Prestigious filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is deep into its marketing campaign and has already provoked an enormous amount of discourse. Most of it has manifested as the usual right-wing culture war echo chamber. It’s important to note: the film is not out yet! No one producing online rage bait has seen the film, and any opinion is premature until that happens. I myself have some reservations about what is seen in the trailer, and will talk about them,¹ but that in no way represents a final judgement on the film. What we do know, however, is that the online reaction has exposed a remarkably narrow understanding of both The Odyssey and the Ancient Mediterranean context in which it was produced. So, let’s talk about it.

Helen of Troy is black! A rapper has been cast as a bard! Elliot Page is Achilles! This is an outrage, an act of supreme iconoclasm against the foundations of Western culture, and a very convenient way to extract money from credulous racists looking to cloak their bigotry in historical objectivity. The most obvious response is simple: who cares? These arguments aren’t made in good faith, and no serious person treats the skin colour of a character in a Hollywood film as evidence of civilisational crisis. Regardless, let’s explain why these criticisms have no historical validity.

Firstly, it must be stated that the Classical Greek world was not “white.” The long-haired Achaeans of Homer lived over two millennia before the emergence of modern concepts of race in the Early Modern period. Their world encompassed not just Greece, but large stretches of the Near East and North Africa. Extensive trade and warfare created a cultural landscape that was far more interconnected and diverse than is imagined in popular thought. Even within this context, The Odyssey is a story that is fundamentally about travel, cultural contact, and the boundaries between the familiar and the unknown. To whitewash the Ancient Mediterranean world by demanding Sydney Sweeney plays Helen of Troy would be a far graver crime against the source material than claiming that the ancient world included people with darker skin. I find it illuminating that the moral panic over Helen’s casting is entirely about skin colour, whereas a Classical Greek audience would likely find Hollywood’s archetypal thinness to be a more grievous violation of their cultural beauty standards. The focus on modern culture war faultlines over real historical critiques betrays these people’s lack of seriousness; no doubt a Helen of Troy conforming more closely to ancient ideals of feminine beauty would provoke cries of woke feminism taking over Hollywood.

Next, we have the casting of transmasc actor Elliot Page as Achilles. Once again, we can safely ignore the outrage over this betrayal of masculinity; this is just manufactured transphobia to draw clicks. The question of whether Page is a convincing Achilles is a matter of performance, not identity. More interesting to me is the assumption underlying the backlash: that Achilles represents a timeless ideal of conventional masculinity. The subject of what Classical Greek masculinity looked like in practice would represent a whole year of research, and I am in no way an expert. What can be said with confidence is that the Achilles of Homer bears little resemblance to the modern caricature often projected onto him. Achilles is a man prone to intense emotional outbursts. He openly weeps and his passions drive him to excesses of anger and revenge. He has a male lover² and, in one famous episode, disguises himself as a woman so successfully that it takes wily Odysseus to distinguish him from the daughters of Lycomedes. The influencer outrage fails to mention any of this; instead, it imagines Achilles as an idealised modern conservative man completely divorced from his own cultural context.

In the examples of both Helen and Achilles, there is a common thread. The outrage is not being driven by real historical critique, but instead by people who use “history” as a shield to excuse their own bigotry and civilisational anxieties. I have seen the claim made several times that this adaptation of The Odyssey (which, again, no one has seen yet) is an example of woke-washing because it is partially inspired by a modern translation authored by Emily Wilson, a feminist scholar. I cannot comment on the quality of the translation,³ but the claim begs a question: what is the alternative? The original Odyssey emerged from an oral tradition that does not survive. Later Greek versions are illegible to all but a tiny minority of humans alive today, and must necessarily be mediated twice over – by their original transcribers, and their modern translators. What the right wants is not the original Odyssey. It is instead an adaptation filtered through their own narrow cultural assumptions; Victorian morality projected backwards three millennia, the Homer of their fathers unchanging in white marble.

Now that the unpleasantness is out of the way, I want to mention a couple of genuine historical concerns raised by the trailer (for the third time: the film might be completely fine!). Perhaps this is hypocritical after spending 1,000 words arguing against making judgements of a Homer adaptation before anyone has seen it. Fortunately, I am a historian and thus correct. At the very least, my pedantry is more entertaining.

Nolan considered casting actors to play gods throwing thunderbolts from Mount Olympus but settled on something more primal. “I became more interested in the idea that to people in that period, evidence of gods was everywhere,” he says. “In Bronze Age Greece, thunder, rain, and the sun rising didn’t have scientific explanations—they represented the will of the immortals.”⁴

This quote is concrete, coming from the director himself, and I find it deeply worrying from a historical perspective. This is not how the ancient Greeks understood the supernatural! To Homer, the Olympians are not abstract natural phenomena, but real beings that are physically manifested in the world. They can be talked to, beseeched, touched, angered. They have agency and personality and power. What Nolan is describing here is a post-enlightenment understanding of religion as a ghost used to fill gaps in our scientific understanding of the world, applied 2,500 years early. This is no different from the culture warriors projecting their Victorian morality backwards. In both cases, it is modern minds failing to grasp what real historical people actually believed, and filling in the blanks with our own understanding of the world.

This flattening of history extends to aesthetics. It is often imagined that pre-modern people were boring and drab, happy to wear washed out greys in flickering candle light. I say this a lot, but people are people! Greeks liked to look good just as we do. White marble exists only in puritan fantasies. Ancient societies were intensely visual and decorative, performative and status-conscious – just as our own is. The trailer for The Odyssey features a grey colour palette, muddy realism, and Beowulf-themed grimness. These are not neutral design choices, but part of the same modern flattening of the past visible in Nolan’s treatment of religion, and a wider problem in cinema. Hollywood collapses radically different historical periods and cultures into a muddy monoculture of pseudo-medieval aesthetics; comfortable big-budget spectacle designed to print money for studio executives. Each instance is harmful to our collective understanding of history. The result is a past populated not by real people, but modern assumptions dressed in ancient costume.

The Odyssey may be an excellent film. Nolan is a competent director, and reinterpretation is not only inevitable but necessary. Homer has only survived to the present day because successive generations have kept him alive for almost 3,000 years, with each engaging with him in a different way. This is good; a culture that simply reproduces the same work over and over again is not a healthy one. The problem exists not in this adaptation and reimagining, but in the approach it takes. The ancient Mediterranean was populated neither by modern conservatives nor secular rationalists in bronze armour. The people that existed there had fundamentally different assumptions about beauty, race, gender, and religion.

That unfamiliarity is part of what makes history so beautiful. The past does not exist to reassure us that people once thought exactly as we do, or to validate our contemporary political anxieties. It exists on its own terms, and may sometimes confront us with ways of living and understanding the world that feel uncomfortable. Too often, modern culture sands those edges away, replacing real history with familiar, inoffensive spectacle. Perhaps The Odyssey will escape that paradigm. I’m not hopeful, but we will see when the film releases.