Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey has generated tremendous debate over, among other things, the casting of non-white actors, including Lupita Nyong’o, who portrays Helen. The argument that these choices don’t honor the original epic has been leveled at the portrayal of the women in the film more generally as well. As one scholar has written, Nolan’s Odyssean women “lack the sexual and intellectual complexity of Homer’s poem. Their desires, agency and choices are either not as vibrant or lost.”
It is true that in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey women are relatively empowered. They are not often under the thumb of men, not threatened, endangered or cowed. And yet Nolan’s creative choices about women, while differing from the ancient texts, do come closer to capturing the actual historical truth of women’s lives in the ancient Greek world.
Homer’s epics offer a variety of fascinating and often powerful female characters throughout: from Helen to Andromache, along with the goddesses who strut through Olympus and down to Troy and Ithaca, female characters often seem nearly as empowered as their husbands, lovers, and brothers. There is only the occasional hint at a power imbalance, such as when Zeus threatens to hurl Hera from heaven, or in cases where a woman has been enslaved, such as for Briseis, Achilles’ “prize” in the Iliad.
One reason for this variety and complexity of female characters might be that, in the archaic period (c. 800 – 500 BCE) of ancient Greece, women were not viewed as particularly threatening. Within the aristocratic system, where powerful families ruled the roost, women had a significant and socially acceptable role to play, unlike in the more male-centered world of the classical Greek polis, in which the bonds of male citizenship were considered crucially important, and familial or female interference was understood as a risk to these bonds. Homer’s epics belong to the archaic period where women were not so systematically feared as they came to be later, and thus there was space for more interesting and complex characterizations.
Yet Nolan takes a different approach than Homer, presenting his female characters as facing greater danger and with less agency. Most notably, he depicts the face of Helen (Nyong’o) as having been half mutilated. It is her husband Menelaus who exposes the terrible scarring to half her face, thrusting it toward Odysseus’ son Telemachus with an angry and mocking gesture that suggests he was the perpetrator of the violence that left her so disfigured.
Second, he shows the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) as terrified of rape and violence, particularly at the hands of soldiers, a nod surely to Madeline Miller’s trenchant take on the character in her novel Circe. Third, he portrays Penelope (Anne Hathaway) as under pressure to remarry by a collective of unseen elders who are absent from Homer’s Odyssey. Finally, even Athena (Zendaya), who appears at Odysseus’ side through most of the film, is revealed to have been a young priestess of Athena—perhaps a shade or a representation of the hero’s guilt—who was the victim of savage slaughter in the sacking of Troy.
In Homer’s Odyssey, by contrast, Helen appears in Sparta to be in fine form and unscathed by the war or its domestic aftermath; Circe is formidable, cunning, and in control, and not apparently afraid of any man; Penelope is not under the thumb of any Ithacan elders, though she does face a great deal of pressure from the suitors; and Athena is in no danger of butchery.
So how are Nolan’s choices justified? He may have decided to follow the historical record in this regard, rather than be true to the literary text. Though the realities faced by ancient Greek women garner precious little space in the early written record, we can glean from Greek tragedy that some of the harsher realities portrayed in Nolan’s Odyssey would have rung true.
From Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, first produced in 458 BCE, we have a description—practically a vision—by Clytemnestra of Troy’s downfall as savage and violent. We find, too, a portrait of Athena’s priestess Cassandra as victimized and destroyed by the god Apollo, only then to be enslaved (for sex, it is insinuated) by her master Agamemnon.
Euripides’ play, Trojan Women, produced in 415 BCE, digs even deeper into the painful realities of women when their homeland has been destroyed. Here we have Cassandra driven mad by the rape she suffered at the hands of a Greek “hero.” We watch the baby of the widow Andromache ripped from her arms to be thrown from the Trojan ramparts. We learn that the old queen Hecuba will endure a life of servitude to none other but the wily Odysseus. In Euripides’ play Hecuba, she evades this fate by casting herself into the sea—but only after having two of her own children brutally murdered by her former allies and enemies.
There are countless other examples to be found in Greek literature of women victimized at the hands of men and their brutal whims: Antigone is thrown into a tomb by her uncle so that she will die of starvation, a fate she too evades by suicide; Danae is cast into a trunk by her own father with her infant to die at sea, though she is eventually saved; Coronis, a woman in a lyric poem by Pindar, is burned alive for daring to sleep with a mortal man after she has been bedded by Apollo.
Although there is a certain degree of ghoulish spectacle in these tales, nothing from our historical record of the period suggests they are unrepresentative of women’s actual reality in ancient times. First, there is the extreme and unremarkable likelihood of widespread domestic violence, referred to jokingly in Old Comedy and in images from vases. Moreover, it was known and accepted practice that when a city-state was defeated in war—a widespread fact of life—its male population was eliminated, while its female population was systematically raped and enslaved, a reality that comes up frequently in the histories of both Herodotus and Thucydides. Indeed, the enslaving of a young woman, explicitly for the purpose of rape, is the inciting incident of both Homer’s Iliad and Herodotus’ Histories.
And such forms of repression and violence have persisted long since ancient times. Rape and brutality against women have been common forms of violence for as long as there have been wars. Incidents of femicide within families (often accompanied by infanticide) also persist.
It is truly fascinating to experience Homer’s strong and dazzling women; everyone should pick up a translation and do so. But in removing the agency from female characters that Homer gave them, Nolan reveals at greater depth their vulnerability and humanity in a way that is much closer to the historical truth of how women actually lived in the ancient Greek world.
Sarah Nooter is the Edward Olson Professor of Classics and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author, most recently, of Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.
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