We left them a gift, an offer of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that’s sacred between people.
Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (2026)
The poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821)
Of all epic heroes Odysseus is perhaps the most enduring, malleable and controversial. The director of the recent Odyssey film Christopher Nolan is neither the first, and nor will he be the last, to play with the myth of the man. No other character played a more formative role in Hellenic civilisation, and by extension our modern world.
The twin Greek epics of the Iliad and Odyssey are both attributed to Homer, a blind Ionian poet. The stories may well have been based on real events, but were originally oral poems, and as such would have been subject to constant embellishment or contraction. Based on a linguistic analysis, the text of the Iliad has been dated to 762 BCE. Most scholars assume the Odyssey was written by the same author. The poems are composed in dactylic hexameter – also known as heroic or epic meter – featuring six metrical feet per line. These epics, in particular the latter, are the primary sources for the character of Odysseus.
The Iliad recounts a series of episodes from the siege of Troy by a Greek army and involves multiple characters – including a relatively minor role for Odysseus – while the Odyssey focuses on the eponymous hero’s long homeward journey.
This essay proceeds from an engagement with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to Nolan’s depiction of Odysseus in the swashbuckling film. It also explores the evolution of the character in authors such as Sophocles, Dante Alighieri, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Constantine P. Cavafy, and refers to analysis from Laurens van der Post and Alasdair MacIntyre.
The widespread appeal of the Odysseus character played by Matt Damon in Nolan’s film perhaps reveals the kind of political leader many of us wish to see in the world today.
In a new twist, that seems contrary to Homer’s original account, Nolan’s Odysseus rejects total war, which is essential to a spiritual return to his home. He shows remorse for inventing the stratagem of the horse, which violated ‘all that’s ever sacred between people.’ The film’s inclusion, however, of Odysseus’ slaughter of his wife Penelope’s suitors – a seminal episode drawn from Homer’s original – undermines an otherwise conciliatory message.
A Different Kind of Warrior
The Iliad depicts a short period during the ten-year siege of the city of Troy in Asia Minor by a Greek army under the command of King Agamemnon, whose brother Menelaus’ wife Helen had been spirited away by Paris, a prince of Troy, after they fall madly in love. It leaves out key events, including Paris’ killing of the Greek hero Achilles with a poisoned arrow and the ultimate fall of the city.
Key episodes in the Iliad include an internecine feud between Agamemnon and Achilles the leading Greek champion; the killing of Patroclus the squire of Achilles by Hector, son of King Priam of Troy; the subsequent rage of Achilles, which accounts for the Trojan prince Hector, whose body he drags around the walls of Troy; and the visit of King Priam to Achilles, where the old king successfully pleads with Achilles to give up his son’s body for burial.
In the midst of the carnage we meet another Greek warrior, the wily and cerebral Odysseus, king of the small island of Ithaca. He is certainly a powerful warrior but does not merit comparison to the near-immortal Achilles. He performs diplomatic missions and mediates disputes. His circumspection and nous contrast with the wild rage of Achilles, who repudiates him, describing him as a man ‘who says one thing but hides another in his heart.’
Odysseus is treated to his own epic tale that takes place after the fall of Troy. The Odyssey is an account of the eponymous hero’s ten-year voyage home and its bloody aftermath. Over its course he faces diverse challenges that test his military prowess, intelligence and endurance. He emerges as heroic in a wider sense than the thoroughbred Achilles.
In an important episode Odysseus undertakes a formative journey to the underworld of Hades. There he meets his deceased mother Anticlea, the prophet Tiresias, and fallen comrades, including Achilles. Of particular significance is his encounter with the shade of King Agamemnon, who has been murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Agamemnon warns Odysseus to be wary of his wife Penelope’s intentions upon his return.
Education through the Epics
The Greeks looked on the Iliad as Homer’s major work, but the minor key of the Odyssey has been more enduring. The epics were taught systematically to the youth of Ancient Greece. From around the middle of the 6th century BCE a custom of reciting them was established in Athens. They seem to have occupied a position analogous to Christian scripture in the education of Europeans since Roman times.
In the words of Plato’s Socrates, Homer was ‘the poet who educated Greece’ (Rep. 606e 2). This was not meant as a compliment, however, as his great philosophical work The Republic condemns the Greek hero Achilles for willingly embracing a doomed fate.
The philosopher Alasdair McIntyre[i] explores the code by which the epic hero lives: ‘They derive conclusions about what to do next, but they are able to do so only because they already know independently of their reasoning what action it is they are required to perform.’
A warrior acts in conformity with how a warrior ought to behave rather than independently evaluating how he should act. He does not ask: ‘what should I do next?’, but rather: ‘what should I do next as a warrior’. The cosmic order can be transgressed, ‘but the consequences of transgression are themselves signs of that same order.’ According to MacIntyre, there is no individual arbitration of moral excellence, or rational determination.
To some extent, however, Odysseus transcends this allotted role. He cannot compete with the military prowess of Achilles, or even Hector on the Trojan side. In the Iliad he fears for his life on the battlefield, although he refuses to leave as ‘a true warrior stands his ground, to kill or die.’ Yet there is a rationale to this decision, a recognition of the crucial role of psychology in warfare. If a leader retreats from the battlefield what message does that send to his troops?
Odysseus also works in the background, at a remove from the front line. Just as during the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II NKVD units enforced discipline in the Red Army, Odysseus ensures that the Greek troops continue to fight. When Agamemnon tests his men’s courage by urging them to abandon the siege Odysseus steps in to restore order and discipline at the camp. In contrast, Achilles has sullenly retreated to his tent after falling out with Agamemnon over a slave girl.
Odysseus survives the long war and the numerous challenges of the journey home, through the exercise of all his faculties, including the use of deception for survival. He is a novel hero, who looks beyond conventional approaches, providing the prototype for all secret weapons, and the ultimate metaphor. This underhand strategy changes the terms on which the Trojan war is fought, after the limitation of Achilles’s brute strength is exposed.
The Wooden Horse
It is by Odysseus’ stratagem that Troy falls to the Greeks (although the Iliad takes place before the denouement and many of the details are actually drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, including the famous line: ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’). After ten years of stalemate Odysseus designs a wooden horse that is supposedly being left as a parting gift to the Trojans. The Greeks feign a retreat by taking to their ships. There remains, however, a substantial force of soldiers hidden inside the horse, including Odysseus.
The Trojans fall for the trap, despite the warning of the prophetess Cassandra, and bring the horse inside the city walls. After nightfall Greek soldiers climb out of the horse and open the gates of the city to their returned comrades. The city is unmercifully ransacked, its population killed, enslaved or doomed to exile.
The Trojans’ eyes are blind to the ruse. For this naivety, according to the cosmic order, they are punished. As Laurens van der Post[ii] puts it: ‘in Greek myth, legend and art, the villain is always the ignorance where it serves as representative of inner unawareness.’
Analogies might be drawn with the 2024 Israeli pager attacks against Hezbollah operatives, but the results of that were far less decisive. Maybe the point about an underhand attack of this nature is that unless it brings a decisive victory, the consequences may be worse in the long run for those who undertake it.
Contrary to Christopher Nolan’s recent version in which Matt Damon’s character regrets the use of the horse as a violation of hospitality, there is no clear evidence from Homer’s epic of Odysseus feeling regret. In the Nausicaa episode, Odysseus asks a bard to sing the story of the wooden horse. When the bard reaches a point where Odysseus is attacking the Trojans, Odysseus bursts into tears and the story stops. This account could be read in two ways. As ever with the character of Odysseus there is ambiguity.
By the late Hellenic period Odysseus’ cunning was already subject to censure. Thus, in Sophocles’s Philoctetes (409 BCE), Odysseus and Neoptolemus attempt to steal the master-archer Philoctetes’s bow of Heracles from the island of Lemnos, where he had been abandoned by the Greek army after a snake bite caused him to emit a noxious odour. A prophecy reveals that only this bow will win the war for the Greeks, but by now Philoctetes has grown to loath his countrymen, especially Odysseus.
The upright Neoptolemus is persuaded by Odysseus to participate in a subterfuge to ensnare the bow, but his conscience gets the better of him. He reveals the plan to Philoctetes and agrees to bring him back to Greece. Neoptolemus’s impending failure to deliver the bow is only averted through divine intervention, when the deified Heracles heals Philoctetes, and tells him to rejoin the Greek army, which he willingly does.
Roman Contempt
It was the Romans, especially Virgil the author of The Aeneid, who were most scathing about Odysseus’ subterfuge. Roman authors considered it unmanly for him to have gained an advantage over the Trojans (from whom they claimed descent) through deceit. Romans were contemptuous of Odysseus for relying on his wits rather than military prowess, and even pulling the wool over opponent’s eyes, as Odysseus does to the Cyclops, when he and his crew escape under the bellies of sheep.
Indeed, Odysseus’ deceitful ingenuity is best revealed in how he prevails against the Cyclops Polyphemus in Homer’s account, which differs from Nolan’s version. When asked his name Odysseus introduces himself as ‘Nobody.’ Consequently, when Polyphemus calls on his fellow Cyclops brothers for assistance after Odysseus has blinded him he shouts: ‘Nobody has attacked me.’ This allows Odysseus and his crew to escape.
The tragic flaw of pride is exposed only after he escapes. Odysseus feels compelled to reveal his identity to the Cyclops and jeer him. This enrages Cyclops’s father, Poseidon the god of the sea. Odysseus’ conduct may attract criticism. On the other hand, if great deeds remain unsung how are they to live on?
Upright Roman morality seemed to exclude even the value of the white lie. Yet, this may be the only means of resolving an intractable conflict. Sadly, we cannot assume divine intervention will arrive as a reward for virtue.
A haughty Roman attitude arrived from a position of unrivalled military strength. By the reign of Caesar Augustus, when Virgil wrote the Aeneid (between 19BCE and 29BCE), Rome was so dominant that opponents were often forced to dissimulate.
The example of Odysseus might suggest that in war, as in love, there are no rules. He reveals that cunning, can be superior to strength, and that even giants may be defeated by stratagems. In politics this might be regarded as Machiavellian, an approach which is, at times, economical with the truth.
Ought we condemn Odysseus for lying to save his skin, or using a ruse to conclude a battle? There are times, surely, when a falsehood is a necessary evil. Nonetheless, the character of Odysseus is ambiguous, perhaps explaining why storytellers have been inclined to reinvent him so often.
His approach bears the imprint of the right hemisphere of the brain, standing outside his immediate frame and conceiving new possibilities. As well as understanding the motivations of others when he resolves quarrels between factions.
Notwithstanding McIntyre’s assessment of the mechanistic nature of the warrior code, it seems conceivable that the independent reasoning that emerges in the late Hellenic period to give us philosophy is linked to the original mind of Homer’s Odysseus. In this respect, the Odysseus of the epics is like an Old Testament figure prefiguring the New.
Will-to-Power
In Odysseus we also see aspects of a Nietzschean, male, will-to-power that impels him to pursue adventure. Ultimately, however, his instinct is to return home to his wife, representing a return to the feminine. Laurens van der Post suggests that: ‘It is precisely because the journey of Odysseus and his reunion with the eternal feminine that is Penelope, is the blueprint of the Greek story that made Greece, I believe, more creative than Rome.’
Van der Post contrasts Odysseus with the character of Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, who rejects the feminine, having left his first wife to the Greeks, choosing to rescue his aged father from Troy instead. In the Aeneid Aeneas also rejects the romantic overtures of Dido – and his own feelings for her – who commits suicide in despair at being abandoned.
Yet, arguably, Odysseus does display a distrust of the feminine when he accepts Agamemnon’s advice in Hades to be wary of Penelope. This leads him to meet her at first in disguise.
One may also feel uncomfortable at the slaughter of the suitors that sought Penelope’s hand in marriage after his disappearance. Odysseus is permitted to sow his wild oats while on his voyage, while Penelope remains chaste for that period. This is quite different to the relationship between Queen Maeve and her consort Aillil in the ancient Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. Maeve chooses her husband precisely because he will not be jealous of her affairs.
Odysseus’ nature reflects a question posed by Hermann Melville in Moby Dick (1851): ‘Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?’ Odysseus exemplifies that striving, will-to-power in pursuit of adventure. He overcomes his fears, yet is also on a homeward quest to Ithaca, where his wife and son await. He is the footloose, randy sailor, but also the loyal, family man. The modern Greek poet Constantine Cavaky evokes this duality in his poem Ithaka (1911):
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Odysseus in the Divine Comedy
In the great poem of the Middle Ages Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (completed c.1321) we encounter a forlorn Odysseus in the Inferno, where he has offended against the sins of fraud, pride and vain curiosity. Dante adds a layer to the Classical myth in which a restless Odysseus recalls how, on returning to his native Ithaca, he found:
not sweetness of a son, not reverence
for an ageing father, not the debt of love
I owed Penelope to make her happy
could quench deep in myself the burning wish
to know the world and have experience
of all man’s vices, of all human worth.
In Dante’s version, Odysseus persuades his crew to embark on a final voyage to a ‘world they called unpeopled’. For five months they sail until, ‘there appeared a mountain shape, darkened / by distance, that arose to endless heights,’ which was the mount of Purgatory.
Alas, ‘celebrations soon turned into grief’, as a whirlwind wrecked the fleet, sending Odysseus and his crew into the deep. The hero, who dared travel beyond the accepted horizons of his world is doomed to an excruciating Hell, even if there is a suspicion that Dante admires his chutzpah.
Odysseus’ sorry fate reflects the Roman bias against Odysseus’ deceitful unmanliness, but also a medieval tendency to fetter originality, and promote superstition, deterring voyages to uncharted lands.
Thus, Carl Jung argued: ‘that if one wanted to fix a precise moment at which the Renaissance began, it would be the day when the Italian poet Petrarch decided to defy superstition and climbed a mountain in the Alps, just for the sake of reaching its summit.’ In the Renaissance that unfolded after Petrarch, Europeans opened their eyes to new possibilities, thereby discovering new continents.
Greed certainly prompted, and religious extremism justified, the voyages of the sixteenth century, but the explorers also displayed admirable qualities – just like Odysseus – including a willingness to set aside a fear, and embrace the unknown, the strange and the exotic.
These challenges demanded inventiveness. To travel into a head wind required breakthroughs in nautical technology, just as breaching the Trojan defences called for new ideas. Thus, a lighter, more mobile craft, the caravel, was developed in Portugal under Henry the Navigator capable of sailing into a headwind. Innovations occurred because adventurous spirits imagined new pathways previously considered impassable. This came about through imaginative leaps. Inspiration became a necessity, and through perspiration, engendered invention.
Despite the appalling genocides and destruction of natural environments, the repudiation by those explorers of orthodoxy retains a heroic dimension. In the Inferno Odysseus does founder, but we may still laud his ambition and rejection of pre-conceived limitations, which Dante considered hubristic. Any innovation also demands an interrogation of ideas that have long held sway, a rejection of preconception, and the embrace of the unknown, like a bird taking flight for the first time in its evolution.
‘Roaming With a Hungry Heart’
Five hundred years after Dante’s Divine Comedy, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote another poem ‘Ulysses’ (1842) in which he develops the epic tale further. Reflecting the Victorian buccaneering spirit, Ulysses is ‘always roaming with a hungry heart.’ Ensconced in Ithaca he bemoans:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!’
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought
As a good Victorian innovator, he is ‘yearning in desire’ to ‘To follow knowledge like a sinking star / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.’
Once again, a danger is apparent in a compulsion to roam and innovate – consider the destructive weapons developed during the twentieth century – but to “rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” is to fail to realise our full potential.
Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus v. Homer’s
A fascinating feature of Christopher Nolan’s take on Odysseus is the character’s ultimate rejection of the total war approach of King Agamemnon, who is portrayed as an utterly ruthless leader willing even to sacrifice his own daughter for victory. This does reflect Homer’s characterisation of Agamemnon in the Iliad in which he chides his brother Menelaus for a lack of genocidal intent:
why are you so chary of taking men’s lives? Did the Trojans treat you as handsomely as that when they stayed in your house? No; we are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs – not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.
In Homer’s account it is not Odysseus, however, who offers an alternative approach to total war, but another Greek warrior, the exemplary hero Diomedes. Like Odysseus, he is not the greatest warrior (a role reserved for Achilles), but he exemplifies the chivalry of his caste.
Encountering Glaucus son of Hippolochus from the Trojan side on the battlefield, Diomedes asks him about his lineage, whereupon he discovers their grandfathers were friendly with one another. Contravening Agamemnon’s approach he says:
So let us avoid each other’s spears, even in the melee, since there are plenty of the Trojans and their famous allies for me to kill, if I have the luck and speed to catch them, and plenty of Achaeans for you to slaughter, if you can. And let us exchange our armour, so that everyone may know that our grandfathers’ friendship.
Diomedes’ magnanimity does not go unrewarded by the gods. Homer tells us that ‘Zeus the son of Cronos must have robbed Glaucus of his wits, for he exchanged with Diomedes golden armour for bronze, a hundred oxen’s worth for the value of nine.’
This gives rise to the concept of a ‘Diomedian swap,’ where the reward for magnanimity is a favourable exchange. Moreover, it also suggests that even in time of war, friends on opposing sides can remain friends.
There is an internal inconsistency, however, with Christopher Nolan’s depiction of Odysseus seemingly coming to terms with the trauma of unleashing total war through the deception of the horse. He goes on to exact total revenge against the suitors that have gathered in his house in pursuit of his wife Penelope! Not a single one of them is spared his wrath.
Nolan’s contradictory portrayal perhaps yields another insight for our own time, when politicians talk of peace, but act otherwise. This tendency is writ large in the conduct of U.S. President Donald Trump who claimed he would be an anti-war president but then launched an unprovoked attack on Iran. It has also, arguably, been evident in the conduct of European leaders unwilling to compromise with Russia. Thus, the age-old battle between East and West, adumbrated at Troy, continues to rage.
The closing line of Nolan’s film perhaps unwittingly acknowledges this internal contradiction: ‘A new dawn will break over the darkening world and our mistakes will once again be forgotten.’
In creating his own compelling version of the character Nolan is in good company. Odysseus continues to evolve, and this latest film acquaints a new generation with the ambiguous hero.
[i] See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame University Press, 1988.
[ii] See Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, The Hogarth Press Ltd London, 1975.
