Plato Had His Reasons for Banishing Homer. Christopher Nolan Does Too. | American Enterprise Institute

The classicists aren’t happy with Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and who can blame them? Scholars of Homer’s epic are right to think that their beguiling hero has gone missing from the IMAX spectacle that is selling out theaters across the country. 

As the translator and critic Daniel Mendelsohn puts it, the “greatly cunning” Odysseus of Homer’s tale—a defiant schemer and verbal virtuoso—has given way in Nolan’s retelling to an earnest, guilt-ridden dullard. Here, he laments, we find “no cleverness, no humor, no wily charm.” Why not let Matt Damon strut and sparkle as he doubtless would if Homer were in the director’s chair?

The scholar Emily Wilson is even harsher, despite the boost the movie has given to her own best-selling translation. “In at least one interview,” she writes of Nolan, “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. Sadly, Damon’s Odysseus isn’t complicated or wily or artful.”

Worse, she says, the movie turns the moral universe of the Odyssey upside down: “Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women, and yearning for honor—all perfectly fine in the world of Homer—are, in this version, very bad.”

I found myself irritated with the movie in the same way, at least at first. We turn to the Greek classics in part for their strangeness, their power to show us human possibilities very different from our own ways of life, putting our own values in sharp relief. Why bother with an Odyssey that is so plainly embarrassed by Homer’s world of honor, shame, and glory?

As many commentators have said, with varying degrees of approval and disapproval, this Odysseus is no Bronze Age warrior. He’s some version of us: a conscience-stricken Christian, a defender of the beleaguered West, a woke liberal, a work-obsessed father who neglects his family, a PTSD-stricken vet sharing his problems in an extended therapy session. Odysseus’s moral center, as Nolan has emphasized, is the Golden Rule, whose violation is the source of his woes.

Nolan, in short, has banished the real Homer. But that’s where things get interesting, because there’s a famous and instructive precedent for it. Plato’s Republic is, among other things, an explicit critique of Homer’s epics and the corrupting passions—rage, grief, lust—they taught the ancient Greeks to emulate. In what Plato calls the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” Homer must submit to reason or be cast out of the ideal city of the Republic.

What sort of tale meets Plato’s standard for cultivating the rational, self-examining part of our souls? The Republic itself is certainly an example, with its captivating dialogue between Socrates (Plato’s teacher) and his young aristocratic followers.

But Plato also shows us what a reformed Homer might look like. In a fanciful poetic episode at the very end of the Republic, he lets us glimpse Odysseus’s troubled soul in the underworld, where it’s given the chance to choose a new life: “from memory of its former labors it had recovered from love of honor; it went around for a long time looking for the life of a private man who minds his own business; and with effort it found one lying somewhere, neglected by the others.”

That’s not a bad description of the Odysseus who emerges in Nolan’s movie—a chastened, brooding, introspective man who finally puts his own house in order and then escapes over the horizon, leaving behind the vice and vanity of his warrior’s life. He may not be a proper classical hero, but in this starkly gorgeous Homer-lite drama, he’s a credible enough ethical figure, scrutinizing his own choices and finding cause for regret. There are worse things all of America could be rushing to see just now.