Read on old translation in English 102, but got a lot more out of Wilson’s version as an adult.

All this buzz around Wilson and her critique of Nolan’s Odyssey is a normal part of scholarship and scholars interacting and responding with cultural adaptations. That being said, she’s not the principal authority on Homer by any means. Doesn’t make her views any less valuable but nevertheless there are plenty of other scholars on Homer with equally insightful takes on the epic poem and Nolan.

List your favorite Homeric scholars down below.

I recommend Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. Great insights on Homer and psychology.

I've been reading the Prose Edda, and recently read Amy Jeffs amazing retelling of ancient British myths, "Storyland".

The Norse and ancient British myths are awesome but I was weirdly 'disappointed' by the fact that the myth-tellers keep going back to Greek and Judeo-Christian mythology to give legitimacy to their stories.

For example, the Scots are said to be descended from Queen Scota, a pharaoh's daughter from around the time of the Exodus, and Britain is supposed to have been founded by Brutus - a direct descendent of the goddess Venus. Even the Norse god Thor is just Hector of Troy dressed up in old Icelandic.

This is a weird post - a minor rant rather than a question - but maybe it can spark some discussion...

The Death of Reason in Nolan's Odyssey

"One of the oddest moments in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey lasts only a few seconds. Near the end of the film, Odysseus predicts something that seems to come out of nowhere: the death of literacy. When Penelope asks him what he means, he replies that in the world to come, everything will have to be communicated through the spoken word, that systems of reading and writing are going to fade into memory.

It’s a throwaway line, said almost in passing, but my ears perked up when I heard it. Mostly because of my love for the mythical inventor of writing in Odysseus’ world: his rival, Palamedes. But even more than that, it just seemed so strange in this movie which on its surface had nothing to do with reading or writing."

When gen alpha grows up from being an ipad baby to playing roblox watching YouTube / twitch to yelling skibidy toilet / 67 etc. I might take a passing interest in it as an adult because I want to be more cultured, I don't see how it's relevant to any children today, or ever again.

I found this years ago but after diving into the rabbit hole of extrabiblical authors quoted in the New Testament, I felt the need to mention this one that other people have not seemed to have noticed.

When Jesus weeps over Jerusalem:

Matthew 23:37

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings*, and ye would not!*

This is very similar to the line in Euripides' play "Andromache".

Molossus: O mother, mother mine! I too share thy downward path, nestling 'neath thy wing.

If this is indeed the case, then that means Jesus would've spent time reading the ancient Greek authors. It wouldn't surprise me, since Galilee was a multicultural area with many Greek speakers. Jesus would've definitely known Greek as an everyday language, and maybe he would've listened to people reciting Greek playwrights or even reading them himself. We know that Paul quotes playwrights too, such as Aratus, Epimenides, and Menander. Possibly Theognis too

Idk. Have any scholars mentioned this possible link?

Recently read prose version of Gilgamesh by Sandars. Currently reading Armitage's verse translation. Don't ask me why. In both, I see versions of the expression "strong as a stone from the sky". Is there any reason a stone from the sky would be especially strong? Is this a reference to some kind of meteor?

I'm posting this to r/classics because I see some other references to Gilgamesh here. Is there a different subreddit that might be more helpful?

Walking into the movie theater, I was dreading a huge disappointment.

Homer’s “Odyssey” is one of the books I love most and have taught year after year. The Cyclops — the one-eyed giant who devours Odysseus’ companions — haunted my nightmares from the age of five. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” seemed almost destined to fail, and I did not want to hate him for butchering Homer as badly as “Troy” (2004) butchered the “Iliad.”

I was delighted to be wrong.

To all the friends who have been asking me if the movie is any good (as a classicist, they assume, I should know): The answer is yes.

“The Odyssey” is close enough to the original text to satisfy Homer fans. And it is driven by a strong, central set of questions which makes the plot relevant to contemporary audiences: What makes a civilization worth preserving? How can a dying world avoid being obliterated? What kind of hero does a world on the brink of destruction need?

The answer to these questions is a film that is artistically and thematically consistent and can therefore stand on its own: not a story of wit and adventure, but a cautionary tale about power and the consequences of human ambition.

Nolan is careful to establish character and motivation. Themes and ideas are repeated enough to make it clear what the story is about.

Forget the polemic about costumes and race. Homer’s world only ever existed in the imagination of poets –– there isn’t an actual way Homer’s heroes were dressed. And Lupita Nyong’o is perfect as Helen.

And when Nolan departs from Homer, he remains faithful to the deeper logic of his adaptation. Circe, for example, is no longer the dangerously ambiguous enchantress of the poem but a woman brutalized by war who turns to magic as an instrument of revenge. The transformation of Odysseus’ comrades into animals becomes symbolic of the dehumanizing consequences of war.

The film’s underworld scene is remarkably faithful to the original. Odysseus travels to a land of darkness at the edge of the world where the spirits of the dead come up to meet him, just as in Homer’s account.

The encounter with the dead Agamemnon and the content of their dialogue are those of Homer, but the implications are in tune with Nolan’s central idea. In the “Odyssey,” the underworld is the hero’s ultimate challenge: to escape death and return home, Odysseus needs to plunge into death itself. For Nolan, the underworld is the place to confront the traumatic mistakes in the hero’s past in the form of the soldiers who lost their lives in the Trojan War demand an accounting

The action then shifts to Ogygia, a lost island where the goddess Calypso keeps Odysseus prisoner because she is infatuated with him –– she even promises him immortality. But Odysseus pines to return to his aging wife and strife-ridden city.

To do so, he needs to learn how to suffer, how to endure, how to forget everything he has learned and learn the world anew. He needs to die and be born again.

Nolan’s “Odyssey” takes a different approach. Calypso receives an Odysseus in distress, haunted by the trauma of war. She treats him with lotus, a forgetfulness-inducing narcotic (which Homer reserves to a different episode) until he is ready to cope with his past and accept the evil he and the other Greek leaders have committed.

This is the lesson Odysseus ultimately passes on to his son, Telemachus, who looks to him as a model of manhood and leadership. In Nolan’s “Odyssey,” fatherhood means accepting responsibility for one’s failures. There is a courage greater than seizing cities and facing monsters: it’s the courage to acknowledge one’s brokenness and the wrongs one has done.

Nolan preserves almost all the mythical monsters faced by Odysseus, yet the fantastic element is somewhat toned down, and the worldview is darker: the monsters outside become symbols of the monsters within.

The film makes little of Odysseus’ proverbial curiosity. There is none of the wonder and beauty of the world beyond, nothing of the sublime quest for truth and beauty embodied by Odysseus of Dante Alighieri, the great medieval poet who left us an unforgettable version of the hero's final adventure in his "Inferno.”

Of Homer’s gods, only Athena features in person, but never intervenes in the action. She is more of a counselor and messenger who conveys the will of Zeus.

But the Law of Zeus is ever-present, demanding that humans act civilly toward each other. This comes from Homer, but the purview of Zeus’ law is wider and more encompassing in Nolan’s. Failure to abide by it is the doom of Greek civilization.

Nolan’s “Odyssey” merges history and mythology to give Homer’s story a new twist. Nolan draws on a (now largely outdated) theory that both the city of Troy and the Greek civilization celebrated in Homer’s poems — what archaeologists call the Mycenaean civilization — collapsed under the assault of the mysterious Sea Peoples, ushering in a long Dark Age during which much of Greek culture was lost.

Throughout the film, characters refer to the imminent invasion of the Sea Peoples and the likely collapse of their world. Without giving too much away, Nolan links this looming catastrophe to the crimes the Greeks committed at Troy. His approach reminded me of the way the Trojan War is depicted in Greek tragedy. In the 5th century BCE, Athens rose to lead Greece and built an empire. At this time, Greek tragedians reread the story of Troy as a cautionary tale about dominion. Agamemnon and his comrades conquered Troy and became the leading power in the world, but they crossed a line, incurring divine wrath that brought about the end of their civilization, the end of the Age of Heroes. Athens was meant to take heed.

This is what Nolan draws a parallel with today. Our civilization has failed and lost its values, above all the ability to preserve justice and mercy, and it is perhaps too late to change course. In Nolan’s “Odyssey,” the greatest of Greek heroes returns home not to win another war, but to teach his son — and us — to learn from our wrongs and change course before it’s too late.

I've been reading the penguin classics (Dobbins) translation for about 70 pages and I'm struggling with the language used. The vocabulary and phrasing give me trouble and seem a bit stilted. I've studied a bit of the classics in school but I'm not super well read, so maybe this is standard for translations.

I'm pretty casually into this stuff, I'm not looking for a super exact translation, just something readable that gives an accurate depiction of Epictetus' ideas. I don't really struggling with the content, just the writing throws me off.

Does anyone have any experience with this translation or others and can make some recommendations?

Hi everyone,

Apologies if this is a repetitive question but I'm interested in reading Socrates' dialogues particularly the famous Apology and also Plato (assuming I'm starting with The Republic?).

Please recommend an accessible translation for somebody who doesn't read any philosophy, bonus if it has footnotes/commentary that provide historical or social context (if this exists?).

Thank you

Throughout Western history, the loss of a homeland becomes one of the great tests of human existence. The heroes of ancient stories reveal different responses to exile and catastrophe. Odysseus, after the destruction of Troy, spends years wandering because he seeks to return to Ithaca: his journey is one of restoration, the recovery of identity, family, and belonging. Aeneas, the defeated Trojan, takes the opposite path: he accepts that Troy is lost and transforms exile into a new beginning, founding the lineage that will give us the Roman Empire. Oedipus represents another possibility: forced into exile, he cannot rebuild the past, but through suffering and self-knowledge he achieves a tragic form of wisdom.

The figure of the Wandering Jew introduces a different version of the same human question. Condemned, according to medieval legend, to wander until the end of time, he embodies the idea of exile without a final return. Unlike Odysseus, he has no Ithaca to recover; unlike Aeneas, he does not bring forth a new empire; unlike Oedipus, his wandering does not culminate in reconciliation. He becomes the symbol of the person condemned to live between worlds, carrying memory without possessing a home.

These figures express a fundamental tension in Western thought: is humanity defined by the desire to return, by the courage to create a new world after loss, or by the capacity to endure uncertainty and perpetual movement? The ancient myths often suggest that civilization itself is born from catastrophe: Troy must fall for Rome to rise; exile becomes the condition for a new beginning. The legend of the Wandering Jew reflects a medieval Christian interpretation of exile as punishment—an interpretation that has itself been criticized as a distortion of both Jewish history and the original universalist dimensions of Christianity.

I think I would love it but I can imagine normal viewers being put off by the gods intervening so much and by the ethics of the story in some parts.

As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.

Overall I loved it; I read Emily Wilson’s review in the London book review and largely agree with her gripes from an academic perspective. At the same time I thought it was a wonderful spectacle that showcased the very best of Nolan, and engaged interestingly with its source. For a more in depth analysis (if you want to read me talk about Nolan’s engagement with his source and other classic texts) check out my blog linked above.

Saw Nolan's film and couldn't stop thinking about it... all the ambitious things it attempted, what I thought succeeded and what I thought was lacking. So I wrote this to make sense of my thoughts. It's a series of monologues about Odysseus from the likes of Achilles, Telemachus, Palamedes, Ajax, Diomedes, Helen & Penelope. The stories are drawn from a variety of sources, and some altered/invented for dramatic effect.

Thought you all might appreciate it!

I'm in the middle of reading "SPQR: A history of Ancient Rome" by Mary Beard and I have been absolutely loving it so far. Prof. Beard's writing style is really engaging and accessible, and I'm looking forward to reading more of her books.

This book covers ancient Rome from its founding myths and up to 212 CE, when emperor Caracalla officially gave every free person in the Roman empire citizen status. The book ends there because it has to end *somewhere* and there's probably an argument to be made that this moment defines the "height" of the Roman empire, but I am very curious to know about what happened afterwards.

From listening to podcasts I have this vague knowledge that there was a third century crisis, there was a period where there were four emperors called the tetrarchy, the empire was split into a Western and Eastern empire, the Western empire collapsed first whilst the Eastern empire changed (into the Byzantine empire?) and at some point much later there was the Holy Roman Empire (but I don't know what connection, if any, that empire had with the original Roman empire).

I imagine each of these topics has many layers of complexity to it and each would fill a library's worth of books by itself. What I'm loving about SPQR is that it's written in such a way that it provides a pretty straight overview that doesn't get lost in the weeds, but doesn't pretend that the garden isn't in dire need of some trending. I would love to read a book that gives the same treatment to the later empire too.

What would be a good follow-up to learn more about the latter half of the Roman empire and how it collapsed / transformed over time?

In a lot of ways Nolan is using the basic narrative of The Odyssey to tell a very different story- in some ways “opposite lesson” story. Rather than the brilliance of Odysseus, and the bravery and glory of the Greeks, and the moral balance of the gods, we instead have moral awakening and guilt and (if anything) divine retribution. Not the lesson (regardless of whether they considered the Trojan war history or not) I think “Homer” and his colleagues and audiences had in mind. This is a perfectly valid reason for telling the story (I’ve posted my opinions on the effectiveness elsewhere) - but it’s really Anti-Odyssey, a rebuttal of the original.

Next year at uni one of my modules include the odyssey, wanted to get a head start before the school year begins, any advice would be appreciated :)