The Odyssey has sent me on a journey. In my last story, “Jewelry That Will Make You Believe in Greek Gods,” I drifted back in time to review the glory that was Ancient Greek gold jewelry and how it has influenced design over time. Then, I had to pause on my excursion to write a forthcoming investigative piece for Air Mail.
Now, finally, this is my jewelry movie review of the epic. For those of you who may not know, jewelry movie reviews are something I have done since the dawn of my career when I co-authored Hollywood Jewels with Penny Proddow.
It has been nice to linger a bit longer over The Odyssey than I might’ve if I finished this review in a timely fashion and see how much it has resonated. How absolutely wild, refreshing and fun it’s been in the last couple of weeks for classicists (CLASSICISTS!) to become a focus in media coverage.
I wish Penny, who was a classicist, were alive to experience it. I feel like she would’ve seen the movie three times by now. She taught The Iliad and The Odyssey to kids from ages 8 to 13 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for many years. For the class, she used art and her own translations, which she wrote in little books that the students would read aloud.
In a New York Times profile about Penny and her course named “Pause for Pegasus” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, she explained:
The incomprehensibility of classical translations read by kids forced me to do my own, she said. ‘I want to take away the obstacles. I want to give them the literature that has inspired the art. I want to show them the intensive feeling that led to the artist’s vision and how this vision evolved into concrete form.
Christopher Nolan has also removed so many obstacles to the text with his movie. He has shown how relevant it is for a modern audience. It holds up a mirror to our times. And it’s great.
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