re: adaptation and the supposed “purity” of the original work it’s complicated right. and ultimately I think that whether classicists like it or not, it’s just the nature of the beast that (a) the texts we study have been and continue to be radically readapted and reinterpreted and we can have strong opinions about which adaptations we like or don’t but it’s just the nature of a 2000+ year reception tradition to produce variance, and (b) the texts we study are much more a scholarly construction, and authorial intent far more difficult (and ideologically suspect) to try to recover, than is true of, say, a 19th or 20th century novel. which is to say that it’s one thing to say that Fennell’s Wuthering Heights misunderstands Charlotte Bronte’s novel and something quite different to say that Nolan’s Odyssey misunderstands “Homer’s” epic, because the latter is responding to another 2500 years of a reception tradition that in some sense is not entirely or even primarily about the Odyssey as a poem in Ancient Greek. this is not to take a stand on either one as an ideological project or whether either is a good film (I am reserving judgment but strongly suspect that neither is) but to say that I think that whatever the Odyssey is on a conceptual level is much less singular and well-defined than what Wuthering Heights is, if that makes sense
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