In reading the newspapers and watching posts, I was surprised by how much people were writing about The Odyssey, a new film released last month based on a Greek poem from antiquity. The amount of free publicity generated by all the commentary surprised me. The studio’s publicity team could not have been more pleased.

As I have mentioned in the past my ancient Greek, or my any Greek, is very bad. But I had always understood The Odyssey as something layered, built from different traditions and different times to different ends. Homer’s version, or what we call Homer’s version, is just that: a version. Saying there is an “authentic” version is like saying there is an authentic version of “Dracula.” Folk stories, poems, musical traditions, spooky stories, decades of movie interpretations that now span centuries. This Greek poem is distilled yet again for another audience, either as a moral lesson or a commercial venture, or both. The Odyssey, like any old story, provides us a vehicle to say what we want to say the way we would like it said, like the Bible. These are long collections of
wisdom traditions, not the one and only source of wisdom.

What to me is always interesting, like in the Bible, is to see how what is moral at one time and place may not not be so moral at another time. Is the trickster hero a good guy or just a con man? Through the magic of having it written down, or filmed, it may be frozen yet again for another generation.

A theme from this movie version, from what I’ve read, is that Odysseus has a guilty conscience for using the trick of the Trojan Horse. This is an interesting take. Does Jacob, a hero of Judaism, feel guilty about tricking Isaac, his old, blind, father, and stealing his brother Esau’s birthright? Does Tom Sawyer have a guilty conscience from tricking people into whitewashing a fence?

And on a grander scale, in violence and war, when do ends justify the means? These seem to be our eternal human questions. I do not know if there is an authentic answer or an authentic version. I imagine I’ll get around to seeing the new movie sometime on a TV screen, and my own anti-war sentiment will be reflected in some way. Or, I’ll interpret it that way. Such is the role of literature. Always there and ready for a new way to look at it.