Soujurn on The Odyssey; from Oral Tradition to IMAX

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The Police, one of the most popular and influential rock bands of the late ‘70s through the ‘80s, has a line which either perplexes listeners or becomes glossed over by those without the initiative to reference dictionaries and encyclopedias. Written by frontman Sting, their most popular song from their last album was “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” and it includes the following refrain:

You consider me the young apprentice
Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis

Scylla was, in Greek mythology, a many-headed monster, snatching sailing men from their ships, even the ships themselves, and often seen as representing rock formations known for endangering Mediterranean navigation. Its counterpart, the Charybdis, was a whirlpool which similarly made treading waters dangerous, and may have been an illusion to the dangers of unpredictable tides. Literally — despite the apparent anthropomorphisms — a rock and a hard place.

The origin of these lines, and these stories from the ancient world, come to us from the same progenitor as the phrases “wine-dark sea” and “siren song,” the oral-then-written traditions of the (supposedly) blind bard, Homer. His twin epics The Iliad and The Odyssey are long, poetic works. Emerging from a series of oral traditions before eventually assuming written form, the earliest versions were sung by itinerant singers in the late Mycenaean and later Archaic Greek worlds. Their length is roughly the same as Christendom’s later New Testament, though not quite as long and meandering as several Hindu epics.

Recently, in a necropolis tomb in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, a fragmented copy of The Iliad was found ensconced nearly 1600 years ago, although the poem itself was already at least a millennium old¹. And a few years before that, 13 verses from The Odyssey were found on a plaque in the mainland Greek city of Olympia².

Often in Classical Studies curriculum, Homer’s epics were used to teach Classical (pre-Koine) Greek. Their influences on us also come down to the commonly-heard quips “Trojan horse,” “face that launched a thousand ships” and “Achilles heel,” meaning a particularly sensitive cause of someone’s downfall. Even in ancient times, Homer was influential, being the background foundation most of the Graeco-Roman world knew the way Western Civilization now knows and considers foundational the Old and New Testaments.

The rhetorical polymath Quintilian places Homer (who they believed was a single person) on a high shelf: “…Homer provides the model and the origin of every department of eloquence. … He is at once luxuriant and concise, charming and grave, marvelous in his fullness and in his brevity, supreme not only in poetic but in oratorical excellence”³. Among the more controversial arguments in contemporary New Testament scholarship, Dennis R. MacDonald (amongst others) gives several incontrovertible examples of both The Iliad and The Odyssey used in the composition of several parts of those holy works, with direct utilization of both the words and sentence structure being direct borrowings. In Acts (12) Peter walks past his guards while guided by an angel, reflecting Priam doing the same, and later (20), Paul’s emotional farewell to the elders at Ephesus reflects Hector’s tearful farewell to Andromache. One of MacDonald’s books centers entirely on Homer’s influence on the first-written gospel, Mark, and the author of Luke-Acts⁴.

We should not be surprised by these wide influences. A section of the library of The University of Chicago website details the worldwide manuscript compilation of Homer’s corpus. Debates in literary, paleographic, epigraphic and philological journals publish entries in over a dozen languages debating issues to this day about such inquiries as manuscript priority and whether scribes from the 9th Century correctly copied arcane Attic Greek declensions. And the visual arts have repeatedly returned to Homer, including one of my favorite paintings, ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus’ by J.M.W. Turner (1820s), which I have used in this post image.

Elsewhere in the art world, Iliad and Odyssey have both contributed themes and were summarily perused by college and touring company stage plays⁵. Orson Welles produced a play in London whose premise was a mash-up of a few Classical themes, mainly cast with Homeric elements. One online journal about the single subject of stage plays adapted from the Classical world has over 1000 entries for “Homer”⁶.

So of course there have been, in the television and cinema of many countries, visual adaptations of varying quality. As far back as 1911, the Italian L’Odissea was a release at the Turin World’s Fair, planned to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Italy⁷. Such luminaries as Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn starred in the 1954 Italian version, with the names being changed to their Latinized version, thus Odysseus becomes Ulysses, and Poseidon becomes Neptune.

The Odyssey version I’m most familiar with was an acclaimed 2-part adaptation on NBC from 1997, with Francis Ford Coppola as a producer with an all-star cast, clocking in at just over 3 hours. As Odysseus, Armand Assante has – to quote a historian on Youtube – “a haunted sadness in [the] eyes”⁸ Of the versions I’ve seen, this is the best blend of the heroes’ journey myth, one I’m sure Joseph Campbell would have been fond of. Our hero has a non-corpus moment of hubris, disavowing the intervention of the gods, leading Poseidon to set the stage for his revenge.

There is, now, a book on these visual variations. Gilberto Neri, film scholar and cinemacentric author, has given us The Odyssey Before Nolan: Homer’s Epic on Screen from Silent Films to Contemporary Cinema (released Feb., 2026, Coppell, TX). The book also covers parody adaptations, such as O Brother, Where Art Thou?, from 2000, by the Coen Brothers at the top of their game. Here, the very loose adaptation has a giant played by John Goodman, who sits at a picnic with our wandering gang, wearing an eye patch, thus signifying Polyphemus, and the revenge of Poseidon becomes exemplified by a dam burst.

— & —

And now, that cultural organism which never stops evolving has a grand, sweeping vision from one of the best-known and most-beloved directors in the modern day.

Christopher Nolan’s version is simply marvelous, and it compresses the stories most important to our narrative by using a Tarantinoesque, non-linear plotline. We do not see, for instance, the Fall of Troy itself until nearly half the runtime is consumed, and the effects on Odysseus are subtly the effect seen in the Maurya Emperor Aśoka’s disillusion after the Conquest of the Kalinga; heartbroken for the bloodshed he helmed. Aśoka converted to Buddhism and vegetarianism. Odysseus carries with him, in the haunting vision of a victim, the embodiment of Athena. Her vision becomes a bounded, forever at his side symbol of remorse, regret. Themes are symbolically exposed, hovering between duty and honor, hubris and dread.

Some of the technical criticism are fair, such as stylistic leanings; others are simply worthy of the troll bin. When asked by the sole inhabitant of a town Odysseus’ crew land at to ask for supplies, the town is abandoned, and the lone elderly man asks “Aren’t you the Sea Peoples?” Odysseus replies “We are Greek.” No, the concept predates the widespread Panhellenic identity familiar from the Classical period. The Trojan War happened during the Mycenaean period, when the Linear B script was in its infancy, and people in what is now Athens were little past their hunter/gatherer stage of civil development.

Modern white supremacists, out of the woodwork due to both the MAGA era and the prevalence of social media giving voice to anyone with a cell phone, predictably have raised their rancor over Helen being cast with a dark-skinned actress. Though they are typically calling this non-historical, such meanderings are a post-modern hurling of prejudices into an ancient world where such structural distinctions do not seem to have existed⁹. A better understanding would be that complexion-based xenophobia in its modern form is a reflection of a world structured on both the Doctrine of Discovery and Colonialism. Separations in these far-ancient lands were most often based on social status, heritage, klan and culture. Memnon, king of the Ethiopians, is in both Homeric tales, and described as both beautiful and the son of the goddess of the Dawn.

The helmets are another point of contention, one I’m more inclined to consider a valid critique, but not for the reasons you may think. Here, we need to jump back to the history of the oral tradition being finally penned onto parchment. So, consider placing yourself in the distant past, where little actual writing existed, and when it did, it was used for temple administration, royal edicts and trade. Oral traditions were currency, and traveling bards, having memorized one or both tales, sang the rhythmic verses to crowds for food, drink and hospitality. The distinctly repetitive phrasings were intentional, functional tools which aided memorization and precise repetition, fitting into the framework of a poetic style called dactylic hexameter, with six rhythmic units per line, and only a few variations of styles within those lines. We might be more familiar with iambic pentameter, a stylization used commonly by Shakespeare, which both differs in structure and allows more variation.

Eventually, near the 8th – 7th centuries BCE, with the flourishing of the purely Greek alphabet, there most likely were written forms being transcribed and copied. These eventually showed up in the Panathenaic festivals (6th C.). From there, the Alexandrian grammarian hypothesis takes over. Scholars mostly active in Alexandria, in Ptolemaic Egypt, set about creating a creedal corpus to consider one version from the variations in both written and oral forms. Neri sums it up:

Their main task was to collect, compare and establish reliable texts of the great authors of past – first and foremost Homer, but also Hesiod, the lyric poets, the tragedians, and prose writers. Among them we can recall Zenodotus of Ephesus (3rd century BCE), the first librarian of Alexandria, who produced one of the earliest critical editions of the Iliad and Odyssey; Aristophanes of Byzantium (3rd-2nd century BCE), who systematized the use of accents and punctuation; and Aristarchus of Samothrace (2nd century BCE), considered the greatest ancient philologist, who established an extremely authoritative Homeric text and developed a rigorous method of textual criticism¹⁰.

They did this by comparing manuscripts, debating spurious verses and scarce words, and passages considered problematic; thus laying the foundations of the scientific discipline of philology. This seems to also be the time such inconsistencies as helmet styles crept into the corpus. Thus, during the throne-room battle when Telemachus throws down from the armory helmets to help the beleaguered defenders below (Bk 22, ls 110, 123-4), they are described as bronze helmets with a crest of horse-hair. These were the stylizations more common in the world in which the writings were formalized, as the helmet of boar’s tusk plates from Iliad (Bk 10) are far more likely accurate of the time in which the war occurred¹¹.

Other criticisms seem to ignore the stories are mostly fable (like Circe’s transformations of the crew into swine). In arguing against the film’s portrayal of the Laestrygonians, the argument is that they are portrayed as too large, or with too much metal armor (which is not in the tale). Though the armor is not original, and is an interpreted stylization, their size is well visualized, as the very words include “they found his wife there, massive as a mountaintop,” and the attacking horde “a countless host of Giants not men”¹².

Yet, despite the petty nitpicking, not realizing the film is not a documentary, nobody seems to have pointed out the biggest singular historical inaccuracy: the film, set in the Mycenaean world of roughly 1200 BCE, is in English.

— & —

As Neri notes in his book, which covers 2 dozen adaptations, the difficulties of bringing to cinematic life songs originally structured in dactylic hexameter are massive. The writers and creative artists must balance and blend — taking out and inserting in — elements to keep an audience engaged. This could be creating a non-creedal argument with the gods. It could be changing the structure, not including Circe or Calypso, and many adaptations left out entirely the Scylla and Charybdis. But the journey, 10 years from Troy to Ithaca, is only about 1/3 of the saga, yet the aspect for which it is best known. In the original poetic works, that journey is told in the form of a long flashback. Not one adaptation acknowledges this, and treats the story as a (with Nolan “mostly”) continuous narrative. The tone could be too “talky,” a complaint of Douglas’ 1968 version. It could also entirely ignore the gods, as does 2024’s The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes as the haggard hero.

The original stories we have to draw from, which also includes Vergil’s The Aeneid (written c. 20-19 BCE) simply present too much story to make a faithful adaptation. One audiobook is 14 hours in length, roughly the same as Fassbinder’s adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz. What to take in and what to leave out becomes the art of sculpting a figure from a block of marble; the art lies not just in what you carve, but in the precise chips you let fall away to reveal the masterpiece hidden within. Three thousand years after anonymous singers first carried these stories from banquet hall to banquet hall, we still reshape them for each generation. The laborious work of crafting the story becomes, when all else is said and done, a tippy-toed pirouette between a rock and a hard place.

— # 33 —

1. https://nypost.com/2026/05/22/science/experts-stunned-after-uncovering-homers-iliad-on-egyptian-mummy-in-unprecedented-find/
   
2. 
   https://currentepigraphy.org/2018/07/12/tablet-with-lines-from-odyssey-found-in-greece/
3. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, Volume IV, books 9-10, Loeb Classical Library, Donald A. Russell, trs., p-411-12
4. The Gospels and Homer: Imitations of Greek Epic in Mark and Luke-Acts, Dennis R. MacDonald, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. This is part 1 of his 2 part series The New Testament and Greek Literature, with Luke and Vergil: Imitations of Classical Greek Literature being the second
5. An interesting summarization can be found at
   https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/2762/the-iliad-the-odyssey-and-all-of-greek-mythology-in-99-minutes-or-less
6. 
   https://www.didaskalia.net/
7. Interestingly, the Wikipedia page for the movie lists it as the 3rd known adaptation, but I have yet to find anything else about them. See
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Odissea_(1911_film), which includes a link to the 1911 film
8. 
   https://youtube.com/@Underrated-Cinema
9. For a better understanding see, for instance, Hall, Jonathan M., Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture, 2002, University of Chicago Press, found at
   https://a.co/d/07q7LoKm
10. Neri, Gilberto, The Odyssey Before Nolan: Homer’s Epic on Screen from Silent Films to Contemporary Cinema, independently published, 2026, Coppell, TX, pp. 9-10
11. For an example, see :
    https://www.celticwebmerchant.com/en-int/blogs/antiquity-romans/greek-helmets-from-antiquity
12. See the translation online here:
    https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey10.php#anchor_Toc90267907 . Translation by A. S. Kline, 2004

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