Homer, Updated: Ancient stories remain alive because every retelling quietly betrays them

Odyssey is a spectacle and yet does not feel visually overdone. Cities, like Troy, aren’t extravagant. The palace of Odysseus is understated. Armies are not in impossible numbers. If you wanted a chink in the armour, it would be the dialogues. Emily Wilson, author of a translation of the Homeric poem, did a critique of the movie in the London Review of Books, which while talking about how director Christopher Nolan took historical liber­ties, adds: “‘Our civilisation is under attack’, Penelope wails. Odysseus comforts her by saying that ‘Bronze Age civilisa­tion’, including literacy, will rise again from the ashes.”

Such self-awareness about a civilisation under collapse comes at more than one point in the movie. Separation of different periods into stone, bronze or iron can happen only with enough information to categorise history. For someone living 12 centu­ries before Christ, what conception could be there about being in the middle of something called a Bronze Age? Or that it is a bronze age because a Stone Age preceded it and an Iron Age followed it?

Did Nolan do it deliber­ately for effect, a deliberate anachronism, or did he not know? In either case, it tells you the difficulty of representing the past in a creative project. Characters say “mom” and “dad” in Odyssey, but why not? It is jarring because you think an ancient movie cannot have a modern idiom. But the present in 1200BCE is the modern world for them. What matters is not authenticity but the perception of authenticity. If that is achieved, then a work about the past has succeeded. And given the box-office numbers of Odyssey, it is hard to see how it has not. Scholars might find loose ends but the average viewer is more than satisfied. For a strictly Homeric world, read Homer’s books and even he spun his liberties from a story that came from much before. Enduring Indian myths like Ramayana and Mahabharata, too, got reimagined in retelling. It is, in fact, the ability of a story to accept such accumulations that makes it immortal. By being willing to metamorphose to the present, some­thing very ancient remains current forever.