I went back to view the film "Odyssey" a second time and enjoyed it again, this time tearing up over the reunion between Argos the dog, Telemachus, and Odysseus, even though, as pointed out at a later lecture I attended, the flashback to the puppy Argos reveals a different canine species than the twenty-year-old Argos.
Matt Damon portrays Odysseus as macho and, as I said, guilt-ridden over his lost companions as well as having engineered the ultimate and hugely violent destruction of Troy, and suffering from PTSD-- features we in the twenty-first century can well relate to.
Let me say here, as an aside, that in his introductory section of the Odyssey, called prooimion in Homeric Greek, Homer accounts for the lost companions by generalizing the loss of some as their own fault: devouring the cattle of the sun god Helios, as if these were all of his companions, many of whose deaths are actually attributed later in the poem to the folly and hubris of Odysseus.
Such folly and hubris are evident in Nolan's version and, as I have already noted, Odysseus and Penelope choose to sail off into a sunset, rather than remain in Ithaca, to assuage his guilt for this tremendous loss and failure by building a commemorative monument to the crew and staying away, in self-exile. [Exile was a punishment dreaded by the ancient Greeks. That's another story.]
I might add that common sense might have motivated a similar ending to the poem for a different reason, the vengeful anger of the parents and extended families of not only the lost crew but the slaughtered suitors. How could Odysseus rule over these people? The poem actually ends with the intervention of the gods to scare these furious souls away from violence against the returned king and presumably his family. A happy ending indeed that Professor Graziosi (more on her below) called "a strange ending" that "doesn't make sense." I won't go into the scholarship that disputes the authenticity of this ending among other passages.
And we can fault Homer for not blaming Odysseus for the loss of his crew in the prooimion. The question "An Homerus dormitet?" was first raised by the Latin poet Horace: "Was Homer sleeping?" [because of such inconsistency]
Having viewed the film a second time, as I said, I was stimulated to continue following experts' reactions to the film and associated subjects. A colleague of the famous recent translator of the Odyssey, Professor Emily Wilson, Princeton's Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Classics Professor Barbara Graziosi gave a talk at Princeton's weekly Tigerside Chat, accessible live or virtually, on September 22. I attended virtually and will report, first of all, the last issue raised: when asked which Odyssey translation was the best, the professor sort of mumbled Richmond Lattimore's as "great," having first paid homage to Mendelsohn and Wilson, the latter having inspired Nolan to create the film after all.
But the best way to experience the Odyssey, she said, was to read it in the original Homeric Greek. She recited a few lines from the prooimion seductively. I have to agree; the hard work required is well worth the effort but time consuming certainly. Translations change according to their eras, while the Homeric epic will endure timelessly.
The second most salient fact [to me] was that, according to the professor, this weekly chat had drawn a far larger number of attendees than is customary, in fact a record-breaking number. Bravo Nolan, bravo Homer, brava Wilson!
Graziosi called the entire epic a "game of intellect [she might have said "intelligence," I'm not sure] and recognition." She added a bit later that it's also "a quest for knowledge and travel" [these themes Nolan includes], and "a story of survival." A popular comparison between the Iliad and Odyssey, is that the former represents Bronze Age culture and the latter looks forward to the evolution toward cerebrality and abstraction characteristic of the flourishing culture so evident in fifth-century Athens. But that point is an aside. I should keep out of this (but I don't) and defer to the far superior perspectives and erudition of Professor Graziosi.
Another issue the professor discussed was how humans blame the gods for their destinies when in fact they themselves are responsible for their actions; Zeus points this out at an assembly of the gods that follows the prooimion of the Odyssey. Witness the hubris of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, the king of the Olympian gods says, who murdered Agamemnon after his welcome-home triumphal procession. Hermes had been sent to warn them away from this folly to no avail. Orestes returns home later to avenge the savagery. The story is told in full by Aeschylus in his Oresteia trilogy.
The professor further pointed to Nolan's implicitly paralleling the twenty-first century gloom-and-doom over the direction this country and with it the world seems headed toward with Odysseus's gloom over the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization to be wrought by "people from the sea." In both cases the scenario, she said, was that "the future will be worse than the past" and then the further perspective that "we have agency. Are we the people from the sea?"
The Q&A was also most stimulating and informative; there's so much that we don't know, said Graziosi, regarding the Homeric Question: Was the opus (the Iliad and Odyssey) created by one poet or many? (I think one, but many scholars disagree. I won't elaborate on my viewpoint here). Also, Who was Homer? And, "By whom, when, where, and under what circumstances were the poems composed?" [quote taken from Wikipedia]. And further questions have joined the debate. The Odyssey was created after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization: big settlements were replaced by hovels three to four centuries later. It is the memory of this heroic age that is portrayed. It is epic composed in performance using formulae as building blocks. But what we have is the "written poem meant for performance, always meant for the future and not to be changed." "Writing emerged when the Iliad and Odyssey were composed." People from all walks of life, from slaves to aristocracy, came together to listen to recitations at religious festivals that would take days from beginning to end. Few stayed home to read the texts. Cows were sacrificed. The people banqueted while they listened and enjoyed the works. "The composer wasn't there." Professionals called Homeridai, "Homer's offspring," did the performing.
Why did Odysseus return? was another question that the hero never addresses directly in the epic. But Penelope is his goal and the several other women he encounters represent impediments and none is prominent [though Kalypso keeps him on her island for seven years and Kirke for more than one!]. Kalypso offers him the immortality of a god. The lovely and nubile Nausikaa, absent from Nolan's film, would have married him and made him royalty at least in the peaceable, carefree Phaeacia.
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