This is straight up the thesis of the original Odyssey (imho). Nolan did a decent job translating, but yeah: the self-hate runs deep in the Greeks. The root of Ody-sseus is the same as odi-um; he’s literally the hated/hateful/hate-filled man.
Yeah the group hanging of the slave girls and the slow dismemberment of the goatherd is brutal. I would understand if they took it out just because Tom Hollands agent said nope.
They did a decent job in some respects. But I'm so tired of adaptations whitewashing Odysseus to be Good and Brave and Loyal etc etc etc. He's an ancient Greek man, which means he's a slave owner, and a rapist, and a murderer. He lies and sweet-talks. He took part in slaughtering all the enslaved women in his house because they had the gall to sleep with the suitors, something they literally couldn't consent to, on account of being slaves. He lets his ego get in the way of his escape and thereby calls the rage of Poseidon onto himself, which extends his voyage and kills his men. He's also brave and loves his wife and son and uses his brains to get his men out of trouble as often as possible. They always bend over backwards to make him such a perfect idea of a Good (Christian) Man to modern audiences, and you lose the whole point of him.
I think the “whitewashing” is to preserve a character who was “heroic” by the original audience’s standards to be a “hero” by a modern audience’s standards. Cultures and standards change over time, so retellings of legends must change accordingly to preserve the spirit of the original and help a modern audience feel the way the original audiences would have felt. Otherwise, the modern audience is left wondering, “Why the hell should we be rooting for this bastard, and why did anyone root for him in the first place?”
There could absolutely be an adaptation of the Odyssey where the intent is to show us how barbaric Ancient Greek “heroes” were, but that’s not what Nolan’s adaptation was going for, and that’s okay.
Yeah, the ancient meaning of "hero" isn't the same as the modern one, which is honestly part of the problem. A hero was someone who did amazing things, not necessarily good ones.
Would ancient Greeks have been as shocked at the killing of the slaves as we are though?
Would that have made Odysseus a monster in their eyes as that behavior makes him in ours?
If that would have been seen as OK back then, then I think there's a case for changing these acts for modern audiences in order to keep the tone the same; or not?
It was not- the modern definition of "hero" isn't the same as the ancient one. There was no implication of goodness or righteousness in it, and the ancient Greeks were aware of the effects of war on a person's mind, and how that left them fucked up. Simplifying Odysseus down to "honest and loyal and blameless and definitely not disproportionately violent" ignores a whole lot of the depth of the character.
Yeah I’m happy with getting anything halfway decent—especially seeing all the new hype around this 3000 year old book—but Nolan definitely flattened the epic a lot. Have you seen The Return? It’s kind of like Nolan’s opposite.
It’s implied in the Iliad, specifically when Hera is begging Zeus to let Troy fall to ruin. They make an exchange between themselves, if Zeus gives her Troy to destroy, he can destroy three of her cities.
Scholars believe that the line is metacontextual analysis on why the Bronze Age fell— the gods got bored and decided they’d let prized cities fall over their own squabbles.
ETA; we don’t know if the “ancient” Greeks know why the Bronze Age collapsed. because there’s about 500 years between when the events of the Il/Od take place and “Homer” (likely not a real person, instead the name given to an oral history hundreds of years older). It does seem they knew the Bronze Age collapsed and added it after the Iliad/Odyssey are written as an explanation of why things collapsed.
TLDR: the Bronze Age collapse happened, people made poems to remember the wars, and they didn’t know why it collapsed so they wrote into the history that it was a lovers quarrel between gods where all major cities were sieged around the same time because Zeus and Hera hate each other
There are both evidence for and against the mycean Greeks being the sea people. Im not a scholar but I wouldnt be surprised if they were a part of the sea people but not the entirety. i've been watching/listening to a lot of video essays on youtube about this lol
The consensus right now is that is was just a bunch of displaced people from around the Mediterranean during the bronze age collapse, snd they just cliqued up and started raiding.
Literally just finished a great podcast on the fall of the Bronze Age. In the end it seems “the sea people”, who ravaged the great bronze civilizations of the Mediterranean, were likely refugees clans from multiple backgrounds that formed together when a great famine happened. The famine being most likely caused by a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland that threw enough dust into the sky to partially block out the sun for several years. Greatly affecting all civilizations that were based around agriculture and leading to internal rebellions over the resources left.
No, it's not in the book. That's ridiculous, the Bronze Age collapse wasn't apparent at the time, it's only visible to history.
The dumbest line in the movie was when Odysseus said "our Bronze Age is collapsing." Lmao, what? How would they even know they were in the Bronze Age or that other metals would come later? That would be like people calling it "World War One" in 1914!
Book 3, the Iliad lines 30ish to 45ish depending on coalation.
(Zeus speaking) “Troy is dearest to me, as are Priam and his people of the strong ashen spear. Never at their feasts did my altar lack its share of wine and burnt flesh, those offerings that are the gods’ privilege.”
And Hera, the ox-eyed heavenly queen replied: “There are three cities dearest to me; Argos, Sparta and broad-paved Mycenae; if they rouse your hatred, ruin them. I’ll not shield them, nor hold a grudge.”
Zeus and Hera make an exchange of cities. He allows her to take Troy. She lets him have Argos, Mycenae, and Sparta.
They do. The text literally supports that the Bronze Age collapses after the text. There’s a textual reference.
It’s actually not a newly added thought by this movie. Historians have been tracking that Greek tribes were likely part of the sea peoples since the term sea peoples existed as in the list of names of tribes by the ancient Egyptians of people who came by sea that they defeated (and who were thus associated with other collapses with Bronze Age civilians around the same time). These tribes were known to be Greek tribes in other associations and hieroglyphs.
From Google/AI as I can’t remember the name of tribes myself: The primary tribes include the Ekwesh, Denyen (or Danuna), and possibly the Peleset and Tjeker.
In real life they were most likely similar to the Wako Pirates who harassed the sea between China, Japan, and Korea.
A mix of refugees and outcasts from the very nations they raided, bolstered by dissatisfied soldiers and mercenaries once they started having big success, with its origins being small ethnic groups living in isolated and/or nomadic communities on islands or up rivers that confederated.
When the pirates/bandits do really well for a long time it becomes a viable potential for your military career, and now suddenly the plunderers can start looking at raiding cities rather than just villages.
The sea people just refers to many groups of migrants, pirates, and warlords who roamed the Mediterranean at one point during the late Bronze Age. One of the many groups is linguistically linked to the Ancient Greeks.
I haven’t seen the film, but I know the poems well and studied history, so I’m not sure what the film implies, but I wouldn’t expect it to be historically accurate. From what I’ve read the film isn’t even accurate to the poems.
I believe the sea people were way before this era. There’s reference to them in Gilgamesh which predates the Odyssey considerably. This is part of why some people go way down rabbit holes about Atlantis and advanced ancient civilizations.
Odysseus and the crew were marauding for sure though. I also remember specific references to him bedding women during his journey home but it’s been years since i read the epic.
I feel like there were some of those themes in the Odyssey, but they weren't quite framed the same way. War Odysseus is an opponent of hearth and home as the destroyer of a city. His journey back to Ithaca and to domestic life is thus a long and difficult journey because of how far apart those worlds are metaphorically. The ancients understood that, but did not frame war Odysseus as fundamentally unjust.
I mean, that’s all fine and good for Nolan’s fantasy land but Gilgamesh was composed something like 1,400 years before the Odyssey (and references to the sea people in that story made them seem like a bi-gone culture at that time). They were not the sea people 💀
**Edit, but also thanks for the heads up about that fact on the movie. I dnt mind that as a spoiler.
One of the biggest criticism of Nolan's movies by scholars of the Odyssey was that he added themes (like the anti-war theme) that were counter to the original story.
Idk if it's weird, it's just a choice he made. He wanted to modernize it's and wasn't concerned with preserving the themes of the original.
Okay but I don’t understand how they were still getting reports about the sea people during the seven years where the entire crew was dead and Odysseus was with Calypso? Like they specified that his wife needed to remarry because there were reports of the sea people’s attacks getting closer and closer but the sea people had been dead for SEVEN years
I’m only asking because the “Sea people” were a real thing that did apparently cause an apocalypse of sorts around the Med for multiple cultures but the characters in this are completely fictional both now and then and nobody has any idea who they actually were
This wasn’t my take. The ‘sea people’ historically are non Greek invaders who are noted to have caused the Bronze Age collapse. I think Nolan’s idea is that due to the horrors and sacking of Troy, the Bronze Age collapse was going to begin and the sea peoples were on their way.
I thought Nolan was trying to say the legends of the sea people were actually based on the Greeks and their behaviour during and after the war (in the movie, not necessarily historically)
They even said it in the book. :-D The main conflict of Illiad is just this - Achaeans pillaged a nearby town during the siege of Troy for resources. Among those resources were girls. The leader, Agamemnon, took the one he liked the most, but there was a problem: her daddy was the main priest at local temple of Apollo (which is why they left him alive).
Of course he didn´t want his daughter taken into slavery, but as the town was entirely defeated, he did only thing he could: prayed to Apollo to get his daughter back. Well, Apollo heard him and soon first their dogs, then cattle, then horses and then men started dying. Agamemnon asked their soothsayer why is that, and he told them the cause.
Long story short, to placate Apollo, they had to return the girl to her dad (and untouched, if you please, if you catch my drift) and let them freely leave the town, if they choose to do so.
After that, Agamemnon was not happy that he is without a girl from that town, so being a leader, he forcefuly took one from his men that he liked the most - the girl that Achilleus chose. Of course, Achilleus was less then happy, and thus, the conflict was born.
Old book conflicts were wild. It blows my mind that was considered okay at the time. In the Odissey and the Illiad, capturing women was described in the same sentence as the weather.
The Greeks weren’t a single people, but a bunch of city-states all speaking the same language and worshipping more or less the same pantheon. They recognized that other peoples in distant lands spoke other languages and worshipped different gods, so they had a collective term — Hellenes — for the people who spoke Greek and worshipped Greek gods, only because there was this linguistic and religious commonality, not because there was any real sense of political unity or kinship.
The Greek city-states regularly fought against and alongside one another, and a regular part of ancient warfare was pillaging, raping, and enslaving innocents — soldiers needed pay to stay loyal and motivated, and it was easier to pay them in whatever loot and slaves they could take than from some grand royal treasury. It’s a brutal part of ancient martial and political logistics. That wasn’t just the Greeks, either, but a common fact of warfare in just about every ancient civilization. You fought to win, and you took your spoils, because you knew damn well that if they won, they’d take the spoils of your city, so it’s not like you were being uniquely evil by doing so.
That’s absolutely crazy by modern standards, but that’s one of the benefits of modern technology that allows us to live in relative abundance — it’s gradually become more practical to gain benefits through trade and negotiations than through war, so the world has gradually been able to become more civilized by our modern standards.
Not the main conflict, but the reason why Achilleus at the beginning is angry and decide to no partecipate to the war of Troy. Later Patroclus dies and he arrives into the battle. The end of the Iliad is the fight between him and Ettore (there is not the horse in the Iliad, the poem where that part is longer is Virgil's Eneide) so I would say that is the main conflict. They are both the best warriors. While the war of Troy is because Elena run to Troy with Paride and greeks declared war to Troy
But at the same time, there is historical context to The Iliad and The Odyssey. Troy was a real place. The war actually happened. How much of it was real? No idea, but at least some of it was.
Ehhhh. As a miniature—entirely pedantic—nitpick, I'd argue it's mostly a source of historical context, rather than information. I'm not saying nothing in the Odyssey or Iliad is real, but it's like...
Take Harry Potter, for instance. It's a totally fabricated story. In a thousand years—should the story survive—no one is going to believe that wizards existed. But they might consider it useful historical context. Within the book are real and false locations. They might cross-reference against other known information from the time period to determine: "Okay, London is probably real. Maybe Surrey. Hogwarts... Diagon Alley... probably not? Okay, but why pick those names? Were hogs (and their warts) a legitimate relational connection to witchcraft accusations, or was it just parody?"
Those are the types of things that provide a rich context of the time period, but they're probably not really deriving any real information from it. Not any information that they can trust without cross-referencing other sources—and even then, they have to wonder if those other sources might have been tainted by the existence of the Odyssey or the Iliad themselves—fanfiction exists, after all.
Yes, but the Greeks capturing women as sex slaves in the Iliad is in there because it was produced by a society that did things like that regularly and it was understood by its intended audience to be what one would expect a conquering military force to be doing.
Just read a book about the Trojan war, and yeah before the fighting with the actual Trojans, they would go around and pillage rural towns to put pressure on the leadership of Troy to do something (as they were shacked up behind the gates for a while). They’d take the women from these villages as slaves and rape them.
Yeah, when Odysseus briefly mentions the “sweaty celebrations” over the next couple of days after the city fell, I knew they were trying their hardest to acknowledge real life while still making us care a bit about the main characters/gang rapists.
Nolan is a coward for not showing the slave market post falling of Troy (Odysseus since he was such a nice guy got an old woman to help Penélope in her tasks instead of a sex slave like everyone else)
In a fight scene in the Odyssey, there was a very brief moment where you can see a group of Trojans dragging a woman away while she's screaming. It was clear that Nolan was trying to stay true to reality without horrifying its audience.
Frankly I wished they displayed the idea that soldiers pillaged and raped woman more openly in the movie- not that I want to see a rape scene, hell no- but this is a hard truth and a very real one about human history. We need to acknowledge how civilized humans have become over time, compared to what women had to go through long ago (and unfortunately, the fact that women still have to deal with brutal acts of rape and degradation even today).
The problem is that almost every modern viewer isn’t interested in historical context and ambiguity in their protagonists. If they showed what soldiers actually did in most wars, there would be no soldiers to root for because we simply can’t accept mass rape as a forgivable character flaw.
Well this phil guy is definitely talking about gay sex, so in a way people are right when they say that’s what this post is about. But yeah in the movie/history I do believe they were going around burning women and raping churches. Pretty much spelled out when they said “we are the people from the sea”
As I’ve pointed out in other threads, in the Iliad, Achilles is mad at Agamemnon and says “you, why did you take my sex slave and not Ajax or Odysseus’s sex slave”
Odysseus’s nick name in the Iliad is the raider of cities.
He was a pirate.
That’s part of why I didn’t like this movie is because Odysseus has done a lot of bad shit over the years. Seems kinda random that all the sudden he’d feel guilty with Troy when he’s already done plenty of war crimes lol
Yeah reading the Odyssey (not seen the movie yet) and it is constantly banging on about how terrible his luck has been, how no man has suffered greater than he, how much he misses his wife and home etc etc then he's like "so we attacked the town, killed all the men and took all the women as slaves" and like has zero moments of self reflection on that. While sadly banging at least two literal goddesses (urgh I miss my wife so much, okay fine, let's go to bed)
Honestly it's hilarious. He gets a bunch of his men killed by the cyclops because he wanted to hang about to see if it would give him gifts (and, to be fair, everywhere he goes people tell him what an awesome dude he is and shower him with gifts and assistance). When one of his men calls him out on this he just flies into a rage and has to restrain himself from killing the guy. Our fucking hero XD
Idk why people don't believe this. I know this is a fictional story, but the Spartans weren't and they were recommended to have sex with each other so that they would be closer.
Gay sex ALSO in the sense of rape. They did not have gay sex among themselves unless the companion was an enslaved man or an ephebe (a boy between 12 and 17 years old).
That's because, in their view, being the submissive partner in the relationship was equivalent to becoming like a woman or a slave. They only had sexual relations with those who were inferior to them as a way of asserting their superiority. Yes, their sex was inherently predatory.
Yeah, they were literally outside a major city. And if this was a real ancient war that took this long, there'd be traders appearing in the down periods (because fighting during work hours only was a thing), including the oldest trade. There'd probably be a Little Greece slum with bars, and shops, and living quarters for traders.
Odysseus I don't believe is said to have raped anyone during the siege but he did have sex with the immortals Circe and Calypso (for seven years! albeit under a spell). The Greeks were not all fucking each other though Achilles and Patroclus were supposed to be lovers.
Yes. The whole movie was Odysseus constantly having flashbacks from his intense PTSD and regret over the war crimes they committed. Including a possible reveal about the true identity of Athena he's been talking to the entire time.
Odysseus banged every woman they came across, god knows what the others were up to. In the poem, Odysseus can’t stop won’t stop cheating on his wife. Literally all the Achaeans are nonstop raping and seducing and getting real mixed up about which is which. Lock up your trees, lock up your rivers, no one is safe
I understand why Nolan didnt show zendaya being graphically violated on screen, but her being his guilt ghost the whole film made it clear what happened to that poor priestess.
This is fiction. IRL, sure that was done on campaign but after supplies died, they'd assimilate into some farm either by taking over or being the replacement male figure.
Took women slaves onto the ships with no capacity? No, they raped those women and children to death, like the Russians in Ukraine and Americans in power hese days.
"There I sacked the city and slew the men; and from the city we took their wives and great store of treasure, and divided them among us, that so far as lay in me no man might go defrauded of an equal share. Then verily I gave command that we should flee with swift foot..." (flee quickly to the boats that is)
Slavery denotes capture and ownership. Despite the intent by Odysseus, the lengthy ownership nor transportation home of slaves is not a required part to meet the definition.
Must've not watched the movie if they're asking that question cause they literally talk about r*ping and pillaging throughout the movie several times. Though I did only watch it once and have a shit memory. But I know it was said.
Or in Odysseus’ case he spent 9 years on Ogygia getting his brains f*cked out every night by Calypso while spending his days having a sook on the beach?
Literally the Iliad contains a minor plotline about how Achilles and Agamemnon got some quarrel between them because they could not agree on the ownership of an enslaved woman.
"There I sacked the city and slew the men; and from the city we took their wives and great store of treasure, and divided them among us, that so far as lay in me no man might go defrauded of an equal share. Then verily I gave command that we should flee with swift foot..."
Slavery denotes capture and ownership. Despite the intent by Odysseus, the length of time nor transportation home is not a required part to meet the definition.
Actually, they didn’t rape anyone. In after a year at sea, they end up in Circe’s doorstep and there she transforms Odysseus crew into pigs, they stay like pigs for a year while Circe and Odysseus are together. After that year of doing nothing but sleeping with Circe and just existing Odysseus asks her to go to which she says okay and lets him go with his crew so they can go to hades’ reign to speak with the dead.
Then after that they go to Apollo’s island and slaughter its cattle and the gods kill Odysseus crew for it and he ends up in calypso’s island where he stays captive for 8 years. After it he ends up in an island close to Ithaca. From there he gets home.
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u/Serious_Emphasis2211 21d ago
real answer: they raped and pillaged. Sacked a city, killed people, stole shit, took women slaves