The wild thing about all the commentary regarding The Odyssey movie and its faithfulness or lack thereof to 1) the text and 2) history is that neither of those things are what people seem to think.
When I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey – where she made a point of keeping it the same length as the original text – I was shocked to realize that very little of it was about Odysseus’ famous journeys and adventures – the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus-Eaters, the Sirens, his men releasing the winds, Circe, and so forth. All of that is told in flashback, and all of that is 4 chapters out of 24. That’s right. They’re less than one-fifth of the text (in page count as well as chapter count). They take up a little less space that Telemachus’ journey to see Menelaus, which starts off the book and is not part of popular common knowledge of the Odyssey (when people talk about accuracy to the the text, the fact that this was included at all is probably one of the things they’re thinking of!)
The rest of the book – i.e. the majority of it – is the events that happen after Odysseys leaves Calypso. His meeting with the princess Nausicaa, getting help from her father, returning to Ithaca, everything with the suitors. Odysseus on Ithaca isn’t the conclusion (as it has been in most popular depictions and descriptions of The Odyssey that I’ve seen), it’s over half of the story!
You’re talking accuracy? You are never going to get an adaptation that distributes its time that way, and virtually everyone watching it would be disappointed if it did!
And the clincher, also the thing that made this translation really make an impression on me, is that Emily Wilson starts off Odysseus’ tale of his fantastical adventures, with:
Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies, answered:
This translation is implying that all the monsters and magic in his adventures could be Odysseus just making shit up. No adaptational divergences from the specifics of those adventures even comes close to the kind of earthquake that reading of the text is.
In terms of the history – other people with more knowledge have said this too, but it’s impossible to have a “historically accurate” adaptation of The Odyssey because the original wasn’t historically accurate! The most common estimates for when it was composed are around the 700s BC (though there’s certainly debate ). The original events that inspired it, if they occured at all (which is also debated) would most likely have been in the 1200s BC, and would have been far smaller scale in terms of number of ships, number of men, and length of time. Neither the logistics nor the technology nor the pooulation size of Mycenaean Greece would have been able to sustain a war of anything like the size of the one described in The Iliad. It’s transposing 700s BC-scale-wars (probably the scale of wars in the Middle East, like Assyria’s conquests; 700s BC Greece was only starting to have governments and writing again after the multi-century impact of the Late Bronze Age Collapse) into the 1200s BC.
So there’s no way to get historical accuracy. Put it in the Late Bronze Age, where it was set, and it’s out of step with the kind of war that could have existed at the time. Put it any time in the Iron Age, when that scale of warfare could exist, and it’s wildly discordant with actual historical events. It is fantasy. It’s kind of like the Arthurian mythos, whose faint historical roots are, if anywhere, in the early middle ages and whose knights-and-castles aesthetic is in the late middle ages.
The historical grounding we do have is fascinating to me, though. There are written documents from the Hittites (state in central Turkey in 1200s BC) that mentions the Ahhiyyawa (taking into account the differences in languages, it’s not too far from Achaeans) in contexts that makes it pretty clear that they’re the Mycenaeans, and that mention a dispute around Wilusa (i.e. Ilium, i.e. Troy). We’ve got burned ruins in Troy, once from around the early 1200s BC and once from around the late 1200s BC, either of which could be the result of war.
discoholicmusic
stormborns
dailybridgerton
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
titsay
romaincrisis
