A LARGER HOSPITALITY

Indulge me. I know that you come to my blog expecting something biblical and theological. I hope to continue to meet your expectations most times, turning up an insight here and there into the faith that most of us profess. This piece is not of that sort. In a way, it’s theological, but these gods are not the God of the Bible. In this piece I’ll be wearing one of my other hats as a reader of ancient literature. Ancient literature has much to teach us, if we read it with the sensitivity and creativity it requires. For this piece, I’ll be looking at The Odyssey. The Odyssey is having a moment, thanks largely to the Christopher Nolan movie of the same title. I’ll start with the movie.

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What gets in the way of Christopher Nolan and his new movie, The Odyssey, is mostly Homer. Like Odysseus’s bow, the ancient poem does not bend readily to the story Nolan wants to tell. The Odysseus of the ancient poem is not the Odysseus (Matt Damon) of the movie.

Perhaps this shouldn’t matter. A movie is a movie, after all. Enjoy it for what it is. But this movie has become the center of a cultural debate. The New York Times alone has carried more than 30 articles about the movie. Among Timescommentators, David French, Michelle Goldberg, Maureen Dowd, Ezra Klein, and Ross Douthat have all weighed in on the Odyssey. It has prompted a negative review from Emily Wilson, whose translation of Odyssey (2018) seems to have inspired Nolan to make the movie, and a long rambling response to Wilson and other commentators by the Bronze Age Pervert. Clearly, the movie has struck a cultural chord.

I’ll have more to say about the movie in what follows, but it’s not the movie that is my principal concern. It’s the poem, perhaps written or, rather, assembled somewhere in the 7^th century BCE. Famously, the poem begins, “Tell me about a complicated man.” The translation is Emily Wilson’s (The Odyssey, 2018). Her “complicated” is polutropos in the Greek, our polytropic, which means “shifty,” “versatile,” “wily,” “various,” “manifold,” and, yes, “complicated.” Odysseus is all of these. He is at times a brilliant strategist (with ample help from Athena), foolish, headstrong, loyal, brave, competent, and impetuous. What he is not is what Nolan makes of him in movie. He’s not, well, Oppenheimer, brooding on what he has brought into the world.

For the movie, the best review I have read—and I have read more than a few—is Alissa Wilkinson’s review in the Times. Wilkinson notes that Nolan keeps making the same movie over and over again. She compares Odyssey to Oppenheimer. Both revolve around a single act by a solitary man that presages the end of an era: for Oppenheimer the creation of the atomic bomb and for Odysseus the destruction of Troy. Once the bomb has been created, it cannot be uncreated. The old pre-Hiroshima order cannot be retrieved. Humans have created the possibility of their own annihilation. Future generations will live, have lived, with that threat.

In Odyssey, Nolan tells this same story set in Late Bronze Greece. The destruction of Troy portends the end of the age. The era of great cities, rich palaces, lavish banquets, heroes and beauties, and the chivalric code that holds it together are doomed from the moment the Trojans drag the huge horse stuffed with Greek warriors into their city. In Nolan’s telling of the story, the horse was a fundamental violation of the central ethos of the culture—“Zeus’s law”—the violation of which is the Bronze Age equivalent of the atomic bomb. Civilization will not be same.

In Nolan’s movie, Odysseus understands all this. In repeated flashbacks, he returns to scenes of the destruction of Troy. A large tower falls again and again, symbolizing the end of the age. Odysseus realizes that he can’t go home again, not because he can’t get there but because home is no longer home. It was not just Troy that fell, he tells Penelope, his longsuffering wife, but Ithaca.

To return home, he must change. He spends seven years eating lotus with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron). In the movie, she’s a healer of sorts. She finds him near dead at the edge of sea, his ship in pieces on the beach. She rescues him, nurses him back to health, falls in love with him, and eventually helps him to remember what he has left. At last she allows him to leave on a fragile raft constructed from the debris of his ship. When the raft is destroyed by an attack from his implacable divine enemy Poseidon, he learns the final lesson: to let go, to give up control, as he drifts back to Ithaca, where, after slaughtering all the suitors seeking to marry Penelope, he and Penelope sail off into the sunset. Roll the credits.

Most all of this is not Homer. At the end, the movie resembles a western, Matt Damon taking the part of John Wayne. What Homer has for us is harder and, I think, truer stuff. The ancient poem is not about the awakening of Odysseus. Odysseus never does entirely wake up to what is happening around him. At the end, not knowing what else to do, he slaughters the suitors, the young men who have filled the palace in his absence hoping that Penelope might marry one of them. They are callow and stupid and entitled, but do they deserve to be massacred? And not only them, but the young, enslaved women who go to bed with them. Odysseus instructs his son Telemachus to hack them to death. A complicated man, but not, it seems, an enlightened one. The Odyssey is not about the awakening of Odysseus, but about the awakening of those who listened to its cadences.

The key to The Odyssey—the poem, not the movie—is xenia, Greek for “friendship,” “hospitality.” Odyssey is a study in the possibilities and perils of hospitality. This is far too large a theme to explore in any detail here but let me sketch just a bit of how this works in The Odyssey.

The Odyssey betrays its origins in tales told around hearths by how it strings together exciting and memorable stories. There are the sirens singing their compelling song; the cyclops Polyphemus trapping Odysseus and his crew in a cave and eating them, two at a time, for dinner; Scylla and Charybdis on either side of a narrow channel, threatening sailors from above and below; and, of course, the horse by which the Greeks gain access to Troy. These are set pieces, rather like the various stories told in an older epic, Gilgamesh. They are intended for amusement. But in the framework of the epic, they have another function. They explore the limits and possibilities of hospitality, of xenia.

Take, for example, the story of the cyclops, Polyphemus. The story is more complicated than it at first appears. It’s not simply about a hostile, one-eyed monster with a taste for human flesh. (The movie’s Polyphemus, one of the best things in it, owes much to Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son.”) Polyphemus—his name means “many voiced”—represents other cultures the Greeks considered barbaric. On arriving on the island of the cyclops, Odysseus, tells us his crew:

‘My loyal friends! Stay here, the rest of you, while with my boat and crew I go to check who those men are, find out if they are wild, lawless aggressors, or the type to welcome strangers, and fear the gods.’ (9:172-176; The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, 245)

The word that Wilson translates “wild,” ʾagrioi, has the connotation of “savages.” Wilson avoids “savages” as a translation because of its colonialist connotations, but that’s just the point. Odysseus is colonialist. He wants to know if the Cyclopes are savages or whether they follow the customs he regards as the marks civilized society. The answer turns out to be both and neither. Polyphemus is a mixture of graces and horrors. But in the story, so is Odysseus, clever but undisciplined and cruel. The episode can be parsed as a failed encounter between alien worlds, along the line of such encounters in science fiction. In this alien encounter, the rules of hospitality—Greek xenia—do not entirely work. Eating one’s guests for lunch is not xenia, but neither are some of the actions of Odysseus. Would there be a way, the story seems to ask, for Polyphemus and Odysseus to reach an understanding? Polyphemus seems to suggest that perhaps there would be, but Odysseus, the experience of seeing his men eaten two at a time, refuses the offer (9:516-21).

There are other such encounters in the poem, where xenia, “hospitality,” is not a capacious enough concept to bridge the differences between Odysseus and his men and the raw forces they encounter. The rules of human hospitality are not sufficient to govern these encounters. This lesson, here already in Homer (and, for that matter, in Job), has not yet been learned by us, as ecological disasters of our time bear witness. We need a larger code of hospitality, a more capacious xenia.

Xenia is explored in the poem in other directions. Toward the gods, for example. There are many such in the poem: Athena, Odysseus’s frequent companion, often in disguise; Zeus, the father God, at times benevolent and at times malevolent; Poseidon and his implacable rage toward Odysseus (why would Odysseus ever take to the sea?); Circe, who turns the crew into pigs (or recognizes their inherent pigginess) but then helps Odysseus on his journey (after sleeping with him), and especially Calypso, whose hospitality lacks nothing except one crucial element, the last step in the xeniacode: saying goodbye.

Like the Polyphemus episode, the Calypso story is complicated. The movie mostly misses the significance of this episode. As mentioned above, in the movie Calypso (Charlize Theron) acts as an early psychiatrist complete with psychotropic medication. She rescues him from the sea, drugs him (with lotus), and then gradually (over seven years) brings him out of her lotus-induced trance and back into the memories of his home and what he has left behind. But this is not the poem. In the poem, Odysseus never loses his memory. He’s not drugged. He is entrapped on Calypso’s island because he has no way to get off—no boat. She plies him with sex and the offer of divinity, hoping he will stay forever. It could always be like this, she tells him.

But it always being like this comes at a high price: the price of what it means to live in time. To live humanly. Human life is not just one day after another, an endless succession of sameness, even if that sameness is in the arms of Calypso. Human life is immersed in time and experience. And suffering. Family—at the heart of the concept of family—is memory, shared experience. Home is a place of suffering and gladness. For Odysseus, taking Calypso up on her offer would be to lose what is most precious about human life. Odysseus understands this. He stands each day at the seashore, looking out toward Ithaca and weeping.

Again, in this episode, the conventional concept of xenia is not enough. Throughout the poem, Odysseus’s relationship to the gods is equivocal. These gods are best understood experientially. The sudden storm is Zeus. The raging sea is Poseidon. The flash of strategic insight is Athena. The deadly whirlpool is Charybdis, and her cannibalistic companion is Scylla. What does it mean to live hospitably in such a world?

Again, we need a larger hospitality. What rules apply? How are the gods to be served? How placated? The movie drums on about “Zeus’s law,” but in the poem there is no such law. Zeus himself is a sometimes unruly, sometimes kind, often indifferent father. To cover such relationships, xenia needs to be expanded, rethought.

This is true not only for relationships with the wild forces outside of human control—a cyclops, say—or the forces of divinity, it is also true for human relationships. Xenia in the minds of the principal characters of Homer’s Odyssey (and in Nolan’s movie) has a limited scope. It defines relationships mostly among the elite warrior class, the likes of Menelaus and Agamemnon and Odysseus. It’s this concept of xenia that cannot survive the Trojan War. Nolan gets this wrong. It’s not civilization that is coming to an end, although it does. It’s xenia, the archaic form of chivalry, that no longer works, that must be changed.

The poem suggests this by beginning, not with Odysseus, but with Telemachus, his young immature son. Telemachus, not telling his mother, sails off to visit a couple of Trojan War veterans, hoping they might have news of his father. Telemachus is given the whole xenia treatment in both palaces, Pylos and Sparta: he is greeted warmly, given a warm bath by young serving women, seated in a place of honor at a lavish banquet, and sent away with rich gifts and transportation. In the poem, these scenes constitute an ironic backdrop—a throwback—for what follows. This is xenia as it’s supposed to work.

Back home in Ithaca it’s not working. The palace is filled with young men seeking the hand of Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, in marriage, eating the family out of house and home. Nor is it working elsewhere. On their way back from Troy, blown off course, Odysseus and his company casually sack and pillage the city of the Cicones, an act for which he seems to feel no guilt (9:39ff.). Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks makes his way home, only to discover that his wife, Clytemnestra, sister of the famous Helen, has been having an affair with Aegisthus . Still enraged at the sacrifice of their daughter, wife and lover do what the Trojans could not: kill Agamemnon. And, of course, the precipitating violation of xenia is Odysseus’s invention, the horse, presented as a gift of the gods but in fact a way into the city for the murderous Greeks.

The problem is not just that these are violations of xenia but that xenia, as understood in Late Bronze Mycenean culture—as portrayed in the poem—is too thin a concept to stitch together the society that is emerging in their time. It’s the limitations of xenia, this semifeudal concept of chivalry, that Homer’s Odyssey exposes.

And this is what Christopher Nolan and the movie version of The Odyssey fail to grasp. At the end of the poem, Homer throws up a barrier to all simplistic understandings of Odysseus’s homecoming: what to do about the suitors, the scores of young men who have set their hearts on marrying Penelope and their stomachs on consuming free food? The only answer Odysseus knows is violence. He recreates the pillaging of Troy in his own house. The floors run with blood. But surely there are other answers. Surely there are ways that would not require blood.

Too little attention has been paid to the ending of the poem. The movie entirely rejects the Homeric ending and imposes its own, as I mentioned above. In Homer, the gang of four who slaughter the suitors—Odysseus, Telemachus, Eumaeus the swineherd and Philoetius the cowherd—beat a hasty retreat to the home of Laertes, the father of Odysseus. They are afraid the inhabitants of the country around Ithaca will seek revenge for the slaughter of their children. They are not wrong. A war threatens to break out, but quickly and anticlimactically, Athena brings the war to an end. End of poem.

This is, of course, an unsatisfying ending. But it throws the question back at us: how will we bring human violence to an end? How will we work out a concept of xenia that has the capacity to cover life as we know it? No easy answers in Homer’s Odyssey. Nor in life.

Some commentators have suggested that in the movie version of Odyssey, Christopher Nolan has slipped in Judeo-Christian values. Ezra Klein of the New York Times makes this argument (“Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse,” August 2, 2026). He has in mind especially the Golden Rule, citing Hillel and Jesus:

It [the movie’s “Zeus’s law”] echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.”

Klein suggests that this enlarges Homer, whose vision of hospitality is narrower in its scope. But this, I think, is to miss the greatness of Odyssey. Homer’s Odyssey. The greatness of the poem is that it understands that hospitality—xenia—is not enough. It challenges us to find a world in which Polyphemus, the cyclops, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, and the people of Troy and the people of Ithaca, and Circe and Calypso flourish together.

2700 years after the poem was completed, we are still looking for such a world. Indeed, we seem, like Odysseus at the end of the poem, to have slipped farther away from such a home than when we first began. As Homer might have put it, “Tell me, O Muse, of a complicated people.”

Clay