News

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

“And tell me too why you weep and lament thus bitterly when you hear told what things befell the Argives and Ilium. These things were the doing of the gods; they spun for mortals this thread of doom to become a theme for generations hereafter.” 

Homer, Odyssey 8, translated by Walter Shewring 

Every era gets the Odyssey it deserves, a Washington Post headline announced last month. Ours belongs to Christopher Nolan. 

Nolan casts Odysseus as a tender yet fierce hero who cannot get home until he has untangled the psychological damage wrought by violence he both committed and witnessed. The film looks like the ancient world and yet departs from the text in myriad ways. 

“The beauty of these myths and these stories and these old texts is in the adaptations and in the ways they can be morphed into different things as time evolves,” said Carolina López-Ruiz, Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Mythologies at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Chair of the Department of Classics. “We call them classics because there is something of universal beauty and value that has lasted for centuries.”

López-Ruiz studies how religion and culture moved around the ancient Mediterranean. She talked with Criteria about what Nolan’s film does with a poem roughly 2,700 years old. 

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Before the film opened, you told UChicago News that an adaptation could modernize the gods into abstraction or keep them fully Homeric, visible and quarreling, and that you preferred the second. Nolan’s film does both. We see apparitions of Athena, but Poseidon is only a roiling sea. Does that work?

The original audience of the Odyssey imagined gods as bigger, marked by extraordinary physicality. In ancient reliefs and other objects, where a person makes an offering to a divine being, the deity appears maybe two heads taller. And in the epic poems, the gods are said to be radiant. There is some kind of shine to them. Athena's eyes are glimmering.

Nolan’s gods did not come across as epic enough for me. But I was looking at it through my own expectations. When it is a text you teach, you are more predisposed to be critical, and nothing is going to match. It was an adventure, for sure, but it did not quite transmit that awe-inspiring feeling. By trying to make the story feel closer to what a human on such a journey would actually experience—battered and lonely and troubled—maybe it loses a little bit of the magic. Homer’s Odysseus was also curious, arrogant, witty, and insatiable for adventure, among other things.

In a story for Today,  Joel Christensen, a professor of classics at CUNY, criticized the film for reducing Zeus's law to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," saying ancient hospitality is not the golden rule. From where you sit, what is xenia actually? 

There is something universal about the golden rule. I am sure it appears in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and elsewhere. If there is one universal ethical rule, it is probably that, and some of it underlies the idea of xenia, of guest friendship.

In Greek culture, xenia becomes a sacred law, encoded in a particular way. There is an epithet of Zeus that expresses this: Zeus Xenios, Zeus of guest friendship, or Zeus of foreigners, because xenos is “foreigner, stranger.” It is part of unwritten law, religious law.

Is the "stranger who might be a god” shared beyond Greek culture? And to speak directly to your scholarship, how did Homer's epics contribute to exchange among Greek, Phoenician, and Near Eastern traditions?

This is the hardest question. To say how common the motif is would require me to do some research. I could think of the Hebrew Bible episode with Abraham and Sarah and the strangers, or Emmaus in the New Testament, but there might be instances in Egyptian or Mesopotamian literature; I just could not think of a famous one. So this may be more common in Greek mythology where gods very often appear disguised as people. But I may be missing something.

I love the larger question, though. The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad has a very good parallel in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And the story of Odysseus, the king who travels and fights monsters, loses friends, goes to the underworld (a lone female character tells him how), and ends up learning some kind of wisdom, is also the story of Gilgamesh.

The more similarity there is among various cultures’ storm gods, love goddesses, and sea gods, and in how people sacrifice to them and tell stories about them, the easier it becomes to adopt more features across their mythologies. The Canaanite storm god is called the Cloud Rider. Maybe you pick up that epithet for Zeus, and they are both cloud riders. So much of what characterizes the gods in Greek epic runs from the Canaanites to Mesopotamia and, to some degree, the Hebrew Bible: the vocabulary, the episodes, the ways they express their power. The epics are repositories for adaptations from other people's motifs, and at the same time they transmit those new versions onward.

The film's climax turns on Calypso telling Odysseus that to get home he must let go of control and accept Poseidon's punishment. That it will take faith and surrender. Faith is not obviously a Homeric category. What is the film reaching for? 

In the film, the idea that this is all a psychological process, that Odysseus has to let go of whatever is holding him back, including his grudge with the gods, and then Poseidon will take him home, is totally new. It is not in the Homeric poem. Poseidon is never helping Odysseus.

But the concept of faith, of "just trust in the gods," I do not see it in Homer.

The origin of the word faith is pistis, but that meant something more like “hope” and “trust.” There is trust in the poem, but it is trust in fate. The will of Zeus, or the will of the gods, is going to be accomplished no matter what you do. This overlaps a bit with the modern construction of faith, but it is a matter of knowing that the gods, and the Moirai, the goddesses also called the Fates, have laid a future out for you, and that you cannot overrule. In some cases, not even Zeus can.

Poseidon's grudge against Odysseus might look petty and personal. It is not. Odysseus has a pattern of being a bit too arrogant, of challenging the gods, and of transgressing divine law, for instance when he boasts against the Cyclops, Poseidon’s son. That is not faith. That is hubris. 

Nolan's Calypso is a woman on an island. In the poem, she is a goddess with something specific to offer. What does that cost?

What bothered me a bit is that it is not clear she is a goddess. But she is. Maybe they are taking the standpoint of the hero, who is not sure, the same as with Athena (Odysseus knows her; other characters do not when she takes another form).

Because of that choice, the audience misses the important point that she offers him immortality. He could have stayed on that island and never died. He chooses his family and Ithaca instead. All of that is lost because Nolan is trying to make the story more human in scale.

So is this the Odyssey we need right now?

I think the film does speak to the modern audience, and I am very happy that a lot of people are watching it and will become curious about the myths, religion, and Homer.

Pop Religion is a series from the Divinity School asking scholars to respond to both overt and subtle religious currents in popular culture.   

Read More Pop Religion:

• Two Nations in One Womb: Professor Abimbola Adelakun on Is God Is, Destiny, Sin, and the Religious Imagination of Black Rage

• Outside of History: 'Marty Supreme' and the American Dream with Professor Sarah Hammerschlag

• Hunger and Thirst: Embodied Religion in The Testament of Ann Lee with Professor William Schultz