίδος διελθεῖν ἢ πλούσιον εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ εἰσελθεῖν. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to
It isn’t often that I get to combine my interests as a choral singer and a classicist. Recently I got interested in the Prophetiae Sibyllarum or ‘Sibylline prophecies’ by Roland de Lassus, also known as Orlando di Lasso. These are twelve short pieces for unaccompanied choir, in Latin, composed around 1560. This story is about how I noticed an error in the text. Lassus’ pieces are startling,
You’d imagine the answer would be Achilleus, right? Actually he’s only number three. Remember, he’s out of combat for most of the epic. Now, I do have to apply some constraints, otherwise this won’t make sense. First, people don’t get to respawn in the Iliad. (Well, mostly. I’ll come back to this.) So we’re not really talking about K/D, it’s really just K. Only a handful of characters get
Every now and then an article about Homer pops up in my alerts and I’ll see if it’s worth sharing. This one isn’t. But maybe it’s a teaching opportunity. It’s a short piece about Achilles and Hector at The imaginative conservative, by Joseph Pearce, a writer and editor attached to a Catholic college in New Hampshire. Worshippers at the altar of ‘western civilisation’ have to put in many hours
1. The spherical earth | 2. Eratosthenes’ method | 3. Distance | 4. Angle of the sun (e) Angle of the sun Eratosthenes didn’t use gnomons to measure the sun’s angle. Here once again I have to digress from telling the true story, and dispel a myth. It’s a myth that even many specialists take for granted. I’m just as guilty: in the past I’ve repeated the popular wisdom that
1. The spherical earth | 2. Eratosthenes’ method | 3. Distance | 4. Angle of the sun Distances along stretches of the Nile as Eratosthenes described them in his Geography, fr. 98 Roller (see below for details). The ‘5300 stadia’ from Alexandria to Syene may include a 300 stadia region around Syene where the sun was overhead at the summer solstice; alternatively the extra
1. The spherical earth | 2. Eratosthenes’ method | 3. Distance | 4. Angle of the sun Around 240–230 BCE Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth as 252,000 stadia. This translates to 46,620 km, plus or minus 1900 km. That’s 12% to 21% higher than the true distance, which is 40,008 km, but it’s still a great illustration of using down-to-earth practical observations
1. The spherical earth | 2. Eratosthenes’ method | 3. Distance | 4. Angle of the sun In the 200s BCE, a Libyan mathematician and geographer by the name of Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth. He did it with pretty basic equipment, and his result was off by only 16%. It’s an impressive story. But to tell it properly, we have to start a few centuries earlier.