Authenticity and Homer’s Odyssey: Part I

Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey has evoked many strong reactions. Some favourable, many scathing. Detractors contend the film lacks authenticity; Odysseus is no longer the bona fide Greek hero and he’s over-moralising. There are missing scenes and no gods. His helmet should have been made of boar’s tusks because he wears a boar’s tusk helmet during a night mission in book 10 of the Iliad. And Helen of Troy, portrayed by a black actress, isn’t the right colour. These and other complaints give rise to a larger question: what does authenticity mean when one is talking about Homer’s epics?

The answer is pretty epic itself, on-going, and to which many scholars have dedicated entire lives. There are different schools of thinking and different points of entry into the world of Homer. Not to mention tens of thousands of published works on the great bard. The amount of academic literature on him and the poems he ‘wrote’ is beyond large. The Plain of Troy – a mere playground compared with the battleground scholars fight in when debating Homer and his corpus.

To begin, the poems themselves contain inconsistencies. The god Hephaestus, for example, is the husband of Aphrodite in the Odyssey, yet is the husband of Charis, in the Iliad. A deliberate literary choice? Or was this a move that took place more in connection with the way the myths formed? No attempt is made in the epics to reconcile these contradictory claims, so, in, say, a film that attempts to recreate the Homeric world, who should the wife of Hephaestus be?

Meanwhile, the way the battle scenes operate betrays an ignorance of how chariots were in fact used. Chariots in the poems function as if they were horse-drawn scooters that served only to whisk folk here and there. The hero dismounts to fight. And that is that. So, what would be the ‘authentic’ way to portray the use of chariots? Should a director represent them operating as battlefield taxis (as they do in the Iliad) or should the hero be portrayed as fighting from them (as they were actually used historically)?

Further complication for those seeking authenticity leads one to the Homeric Question and the seer himself – a dubious figure. The surviving biographies contradict each other, and scholars regard them as unreliable, even intentionally specious. One biographer, ‘Pseudo-Herodotus’, mines the epics for place names, such as Chios and Ithaka, and then claims Homer visited these places in order to lend his biography a certain circular semblance of plausibility. To give his forgery authority, Pseudo-H claims, in the very first sentence, his own work is in fact that of ‘the father of history’ himself, Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Most scholars do not see the Homeric biographies as providing any creditable information at all.

There is, in fact, a growing scholarly consensus that a man named Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, likely never existed. In a recent interview, Harvard professor Gregory Nagy argues the Odyssey was not written by a single man. Instead, he asserts, the epic was composed orally during performance by different singing groups. Subsequently, such groups of singers received the poetry from their forebears and made additions and alterations based on their tastes and the performance context. Thus it is that the surviving texts of the epics consist of layers composed at different times and by different singers. These layers are comparable to the strata of dirt at an archaeological site, which indicate different periods in time. The composers and perpetuators of what would become our Iliad and Odyssey fit into three main layers or groups:

The first consists of the singers who adapted the epic material as they performed it, primarily at the courts of kings. They lived and sang during the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Two models of this type of singer appear as characters in the Odyssey. The first, Phemius, is the court-singer at Odysseus’ palace on Ithaka. He even performs nostos (or return-journey) stories, and the Odyssey itself is Odysseus’ nostos story. Another poet, Demodocus, performs in the court of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians (he like Homer is described as being blind). Odysseus describes the context in which Demodocus performs—a royal banquet—and claims that listening to such a singer is the most pleasurable experience we humans can enjoy:

‘Lord Alcinous, most illustrious of men, it is a very fine thing to hear a bard like this, one with a godlike voice. I say there is nothing more delightful than when all the people give way to joy while sitting as banqueters in their rows and listening to a singer in the hall with tables in front of them laden with meat and bread, and while the wine-server decants wine from the mixing bowl and carries it around and fills the cups. It strikes me as being the loveliest thing of all’ (Odyssey, book 9, lines 2—11).

Through Phemius and Demodocus, we can catch a glimpse of the singers whom Nagy identifies as the original composers of the Iliad and the Odyssey, before things begin to ‘crystallise’.

The second layer of singers enter the historical record in the 6th century BC. A tribe whom, we are informed, lived on Chios, the island most often identified as Homer’s birthplace. Their name, ‘The Homeridae’, means ‘the children of Homer’, and they claimed to be Homer’s literary and literal descendants. The evidence suggests they operated on the basis of rules resembling those of a cult or secret society. It was, for example, forbidden for them to share their training in the craft of Homer with outsiders. Singing during a time of instability in the Homeric epics, the Homeridae inevitably added lines and scenes that became a permanent part of the tradition.

Itinerant singers known as the rhapsodes constitute the third layer of contributors. Their name derives from the Greek verb rhaptō, which means ‘to stitch’, and the noun ōidē, which means ‘song’. Their name literally means ‘singers of stitched words’. The rhapsodes travelled from town to town to recite the Homeric epics for money. Though they, for the most part, repeated poetry they had received from their predecessors; they undoubtedly made contributions to what has survived as Homer’s epics. Interestingly, the rhapsodes were also involved in the transition of the epics from oral songs to written texts.

During this time Hippias was ruler of Athens (527—510 BC), and his brother Hipparchus was responsible for managing the recitation of the poems by rhapsodes during the annual Panathenaea festival in Athens. Hipparchus instituted the rule that the performers were to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey in relay, picking up exactly where the previous performer left off. Hipparchus also, we are told, had the rhapsodes dictate sections of the poem so that scribes could record them. Our printed texts of Homer may well ultimately owe their existence to Hipparchus’ efforts.

And so, we can see that the strident insistence on ‘authenticity’ in renditions of the Odyssey is to a large degree, misguided. How can anyone stay ‘true to Homer’, when Homer was less of a person and more of a process, when the epics themselves contain inconsistencies, and when our received texts of them consist of layers composed by different singers over the course of hundreds of years?

Any account of how the Homeric epics came to be must surely include the work of these various groups. Their efforts resemble the vanishing act which ghostwriters perform for clients and patrons today. Since we are talking about an oral (and largely preliterate) culture, we might call them ‘ghost-composers’ instead. Still, their similarity to ghostwriters is striking in that they ended up being, in most cases, anonymous in their attempt to pass their work off as that of another—their fictional predecessor, Homer.

The film is Nolan’s Odyssey, not Homer’s and many aren’t happy with this. Someone on social media has asked Elon to give Mel Gibson 100 million dollars to make an accurate version of the poem. It is true that Nolan’s cut is not an accurate Odyssey. But is it a betrayal? Adapting and re-shaping Homer might be doing something closer to what ancient performers themselves did—playing with inherited material for a new audience.

Nevertheless, the script was in fact ‘abysmal’ according to Emily Wilson, the translator whose version of the poem inspired Nolan’s adaptation. But producing an accurate version? A difficult demand for there is no source text. Then and today, epics are redacted to serve theological and political goals. This is true of all epics including all bibles. A Gibson variant would be good but can’t be accurate—there is no origin to an epic.

Sure, there were scholars like E. V. Rieu who believed Homer was real and did write both the Iliad and the Odyssey and that it was not a patchwork built across time by many hands, but the work of one single master. There are also scholars who believe that someone called Mark wrote the Gospel of Mark. And this is all possible. And so the debate continues about textual transmission.

What we can’t really do though, is create something based on any original for this is not how epic forms. All original writings from the ancient world have been destroyed, have not been discovered, or did not exist to begin. For Homer, Plato, Euripides, Seneca or any gospel, we just have copies. Copies of copies of copies. All texts are copies of original source texts that no longer exist. But asking for the original source text is equally juvenile and misunderstands the performance tradition – it’s like asking for an original folk song. And so the earliest recoverable written text is the closest thing translators have to use.

Indeed it is not as if Rieu or others like him did not have a reliable text to translate. In the 1940s, classicists had produced editions of this epic that compared medieval manuscripts and scholia (ancient marginal notes) to reconstruct the earliest text that could be reasonably recovered. So Rieu translated from the scholarly Greek text that was accepted in his day. And such a text was already the product of centuries of textual criticism. Rieu translated the best version available, without trying to reconstruct a hypothetical earlier oral version – his translation was about rendering the poem which scholarship had established, not solving the Homeric Question.

In all instances Nolan seems to have done a little bit of everything: pay homage, redact, and re-write the epic into something meta. And he’s created quite a stir. Above all, like Rieu, Nolan has made Homer accessible and has generated much debate around the blind seer and the foundational text of Western literature.

‘In the nineteenth century’, said Rieu, ‘German critics were at endless pains to show, not only that the two works are not the product of a single brain, but that each is a piece of intricate and rather ill-sewn patch-work. In this process Homer disappeared.’ Rieu set out to prove otherwise, to re-establish Homer, and place him back ‘on his throne’, and to a degree he did so. Nolan, with his own production, in his own way, has kept him there. Three thousand years on, Homer is still very much alive, because people like Nolan are still participating in the same process that produced the blind one from Ionia. A process the ancient rhapsodes would have understood all too well.