The Most Greek Thing in Nolan's Odyssey Is Homer

I have spent most of my life being Greek somewhere other than Greece.

I consider myself a Greek story retold: for more than two decades I worked in Greek-language media in Australia, across radio, television, newspapers and the internet, translating one world for another, carrying a language and a culture across an ocean and finding that neither diminished in transit.

So let me admit what the think pieces won’t. When I heard Christopher Nolan was filming the Odyssey, something in me hoped: to hear our language in the mouths of its heroes, to see our faces on that ship. The film arrived, shot partly in Greece, with barely a Greek face in its principal cast, and it stung, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I also think we are misdiagnosing the sting.

Three separate arguments have been tangled together in this controversy, and they deserve to be untangled, because they are not equally worthy.

The first is the ugliest, and I want no part of it. Some of the loudest outrage has not really been about Greek representation at all; it has been about the colour of Lupita Nyong’o’s skin and the existence of Elliot Page. Whatever that is, it is not cultural pride but prejudice that has borrowed our flag, and the surest way to dishonour a civilisation built on hospitality is to weaponise its stories against strangers. Whatever legitimate grievance Greeks may hold about this film, we should refuse to let it be laundered through racism and transphobia. Those voices speak against Hellenism, not for it.

The second argument is legitimate, and it deserves a better hearing than it has received. Greece did not merely inspire this film; it hosted it and helped pay for it, with millions in public subsidies supporting a production that then found little room for Greek actors, Greek writers or Greek creative leadership. That grievance is really a question of industry rather than identity: access, pathways, and who shares in the value extracted from a culture’s heritage. Greek and diaspora creatives are entitled to ask why the door to global productions opens so rarely for them, just as every community historically shut out of the screen trades is entitled to ask it. I support that demand without reservation, while noting what it actually is: an argument about jobs and fairness rather than about who is permitted to tell the story.

The third argument is the custody argument: the claim that the Odyssey is ours and only we may perform it. That is the one I want to challenge, and I want to challenge it as someone who loves this culture too much to see it shrink into a possession.

The Odyssey predates the Greek nation-state by more than two and a half millennia. It was composed for oral performance, carried port to port by singers who reshaped it with every telling, in a world where “Greece” was not a country but a scatter of quarrelling cities held together by language, gods and stories. And the Greeks themselves never treated those stories as museum pieces. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides retold the same myths in different and often contradictory versions, and no one imagined the tradition had been betrayed, because there was never a single authorised Trojan cycle to betray; retelling was the tradition. Nor did what we now call Hellenism ever spread by staying put. It travelled with merchants and colonists, with philosophers and mercenaries, and, let us be honest, with Alexander’s armies, whose “cultural exchange” arrived at spearpoint. It was absorbed by Rome, preserved and extended by scholars writing in Arabic while much of Western Europe lost direct access to it, revived in the Renaissance, and embedded in every modern democracy. At each step, Greek culture survived precisely because other peoples took it up, translated it, argued with it and made it their own. Greek became the common tongue of the eastern Mediterranean not because it was protected from the world, but because the world kept taking it up.

So when we ask whether Nolan’s film is Greek enough, we are measuring in the wrong place. The Greekness of the Odyssey was never going to live in the passports of its cast but in the ideas the poem carries: xenia, the sacred obligation to the stranger at your door; metis, the cunning intelligence that outwits brute force; nostos, the ache of homecoming and the knowledge that you return changed. Whether the film understands those things is the authenticity test worth running, and it is one open to any storyteller on earth.

Here I want to be precise, because I know how an argument like this can be misused. The argument that a cast’s ethnicity has no bearing on a story’s authenticity has been used in bad faith against communities fighting for their first real presence on screen.

I am not making that argument, and I would ask that nobody quote me into it. There is a world of difference between a culture arguing from abundance and a community arguing from exclusion. Greek culture is not underrepresented in the Western imagination; it is one of the pillars on which it rests. One claim asks whether a civilisation can share what it already possesses everywhere; the other, whether people long shut out may finally enter the room. The two are not moral equivalents, and I defend the second for everyone, Greeks included. The argument I am making is only available to cultures that have already won.

And Hellenism, measured by the endurance of its ideas, has already won. A civilisation that gave the world philosophy, tragedy, democracy and epic poetry loses nothing when others perform its stories; if anything, it is confirmed by them. I choose to read our history as a story of that confidence: a culture so certain of its ideas that it offered them to humanity and found they belonged everywhere without ceasing to be Greek. I have to believe that, because I am its evidence. If Greekness could not survive outside Greek hands, I would not exist. The moment we treat that inheritance as something to guard from the world rather than something to offer it, we have misunderstood the civilisation we claim to defend.

Odysseus himself would have found the guarding instinct strange. He is the least stationary hero in literature: a man defined by crossing seas, learning from strangers, borrowing, adapting, deceiving, surviving, and coming home altered by everything he met. There is something almost perfectly Homeric about his story washing up, three thousand years on, in an IMAX camera on an Icelandic coast, told by people from every continent, argued over in a dozen languages.

The journey was always the point.

By all means, let us fight for Greek actors, Greek filmmakers and Greek creative industries to share in the wealth our heritage generates. That fight is just, but let us not confuse it with ownership of the story itself. Some stories become the inheritance of a people, others the inheritance of humanity, and Homer achieved the second three thousand years ago.

Next week I am going to see the film with my friend Eleni. I know how the scene will look: two Greeks in an Australian cinema, watching an English director’s telling of our oldest poem, with a Helen on screen who shares my friend’s name and little else. That name has survived for close to three thousand years, handed from generation to generation across every border Greeks ever crossed, and next week it will be sitting in the audience. I suspect Homer would recognise the scene instantly. A story being received, once again, far from home, by whoever came to listen. That has always been how the poem survives.

The Odyssey left Ithaca a very long time ago. Like its hero, it belongs to the voyage now. And perhaps that is the greatest compliment we can pay Homer: not to bring his story home, but to trust it to keep travelling.

First published on Substack, 20 July 2026.