Irena Karafilly
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I am tired of the controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan’s ODYSSEY, but here is the best A guest post from writer and author Tenia Christopoulosresponse I’ve seen to the film, posted on X by Maria Papadopoulou. (Thanks to writer and author Tenia Christopoulos)
Dear Christopher Nolan,
My name is Herod Priovolos and I want to tell you what #TheOdyssey truly means to me and to generations of Greeks who grew up with Homer’s story.
Homer did not sing of Odysseus simply to entertain us with ships, storms, gods and monsters. He told the story because he understood what war, time, distance and loss can do to the human soul.
Odysseus leaves Ithaca as a king, a husband and a father. He returns twenty years later alone, exhausted and disguised as a beggar, carrying the memory of every companion who never made it home.
The monsters are not merely creatures created for spectacle.
The Cyclops is power without justice. The Sirens are the beautiful voices that tempt a person to abandon their purpose. Circe represents the danger of losing our humanity. Calypso offers Odysseus immortality, but even eternal life becomes a prison when the price is forgetting his wife, his son, his homeland and his own identity.
And Ithaca is not merely an island.
Ithaca is the place that remembers you when the world no longer recognizes your face. It is the home that remains alive inside you after everything else has been taken away. It is Penelope growing older while she waits. It is Telemachus becoming a man without his father. It is Argos surviving long enough to recognize his master one final time.
Odysseus is not great simply because he defeats monsters. He is great because he is proud, frightened, wounded, clever, imperfect and deeply human. He loses his companions, his youth, his name and twenty years of his life, yet he refuses to forget who he is.
When he finally returns, Penelope does not recognize him through strength, glory or appearance. She tests him. Odysseus proves his identity by remembering the bed they built together around the roots of a living olive tree.
That is the heart of The Odyssey.
Not the battles.�Not the ships.�Not the monsters.
Two people standing before each other after twenty years, asking whether love, memory and identity can survive everything time has done to them.
That is why this poem has survived for almost 3,000 years. Every human being is trying to return to something: a home, a person, a lost part of themselves, or the life they had before the world changed them.
So use Homer’s seas, gods, heroes and monsters. But please understand what you are touching.
The Odyssey was never truly about how far a man could travel.
It was about how much the world could take from him before he stopped being himself, and whether, after losing almost everything, he could still find his way home.”
Irena Karafilly
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“The fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” (Aristotle)
A postscript from William Green: This is moving and perceptive, especially in its emphasis on war, loss, recognition, and the costly return home. I am less certain that each monster carries so fixed an allegorical meaning, or that Ithaca can bear quite so much symbolic innocence. Still, the reminder is timely: The Odyssey is not merely an adventure but a poem about what survives distance, violence, and time. – Thanks for this post, Cynthia!