I’d love to go back in time and tweak Sir Christopher Nolan’s title to ‘An Odyssey’.

He has every right to make a film of his understanding of the story. He has put together a fine, rather dour film about strong men in strong armour. God knows, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are not short of violence but there is so much more to this ancient story than that.

Nolan ignored swathes of excellent, often funny dialogue from the original. My favourites are the deliciously romantic, crossed-purposes-or-are-they conversations between Penelope and Odysseus. Top goddess Athena is utterly dull in Nolan’s film while Homer’s is lithe, funny, flirty, and as wily and quick witted as Odysseus. And Nolan has changed the theme from nostos (the hard toil of an old soldier finding his journey home, joyful at last, to his family, his country and himself) to how dreadful and irredeemable we humans are for destroying the world.

Apart from that?

Ah yes. Nolan has excised possibly the oldest written joke we have. It used to have me and my father rolling around laughing before I was even at primary school. He’d act the dialogue between Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant, and Odysseus who is trying to escape him, with my dad playing all the parts, including the sheep. He was a classicist (Trinity, Dublin in the 1940s) and my earliest bedtime stories were of Paris and the jealous goddesses, Odysseus and Penelope, Hector and Achilles, Agamemnon’s return and the rest.

His whiskey glows by your bedside lamp,
‘Read Trojan Horse
again, Daddy.’

Aeneas’s tears at the mural of sorrows,
Achilles’
battle rage: he plays them all.

He weaves a lifelong wonderland:
Priam, Mozart,
the Clancys, Keats.

(From In Good Hands in Safe Ground, Mica Press 2025)

Over the years, I’ve read most of the Homer’s Odysseys in English (barring Pope: Keats wasn’t wrong, Chapman’s better.) I have a classicist son too, so I’m happily bookended by classicists. That’s probably why, in my writing groups, up comes Homer time and again to show how to compose and sustain the best storytelling there is.

Colorful Crow Publishing is scheduled to publish my book next year about how to sustain your writing process lifelong. There will be more about Homer’s excellent lessons in storytelling there.

For now though, here are just a handful of Odyssey gems that Sir Christopher decided he could do without. There are plenty more:

Calypso is no therapist. She is another barrier to Odysseus getting to where he needs to be: a ‘love goddess’ who likes sex, has seen the male gods (Zeus in particular) help themselves to that side of life with humans and she’s decided to have her turn. Would those scenes not have challenged Odysseus and engaged us far more than Charlize Theron being all wise and understanding? In spite of Homer describing Odysseus as ‘the most miserable man alive’ in her care, his Calypso won’t let him leave her until the gods command her to set him free. She rants about gender inequality in the divine sphere, then does help Odysseus on his way.

Calypso fed divine ambrosia to Odysseus to cloud his memory . I thought this vivid poppy seed head might be prettier than a bowl of creamed rice.

Zeus’s Law: this is Nolan’s name for the laws of hospitality (Xenia in Greek) that bound and still bind many of us humans, across time and geography. If you have Irish family, you’ll know what I mean. Nolan’s characters forget to mention that guests are as bound by these laws as hosts. Penelope is besieged by ‘Suitors’ who rampage around her home, helping themselves to food, wine and slave girls, knowing that she would be in breach of Xenia if she turfed them out. They’re trying to coerce her into believing that she must be a widow by now, so should remarry one of them, ceding Ithaca, the castle and all Odysseus’s power to her new husband. Those ‘Suitors’ are as much in gross breach of Xenia as Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant, who bites the heads off Greek soldiers who have strayed into his cave.

Every section of Homer’s Odyssey has some breach of Xenia in it, with just two exceptions that I can think of. One is Telemachus’s visit to King Menelaus (lovely behaviour on both sides). The other is Odysseus’s time spent with the Phaeacians who find him washed up on their shore, feed, clothe, listen to him, dry his tears and then help him find the easiest way home.

My quibble with calling Xenia ‘Zeus’s Law’ is purely that the Graeco-Roman god who trashed that law more than any other was Zeus (Jupiter in Latin), top god in the pantheon with a keen taste for, shall we say, sex by deception. Between arguments with his wife, Zeus’s favourite hobby is disguising himself as animals and birds to seduce human females. Helen herself was supposedly the product of Zeus’s interest in her mother when he was disguised as a swan.  

The Trojan Horse. Nolan has said that his inspiration for the film is the image of a huge bronze horse washed up on a beach. Wherever that came from, it wasn’t from Homer. He’s right that Odysseus’s idea to smuggle Greek soldiers into Troy inside a constructed horse was a severe breach of Xenia. But Homer is clear at every point that it’s a wooden horse, probably knocked up on the battlefield from old bits of carts and boats. Adam Nicolson’s book The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters explains that at the time of the action of the story, tamed horses had just revolutionised farming and that a horse-shaped gift would have been mightily persuasive. Horses had transformed warfare too, making chariots and javelins new essentials.

How could a bronze horse statue have worked on that battlefield? It would have been improbably difficult to shift. We are told that Trojans shoved swords through to test if anyone was inside. When Helen comes out of Troy to inspect it, Menelaus tells us that she strokes its timbers and whispers, whispers through the horse’s flanks, sometimes in the voices of the Greek soldiers’ wives. How could she have achieved that through bronze?

There are so many clear references in Homer (eg: 4: 272, Menelaus describes Odysseus’s courage inside ‘the Wooden Horse’; 8:493, the Phaeacian king asks the bard to ‘sing to us of the making of the Wooden Horse’ and more) that I can’t help wondering what source Nolan used.

Achilles is a sad loss from the film. I see his super-sized armour still stars, though it’s supposed to be Agamemnon who wears it. No. In Homer it’s Achilles who is part god and of superhuman size and strength, with special armour. It’s a pity to lose the scene, pivotal for Odysseus, when he finds Achilles in Hades (Graeco-Roman home of the dead) and asks how his old friend is doing. Achilles replies that he would give anything to have been the lowest serf or a shepherd quietly on a hillside all his life, rather than the world’s most glorious soldier.

Nolan’s film has Achilles’ armour look like Batman. They do walk among us, these god-like men.

That oldest joke in Western literature that had my father and me giggling all those years ago? Odysseus and his men are trapped in Polyphemus’s cave with his sheep. At dawn, they see that their captor is gigantic but has only one eye, in the middle. How can they smuggle themselves past him and out to freedom? Odysseus works out that if they blind the giant Cyclops and cling to the sides and bellies of his sheep, they can be carried out to safety. They manage, as in the film, to blind the giant and Polyphemus comes out yelling (yes, in the Greek soldiers’ own language): who did this to him? Odysseus says that he did and, when asked his name, quips that his name is ‘Nobody’. When the other Cyclops hear bellowing, that someone’s been hurt, they ask, ‘Who did this to you, Polyphemus?’ The giant has no choice but to reply, ‘Nobody did it. Nobody!’

Ba-dum ching! Odysseus and his men escape.

Wine-dark

Enjoy the film if it’s your sort of thing. I recommend the BBC’s television series Troy: Fall of a City (an excellent version of The Iliad) and the recent film The Return where Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche are wonderful as Odysseus and Penelope in the second part of The Odyssey. Great to see the truths and foibles of our human hearts still glowing from the embers of these old stories.