classics Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

An Ancient Historian’s Breakdown of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is perhaps the most highly anticipated new film of the 2020s. It has already received near-universal acclaim from film critics and earned more at the box office in its opening weekend than any of Nolan’s previous films, including The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Oppenheimer (2023). It has only been out for one week and is already fueling a culture-wide resurgence of interest in ancient Greek myth and literature.

Although Nolan’s creative decisions for the film raised controversy even before the film was released, I promised myself early on that I would not weigh in on the film until after I had seen it myself. And I will be honest: I went into Nolan’s Odyssey with the expectation, based on my previous experience with big Hollywood adaptations of Greek myths and the images and previews that I had seen beforehand, that it would be unconscionably bad. As I watched it, I found some things I disliked, but, overall, I was pleasantly surprised. By the time I was about an hour or so into it, I found myself really enjoying it and actually liking some (although certainly not all) of the creative decisions Nolan made.

If I had directed a film adaptation of the Odyssey, I would have done it very differently, but, as I have reminded myself repeatedly, I am not the target audience of this film; this film is for normal people who like movies, spectacle, and mythic fantasy, not a nerd like me who has spent over a decade studying ancient Greek history and literature, can read Ancient Greek and Latin, has a master’s degree in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, and has been writing an ancient history blog for the past decade. In this post, I will lay out my thoughts on the film itself and some of the criticisms other people have made of it.

Ancient and Medieval People Believed that Unicorns Were Real—and Murderous

No one can deny that Death of a Unicorn, released in March of this year, is a very strange film. It is a horror comedy in which a man and his daughter driving their car through a remote forest accidentally hit and fatally injure a unicorn. Soon, the unicorn’s body ends up in the hands of Big Pharma executives, who discover its horn and blood can miraculously cure all ailments, and want to sell its ground-up horn and blood to wealthy customers for big profits—until the unicorn’s angry parents come to seek violent revenge for their child.

Readers may, however, be surprised to learn that this film, for all its surreal imagery, is actually much closer in important ways to how ancient and medieval sources describe unicorns than perhaps any other recent media depiction. While twenty-first-century popular culture generally portrays unicorns as friendly, docile creatures and associates them with plush toys and backpacks for young girls, in premodern traditions, the most consistent traits associated with unicorns are their fierceness, their impossibility to tame, their devotion to their foals, and their ability to kill humans who would seek to capture them in large numbers.

Is Athena Named After Athens, or Vice Versa?

In ancient times, the people of the Greek city-state of Athens regarded the goddess Athena as their patron. The special relationship between the goddess and the city is reflected in their shared name, and, naturally, many people have assumed that the Athenians named their city in honor of Athena. Startlingly, however, historical and linguistic evidence may support the opposite conclusion: that the goddess Athena derived her name from the city of Athens, rather than vice versa.

Advice on Reading Homer in Translation

The Iliad and the Odyssey are often regarded as being among the greatest works of world literature and many people have an interest in reading them—but how does one go about starting? Which translations are the best? In what manner should one read them? In this post, I will give advice in response to all these questions and discuss both the strengths and shortcomings of the most widely read translations, drawing on my experience as someone who has a master’s degree in classics, knows Ancient Greek, and has read the epics in the original Greek as well as in multiple translations.

What’s the Problem with Elon Musk’s ‘Iliad’ Advice?

On August 24th, 2024, Elon Musk, who is currently one of the richest, most powerful, and most influential human beings on the planet, tweeted, “Can’t recommend The Iliad enough! Best as Penguin audiobook at 1.25 speed.” He accompanied these words with a link to the audiobook edition of E. V. Rieu’s 1946 prose translation of the Odyssey (a different poem from the Iliad), published by Penguin Classics. This tweet has created a lot of discourse in the online classics community, with many classicists criticizing Musk while others are left wondering what there is to criticize. In this post, I will explain what the problems are with Musk’s recommendation, which basically break down into two separate issues: right-wing dog whistling and bad practical advice.

Why Greece Hasn’t Rebuilt the Agora

Almost every tourist who has ever visited Athens has at some point thought about how amazing it would be if the city’s monuments were restored to how they looked when they were new in classical antiquity. A couple of months ago, the website UnHerd, which has right-wing and libertarian political leanings and specializes in what it calls “slow journalism,” published an essay by Nicholas Boys Smith titled “It’s time to rebuild ancient Athens,” in which Smith proposes that Greece should fully restore the Athenian agora (the ancient central market and meeting place of the city) to how it looked in antiquity. This is a fairly common sentiment, so I wanted to take this opportunity to address it.

In this post, I will discuss why restoring Athens’ ancient ruins to how they looked in antiquity hasn’t already happened in the way that many tourists like Smith have hoped and the problems that such a restoration would certainly entail. Most ancient historians and archaeologists do support the idea of restoration to some degree or another, but we also recognize that restoration must be balanced with other concerns.

New Fragments of Euripides Discovered!

As I previously discussed in this post I wrote back in 2021, the vast majority of ancient Greek drama has not survived to the present day. Of the hundreds of Greek tragic playwrights who flourished in antiquity, only three have any plays that have survived to the present day complete under their own names: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. At least ninety-five plays attributed to Euripides circulated in antiquity. Of these, only nineteen have survived to the present day complete and only eighteen of them are actually his work. (One of the surviving plays attributed to him, Rhesos, is generally agreed by modern scholars to be the work of a different playwright wrongly attributed to Euripides.)

Many of Euripides’s lost plays, however, are not totally lost; fragments of them survive. Some of these fragments are preserved through quotation by later ancient writers in surviving works, while others survive on papyri that have been discovered in Egypt over the past roughly century and a half. Some of these fragments are as long as whole scenes, while others are as short as a single word. A new expansion to Euripides’s surviving corpus, however, has just arrived. On August 1st, 2024, two classics professors at the University of Colorado Boulder announced that they have identified substantial previously unknown sections from two of his lost tragedies on a papyrus recently discovered in Egypt. This is a positively electrifying discovery for the field of classics.

Did Julius Caesar Really Say “The Die Is Cast”?

One of the most famous anecdotes in all of ancient history holds that, when the Roman general and politician Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon stream, which marked the boundary of Italy, in January 49 BCE during his march on Rome, he declared “Iacta alea est!” (which means “The die is cast!” in Latin). A version of this story does occur in the ancient historical sources, but those sources indicate that, instead of the Latin phrase I have quoted here, Caesar actually used a Greek phrase with a subtly different meaning, which holds different implications for his understanding of the significance of his famous Rubicon crossing.

What Do the Newly-Read Herculaneum Papyri Actually Tell Us about Plato?

Readers who have been paying attention to the news may have seen that a group of researchers led by Graziano Ranocchia of the University of Pisa in Italy have recently used modern technology to read portions of a carbonized scroll from the library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum bearing a history of Plato’s Akademia written by the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemos of Gadara, who lived in the first century BCE and died sometime between c. 40 and c. 35 BCE. The newly-readable parts of the scroll include an anecdote about how Plato supposedly died and more specific information than was previously known about where he was buried.

In this post, I will briefly discuss the actual historical, literary, and philosophical significance of these findings. While the findings are genuinely significant, a lot of media coverage has been rather sensationalistic and has perhaps raised some false assumptions and hopes about what these discoveries mean. This post will serve as a scholarly counterpoint to these assumptions.

Why Were Elaborate Floor Mosaics More Common in Antiquity Than Today?

Ancient Greek and Roman wealthy homes often bore elaborate and beautiful floor mosaics, many of which depicted gods, heroes, and mythic and historical scenes in exquisite detail. Many such mosaics have survived to the present day, are displayed in museums and art collections all over the world, and are justly admired as great works of art.

Some people have recently wondered why floor mosaics were so popular in antiquity and why they are no longer as popular today as they were back then. In this post, I will attempt to answer this question. Along the way, we will take a deep dive into the ancient and modern economics of art and artistic labor.