“A war A man. Cleverness. A trick to breach the walls of Troy. And burn it—screaming—to the ground.” Christopher Nolan’s name Odyssey opens in the great hall of Ithaca, with the bard singing a song about the trickery of Odysseus, the legendary hero, to the men who have conquered his house – to convict his wife, to frighten his son – while he is away. A feast has been turned into a desecration.
The law that these people broke was the most sacred in the ancient world: “Xenia,” the law of hospitality.” The stranger at the door stood under the personal protection of Zeus, the supreme god and protector of strangers.” The relationship between the guest and the host was not only polite, but a covenant that enabled mutual trust between the guests.
In the Bronze Age, the covenant was fundamental. Greece was not a nation; it was a scattering of states and island kingdoms without common law and no common authority. Travelers had no rights. Xenia was the bond that allowed guests—hosts and guests, both with mutual obligations—to trust each other. It was the thread that held the broken world together.
“Break the law of Zeus and see what they do to you if you give them that excuse,” Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, tells her son Telemachus. And in the movie, Telemachus says that one must always be kind to travelers, because they can secretly be gods. Treating guests badly is the risk of incurring the wrath of the gods.
The The Trojan War it began with a breach of hospitality. Paris, the son of a Trojan king, was welcomed as a guest in the house of King Menelaus of Sparta—and received the welcome by running away with Menelaus’ wife, Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Menelaus’ brother, Agamemnon, led a Greek expedition to bring him back. The war lasted for 10 years, and ended when the Greeks sacked Troy with the trick of the Trojan horse.
The trick was Odysseus’s idea, a stroke of military genius for which he was celebrated. But according to Nolan, it is not a victory but a moral failure, which fills him with guilt and shame that for a decade he cannot go home. He had turned a sacred object into a weapon. The horse turned himself into a sacred offering to Athena; The Trojans, fearing to anger the goddess, pushed it inside their own walls. As soon as the gates were opened, the Greeks poured in and slaughtered the city.
In the film, unlike in the poem, the killing affects Odysseus, although we don’t understand how much until the end. Throughout his journey he is accompanied by Athenathe goddess of wisdom. It is only when the film returns to the night that Troy fell that we discover that he is wearing the form of a priestess of Athena, who was beheaded at the altar of the goddess when the city was burned. Odysseus’ divine mentor, the leader who has walked by his side all along, has the characteristics of the woman who watched him die. Whether a goddess ever accompanied him, or whether she is merely the ghost of his greatest sin, the film is uncertain. What is certain is that until Odysseus can face what he has done, until he tells the truth about himself, and to others, no return home is possible.
In the final scene of the film, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and sees what his world has become. Law and order are collapsing; trust is not there; trickery abounds. The man who once commanded the armies discovers how people react to someone who can do nothing for them. The only kindness he gets comes from his son and a few loyal servants. Then, near the end of the film, Odysseus tells Penelope, “We are sea people,” referring to the feared outsiders, raiders, and raiders. But they weren’t a threat after all. “People from the sea” are the victors of the Trojan War, they were stripped of their humanity, their civilization, their xenia.
TElemachus was not alone in his intuition about the gods in disguise. The belief that the stranger at your door may be more than meets the eye runs through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as well. When, in Genesis, Abraham looks at Mamre and sees three travelershe runs to meet them, washes their feet, and prepares food before them—not knowing, as the reader knows, that he is welcoming the Lord. The letter to the Hebrews tells us to welcome strangers, for others “he welcomed the angels without knowing it.” And in Matthew 25, the stranger is Christ himself. “I was a guest and you welcomed me,” Jesus says.” What he reveals is that the stranger is where God has chosen to be found, and that everyone will be judged according to how they treat the outcast, the hungry, the sick, and the beggar at our door.
Homer’s poetry, like the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, is an ancient text. But like Nolan he told it New York Timesthe greatness of a poem is that you treat it as something strange and distant, and then find it “very useful.” As for the treatment of the foreigner, he added, nothing has changed – it is still important “to hold civilization together, or even to define civilization.”
Part of what it does Odyssey so attractive to a modern audience is that it takes elements of the civilization of Greek culture—hospitality and nobility—and adds later concepts, some of them influenced by Jewish and Christian values that, to varying degrees, were alien to ancient Greek culture: deep self-examination, even confession; humility and compassion; grief and guilt for the harm one has done, even in victory; the belief that losers count and have value; and revenge full of mercy. In the film, Odysseus emerges as a man enraged by his victory in a way that no ancient Greek would be.
Odyssey offers a very human hero to a culture that desperately needs him. Nolan could have told this story in a number of different ways, but he trusted his instincts: Summer audiences would embrace the epic story with its tough hero, brave but broken, fierce but compassionate towards the underdog, a man who gravitates not so much for his victories on the battlefield as for his conscience.
Much of life in the ancient Greek world was brutal, even barbaric—mass murders in conquered cities, torture, the helpless cast out at birth, chattel slavery—which is exactly why the Greek commitment to honor and welcome strangers was remarkable at the time and continues to this day. So, too, do the later, more human characteristics that the film enters.
Those virtues are now under attack. Movements and voices in our own country hold them in open contempt, treat mercy as weakness, and feed on revenge and grumbling. Theirs is the Nietzschean morality, the “great morality,” the principles of the powerful that Christianity overthrew when it took the side of the slave, the stranger, and the poor.
But Nietzsche was at least honest about the cost of the revolution he proclaimed. With God dead, he warned, the values built on God can collapse as well, and into the void nonsense, bigotry, and alternative beliefs can quickly creep in. Nietzsche announced, with some sadness, the death of God. Many of his successors commit their atrocities with joy in the name of God.
The world these values create is stark and barren, raw and uninteresting. It exists in everyday harshness, in anger and malice, and in isolation. There is weariness in us, and sorrow, as we have been. Robert F. Kennedy, quoting Edith Hamilton, an antiquarian, once made this call: “Let us devote ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote so many years ago: ‘to control the cruelty of man and make the life of this world gentle.'” What Christopher Nolan and his actors are inspired by is our desire to have a gentle world. We want to go home.
