Ed’s Note
I had to get over the fact that Theo James was not going to manifest in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It is, in my books, a great oversight. I firmly believe The Odyssey deserved at least one token Greek god descending in all his glory among the multiplicity of ethnicities represented in what was, after all, a Greek epic. A journey that took in innumerable lands and ports over the 20 years from the fateful day Odysseus left Penelope’s bed and Ithaca to go and pillage Troy.
In all that time and space, Nolan, it appears, could not find a single Greek to play any of the roles. But so be it. That is what happens when your childhood stories are transmuted into global mythologies: anyone can do with them what they will. So, no Greeks.
And then there is Elon. That great defender of … I don’t even know what. Taking up a peculiar cudgel to argue that Lupita Nyong’o could not possibly play Helen of Troy or her sister Clytemnestra because this was some woke aberration of historical truth. Of course, if you apply yourself to actual history, you might discover that what counted as being Greek or Hellene, both terms that were in use in that far distant time, was speaking the same language and worshipping the same gods. They did not specify that everyone had to look alike, nor did they station a doorman at Olympia to check for ethnic purity. That was never the criterion.
Paris was promised his Helen by the very goddess they all seem to have worshipped. The story I grew up with goes like this. In a Game of Thrones-worthy moment, the three great goddesses — Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite — competed for aesthetic supremacy by bribing a young shepherd, a certain Paris. The most handsome youth of antiquity had to choose the most beautiful goddess among them. A fool’s errand with disastrous consequences.
A golden apple was thrown into the field, which he rather foolishly picked up, luring him into making the fateful choice. But these goddesses played dirty. Hera, wife of Zeus and the embodiment of power, promised that he would become the most powerful man in the world if he chose her. Athena offered wisdom. Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world.
We know which prize he chose.
Of course, the Fates had the whole sorry tale of his life unspooling all the while, and the goddesses knew that this humble shepherd was in fact the lost prince of Troy. His mother dreamt she had given birth to a burning ember that would destroy the city. So Priam, his father and king of Troy, ordered the infant killed. Fortunately, the hired muscle took pity on the baby.
The rest is history.
The genius of Homer is that, throughout The Iliad and The Odyssey, he never actually describes Helen. She is simply said to be comparable to a goddess. We know she was beautiful, but for thousands of years the face that launched a thousand ships has populated countless imaginations with their own version of what that face might have been. That omission enables myth-making and creates a febrile fantasy in which Helen stands in for every beautiful woman across time.
She is also a profoundly wronged woman. What choice does she ever really have in this story? Her name and honour are toyed with from the moment the apple begins to roll. She becomes a troubled symbol, blamed by the people of her own age and by successive generations for igniting men’s passions and causing untold misery and destruction through her mere existence.
Powerful stuff.
And here she is, thousands of years later, still the fall girl — only now for the manosphere, with the richest man on earth battling it out on the interwebs, claiming to speak for her and for the ideal beauty she may or may not have embodied.
It’s a Trojan horse worthy of Homer himself.
Frankly, Elon should read his Homer, where the poet tells us that the Ethiopians were especially favoured by the gods and, because they lived closest to the sun, were considered the noblest of peoples. He might also note that Cleopatra was a Greek Ptolemy, descended from Alexander the Great, yet there is no definitive record of what she looked like, other than that she was evidently attractive enough to captivate both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
I watched The Odyssey in an open-air cinema in a garden on the island of my forebears, Samos, fragrant with basil and fig trees, the birthplace of Pythagoras and Aristarchus. Pythagoras, like Odysseus, travelled the known world for 20 years, accumulating philosophies and a few rather useful theorems. Aristarchus worked out that it is we who travel around the sun, and not the other way around. And every summer, a thousand years after Pythagoras wandered these lands, Cleopatra is said to have spent time on the very beaches just over the hill, beneath the ancient fortifications. Down the coast stood the great temple of Hera, still ruling the roost.
I do not know what any of them really looked like.
What I do know is that I grew up with these stories and these ideas, and that it moved me beyond words to watch Nolan create his own version of this mysterious past in the very landscape where these legends took shape. He has put his own spin on a universal story that is older than any of us can truly comprehend, yet still feels strangely familiar.
We may no longer speak the same language or share the same gods, but this story belongs to all of us. Not because we look the same, but because we are all human.
Though, really, he should have thrown in a little Theo James for good measure.
X
Aspasia
NOW AVAILABLE | Page through the August 2026 issue of Wanted and enlarge for easy viewing:
• Remember, you can subscribe to the Business Day newspaper to receive your gorgeous, glossy physical copy of Wanted in the mail.
