I have been a professional Homerist for over two decades. I have spent a majority of my life thinking, talking, teaching, and writing about Homer. Yet, nothing prepared me for the intensity of interest in Homer’s Odyssey nor the blinding pace of the debates about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation, The Odyssey.
Nolan’s film grossed just over $1 billion USD in global box office revenue in three weeks of release, and reactions to it have been dominating news broadcasts, podcasts, and social media for months now. Some of the debates are proxy battles in larger culture wars, and there’s a great deal of posturing and opining about Homer’s (and Nolan’s) historical and cultural positions.
However, many of the discussions are well informed by antiquity and include critical interpretations of both Homer’s Odysseus and Nolan’s modern adaptation. The discussions are truly global, not restricted to the Anglosphere or the ‘West’.
Whether you think of the movie as an adaptation or a divergent reinterpretation of Homer’s epic, the real victory of Nolan’s film is the questions it has stimulated.
Audiences on social media are deeply engaged and addressing the finer points of translation and adaptation. Such as the translation of the traditional epithet “polytropos”. Or, Nolan’s inclusion of the historical Sea Peoples in his movie. Multiple translations of the epic have become international best-sellers. More people are reading Homer than at any time in known history.
Whether you think of the movie as an adaptation or a divergent reinterpretation of Homer’s epic, the real victory of Nolan’s film is the questions it has stimulated. Nolan’s Odyssey has energised a global public conversation and has us arguing about where Homer came from, what heroism is, and how stories shift their meanings from one culture to another. One of the most “Homeric” things about the film is its capacity to inspire and sustain debate.
Many people think of the Homeric epics as coming at the beginning of a literary canon. For ancient audiences, however, the Odyssey and its companion, the Iliad, came at the end of oral traditions. Homer adapted traditional narratives and transformed them into provocations for his audiences.
Homer invites his readers, for example, to take a more critical look at legendary scenes like the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus. In his version, Odysseus’ men try to stop the creature from entering the cave and from bragging about his savagery on his way out. It is his boast that leads Polyphemus’ father to curse their homecoming. Nolan joins this tradition by making the famous Trojan Horse trick the reason Odysseus and the Greeks run afoul of divine law, bringing an end to their “age of Bronze.”
We are starving for shared frameworks within which our differences have meaning. In an era of disputable facts and AI-driven fictions, we long for substantive discussions about creative works that take us beyond the present moment.
Debates about how appropriately Homer adapts from tradition have raged since the 6th century BCE when pre-Socratic philosophers like Xenophanes and Heraclitus criticised the Homeric representation of the gods as sacrilegious. In the 5th century BCE, poets revisited epic themes and plots on the stage. Odysseus is a manipulator in Sophocles’ Philoctetes and a political operative in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. Plato returns to Homer in the Republic; he asks whether people understand allegory well enough to cope with Homer’s epics. Socrates ends the dialogue by describing Odysseus’s choice to reincarnate as just a regular guy with approval.
What Nolan gets right about epic is that Homer makes us take a closer look at ourselves. The intensity of the debate about Nolan’s Odyssey shows that people long for serious discussions. Just as in antiquity, people today do want to engage with challenging literature and art.
We are starving for shared frameworks within which our differences have meaning. In an era of disputable facts and AI-driven fictions, we long for substantive discussions about creative works that take us beyond the present moment.
I wonder whether the critical response of classicists is helping or hurting our cause. How do we frame discussion of the film in a way that brings new audiences into the discussion about Homer? Are we demonstrating the kinds of character we believe humanistic study should make? Are we engaging to grab some slice of fame or some crumb from the banquet of money set out around the movie?
The irony of a billion-dollar film and culture industry is that it speaks to audiences increasingly alienated from the institutions that could help them engage with their own questions in depth. After generations of relentless focus on STEM and shrinking public and private support for the humanities, people long for discussions about history, meaning, belonging, and what makes us human.
Homer makes us take a harder look at ourselves. Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey shows us there’s a hunger for more. What are we going to do to feed it?
* Joel P. Christensen is provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the Graduate Center, where he is also professor of Classics. He previously taught at Brandeis University and is the author of several books on Homer, most recently Storylife: On Epic, Language, and Living Things (Yale, 2025). He is a regular contributor to Neos Kosmos.
