Ur analysis on the importance of the phaeacians + oral tradition was incredible. Damn I need to reread the Odyssey but n e ways,,
I have been mulling over in my head as to why blockbusters like Nolan's Odyssey and Troy feel the need to reduce the roles of the gods. I respect creative choices, but turning them into concepts that are implied to exist but never truly shown (Nolan's Athena is a gray area in this case) has never sat right with me.
Personally, and this is a crazy claim to make I know, it feels like in an attempt to make their adaptations more 'realistic' they turn to a monotheistic, all encompasing idea of what a god can be. Like Nolan's Zues is genuinely treated like capital G God with how Zues' lightning lakes the place of the other gods in parts of the story. For example, how lightning is used in scenes with Calypso. She looks to the sky with understanding that Zues is telling her to let him go when in the og it's Athena who commands Zues who commands Hermes to do the grunt work. Basically, if it can be reduced to Zues, it is. And Troy is it's own things since there are literally no gods more real than statues.
Have you ever noticed this? is it a thing or am I being dramatic?
I do think a HUGE part of why modern adaptations of Greek myths often reduce the role of the gods is because the directors/writers of those adaptations are deeply Christian, or at least monotheistic, in their own cultural backgrounds. They have an idea of a singular capital-G God and need to maintain that, so they shoehorn Zeus into that role. Even when it doesn't work.
Zeus absolutely isn't a moral paragon — even those who believed he would punish evil also knew about the thousand or so times he cheated on his wife, the cruelty he showed his own children, the whole thing with Prometheus and fire and humanity being unnecessarily burdened, etc. He was perceptive and powerful, to be sure, but he does whatever he wants not what's just. At best, a rules for thee and not for me kind of guy.
Also, perhaps more importantly — Zeus isn't infallible. I wrote a paper about this in undergrad, but his role comes from the fact he is the god of kingship, and therefore the leader of the gods.
Zeus very much isn't more powerful, necessarily, than any of the other gods — even Hesiod, an ancient author who loved Zeus-glazing in his myths, acknowledged that! He addresses the myth of Zeus being imprisoned and dethroned by Poseidon, Hera, and Athena's cooperative efforts; he gets his throne back because Thetis summons one of the hecatoncheires to help free him. (That's why Zeus owes Thetis a debt and is nice to her during the Iliad.) Athena regularly manipulates the shit out of him using her favorite child status. It's stated outright that Zeus becoming king is because Gaia and Rhea put him in that position as the only kid who wasn't swallowed by Kronos and therefore the de facto leader of the rebellion; he was chosen to lead based on circumstance and keeps that position based on merit.
Arguably, the implication is that Zeus is king of the gods and rules them thanks to the consent of the governed, which...you can totally explore and validate in modern adaptations, but it's very much making Zeus more palatable as a powerful king. As a god, he can be uncomfortable for people, because despite being the most supreme of the Greek gods, Zeus still often does terrible shit and it goes largely unpunished, with the consequences usually falling on the women and children around him.
Like, if your idea of god has always been something distant and mysterious and unknowable but unquestioningly good, you ARE going to find the Greek gods hard to swallow! They will not match your own definition of what the divine should be! Because rather than a distant, all-knowing being, who seeks to create a just world...Greek gods are constantly intermingled with mortal lineages and daily life, completely capable of being deceived by mortals as well as one another, and are not interested in the greater good so much as in personal benefit/enjoyment and perhaps protecting their own domains and people.
And I think many people, when given a story about imperfect, flawed, fallible, human deiites — when shown a paradigm for holiness that has zero moral requirements, and therefore the possibility that gods and many other powerful people might just frankly suck and have unlimited power anyway — reject that. As a moral or concept to include in a story, or just as lore for certain characters, the idea you can be born powerful and do nothing to deserve it and have no sense of noblesse oblige and it won't matter is...depressing. That's probably why some stories featuring the Greek gods try hard to moralize them, to sand down their edges, or else condemn them outright — even in ancient times!
Ovid is a huge example of an anti-divine mythological author, but it goes back even further. Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos is (arguably; nothing is consensus among classicists) all about how you simply cannot defy a fate set for you by the gods, and how miserable that can make you. Euripides' Bacchae sees Dionysus scolded for his vengefulness, being told that "gods should not be like mortals in temper," AKA that he should rise above rather than chase petty revenge against his maternal relatives like he did. Plato did that in the Phaedrus, describing the gods as idealized concepts when we know they very much aren't. And he actually lived in the culture that worshipped the Greek gods!
TL:DR making the Greek gods more obscure and/or more ethical is absolutely a thing people from monotheistic (usually Christian) religious backgrounds do, because the idea of multiple gods, let alone that god could be fallible and immoral, is deeply uncomfortable for them. BUT. It's not just uncomfortable for religious reasons, but also moral ones. In a very real way, the Greek gods being often bad but still unstoppable is a sad message that many would prefer to subvert in their retellings of myths, and even the ancient Greeks sometimes did so.
So like. I'm not absolving Christopher Nolan for the absolutely dogshit choice he made to cut the gods from the Odyssey when that removes both the main antagonist, deuteragonist/primary support, and a ton of the story's politics and themes. But it's very much not a problem unique to him.
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