The 3,000-year-old Odyssey has become compulsory viewing and reading for the whole world because of its ever-immediate relevance. Of course, Christopher Nolan’s version departs freely from Homer’s text and its trappings are determinedly inaccurate—Agamemnon’s armour is like a Batman suit with Hellenistic highlights, and the film is not a faithful depiction of Bronze Age Greece at all. Instead, it faithfully mirrors the viewer’s contemporary reality, across the world. Our experience of the cinema epic could be very much like that of Homer’s original readers, because we too are at a threshold, looking back on the collapse of certainties and looking forward to new realities.
Homer’s work is dated to the early Archaic Greek period, whose beginning is marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE. The region was emerging from the Greek Dark Ages, which began circa 1200 BCE with the late Bronze Age collapse, a mysterious domino event in which the cities of urban cultures like the Hittite empire and the Mycenaean and Minoan civilisations were abandoned. In 50 years, all the Mediterranean urban centres from Greece to Gaza and the Hittite capital of Hattusa in Anatolia were abandoned, mostly for ever. At the junction of Asia and Europe, urban cultures were reduced to village-based economies.
Then the Archaic Greek states re-learned statecraft, and the Olympics, which bound them in a peace contract, represented a return to high civilisation. Alphabets came into use and “When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre”, as Kipling wrote in Barrack-Room Ballads, the age of oral poetry was ending.
Across the gulf of time, we can identify with Homer’s audience. Through the Iliad and the Odyssey, they were looking back to a heroic age before the darkness fell. Today, the world is looking back on the collapse of a global compact forged after the Second World War, and the culture of progress it developed over about 50 years. (Ironically, that’s how long the late Bronze Age collapse took to destroy Mediterranean urban culture.) And Janus-like, humanity is again looking forward to a new order founded on morality and accountability.
Another Greek author, Thucydides, was recently invoked in diplomatic messaging. In May, Xi Jinping laid a shot across the bows of Washington by speaking of the Thucydides Trap, the theory that when an emerging power rivals the established hegemon, war follows—a dangerous outcome between nuclear States. This is Thucydides seen through the lens of Harvard Kennedy School academic Graham Allison, but in The History of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek general himself, who campaigned in the conflicts of the Classical Period after Homer’s time, made other observations.
With respect to anti-intellectualism and the security State, dominant threads in modern politics, he wrote: “The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” With respect to the contempt for decency now seen in so many nations, and the withering of the idea of justice: “When will there be justice in Athens? There will be justice when those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are.”
By that reckoning, justice is within reach in India. The cockroach protest served as a lightning rod surfacing the repressed discomfort of people who had thought that the idea of India was not their problem, but who were deeply disturbed nevertheless by the dismantling of institutions by brute force, and by the rise of State-sanctioned lawlessness and cultural bullying. Unwillingly, they had been sitting it out, hoping that opposition politics would bring back decency to public life. They had been silently acceding to the most famous dictum of Thucydides: “The rich and the powerful do what they can, while the poor and the powerless endure what they must.”
It was not only the students’ protest which dismantled this fatalism, but especially what followed: the doxxing of young people, rape and death threats against teenaged girls, articulated by a troll army of professional frighteners which has been harassing outspoken people—academics, students, journalists and activists—for almost 30 years. When this ageing army was deployed against minors, when 60-year-old frustrated uncles were flinging abuse at 15-year-old girls, it seriously disturbed the nation. The outrageous perversion of the perpetrators of State violence, with their hands firmly in control of the levers of power, ‘forgiving’ (if only for the camera) the trivial trespasses of their powerless victims, has also not gone unnoticed. If the abuser got away with advertising the abused as the perpetrator, India would be playing out a paltry Greek tragedy—and not for the first time.
Thankfully, this is not the case. Thucydides would have applauded the collapse of fear in India. “The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage,” he wrote. In his 1833 poem Ulysses, Tennyson spoke of a people “made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”. It’s a good description of the present mood in India. No wonder retellings of the Odyssey are doing well, whether it is Christopher Nolan’s opus, the cascade of translations starting with George Chapman’s 17th century edition, or YouTube multimedia interpretations like Gigi’s Epic: The Musical Animatics. Today, Odysseus’s voyage holds meaning for every traveller who dreams of Ithaca.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public
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