Adapting the Odyssey: ‘Culture wars’ and the enduring legacy of Homer’s epic

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey has faced backlash over the racial diversity of its cast as well as the lack of Greek actors.

Vrasidas Karalis, a professor in Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney, says that controversy overlooks the “universality” of the roughly 1,500-year-old poem, and more broadly, the “Greek tradition”, adding that it’s “not a national myth, or even a nationalistic myth”.

“It’s a human myth, a myth about our humanity, our desire to go back home – and that’s a universal desire, to go back home,” Karalis told SBS News.

Karalis said he believes there’s no “racial element” in the original poem.

“Today, we have these cultural wars about race, and we’re trying to incorporate them into these old myths, where they didn’t exist in the intellectual horizon, this idea that there are superior and inferior races,” Karalis said.

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