In Homer, Odysseus does not suffer because he did wrong at Troy. He suffers because he blinded a Cyclops who happened to be a god’s son, and because his men ate the wrong cows. The poem is quite clear about the causal chain and it has nothing to do with the sack of the city. The gods in it are not administering justice; they are pursuing grievances, and the grievances are personal, and the punishment falls on people who had nothing to do with them. The crew die because their commander offended someone’s father. That is the theology, and it is not a theology of desert.
A world in which suffering is caused by guilt is, for all its grimness, an orderly world. It is a world in which you can in principle work out why things are happening to you, and in which the correct response is remorse, and in which remorse is a kind of currency. The world of the poem is not orderly in that way at all. Things happen to Odysseus because a god is annoyed. When he asks why, nobody explains. The nearest the poem comes to a moral about the whole affair is that the gods gave men suffering so that there would be songs about it for people not yet born — an idea so bleak and so aesthetic that no film could ever put it on screen without an audience walking out.
Nolan’s version replaces that with a story we know how to hear: the veteran who cannot come home because of what he did there. It is a beautiful, coherent and humane story. It is also the story we tell about every war now, and it has the effect of making a very strange poem feel like a film we have already seen.
from Watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026)
GPT-5.6 Sol:
The passage is strongest as a criticism of Nolan’s act of translation from an archaic moral universe into a modern psychological one. As an account of Homer himself, though, it overstates the case. The Odyssey is stranger than Nolan’s film, but it is also more morally structured than this writer allows.
The crucial problem is the claim that Homer’s gods are simply ‘pursuing grievances’ rather than administering anything resembling justice. The poem practically begins by raising exactly this question. Its proem says Odysseus’ companions perish through their own atasthalia—recklessness or ruinous folly—and a few lines later Zeus complains that mortals blame the gods for evils that they themselves bring upon themselves ‘beyond what is fated’. Aegisthus is Zeus’s example: he was explicitly warned and knowingly committed the acts for which he was subsequently killed.
That does not make the Odyssey a tidy theodicy. Far from it. Poseidon’s persecution of Odysseus plainly has the structure of personal vengeance: Odysseus blinds Polyphemus; Polyphemus appeals to his divine father; Poseidon obstructs Odysseus’ return. There is no impartial tribunal deciding the appropriate penalty. And the Homeric gods routinely act because their honour, favourites, children, privileges or possessions have been slighted. Modern moral categories such as proportionality and equal responsibility fit this world very badly.
But this is precisely why ‘not a theology of desert’ is slightly too clean. Homer has something more unstable: desert, fate, divine favour, inherited relationships, taboo, heroic error and sheer contingency all operating simultaneously. Even modern scholarship has long noticed the tension between Zeus’s programmatic assertion of human responsibility and episodes such as Poseidon’s vendetta. The poem does not give us one causal system.
The claim about the crew is particularly misleading. They do not, collectively, ‘die because their commander offended someone’s father’. Six men from each ship die fighting the Cicones before Odysseus has even encountered Polyphemus. Eleven of the twelve ships are later annihilated by the Laestrygonians. Scylla eats six more. The remaining crew finally slaughter Helios’s cattle despite explicit warnings, and Zeus destroys their last ship; Odysseus survives precisely because he did not participate. So Poseidon’s anger is central to Odysseus’ delayed nostos, but it is not a master explanation for the deaths of his men.
And ‘they ate the wrong cows’ understates what Homer is doing. They eat sacred cattle after being repeatedly told exactly what will happen if they do. Tiresias and Circe both supply advance warning. In that respect the cattle episode looks remarkably like Zeus’s Aegisthus paradigm: warning → deliberate transgression → foretold consequence. Yet Homer complicates the morality because the men are starving after being trapped by adverse weather. The narrator calls them reckless; the narrated circumstances invite more sympathy. That friction is characteristic of the poem.
There is nevertheless something very good in the passage’s distinction between guilt as causality and Homeric suffering. Odysseus does not wander for ten years because he has recognised the wickedness of Troy and subconsciously believes himself unworthy of home. The poem gives no such explanation. Nolan very deliberately does. Contemporary accounts of the film describe his Odysseus as guilt-ridden over Troy, interpreting his own Trojan Horse stratagem as a violation of sacred hospitality and his wandering partly as an inability to face what he has done. The film has therefore been read explicitly in terms of PTSD and ‘moral injury’.
That alteration is more radical than simply ‘making Odysseus sympathetic’. It internalises Homer’s gods. In Homer, the obstacle is out there: Poseidon hates you; Helios demands satisfaction; Zeus sends the thunderbolt; Scylla eats six men; fate has spun something for you. Nolan relocates much of that machinery inside Odysseus. The god who prevents homecoming becomes the conscience that says, in effect, you cannot go home as the man who did this. External divine grievance becomes internal moral injury.
That is an enormously modern operation. It produces the sort of narrative causality we instinctively recognise: an atrocity produces guilt; guilt produces avoidance and self-punishment; acknowledgment makes reconciliation possible. The journey acquires the structure of therapy. Homeric nostos becomes psychological reintegration.
The quoted writer is therefore onto something important with ‘a world in which suffering is caused by guilt is … an orderly world’. Nolan’s account makes suffering interpretable. If Odysseus suffers because he cannot forgive himself for Troy, his pain points backward toward an intelligible cause and forward toward a conceivable cure. Recognition, confession and reconciliation can complete the arc. Homeric suffering is much less amenable to that machinery. Poseidon does not particularly care whether Odysseus achieves moral insight. One does not cure divine anger by acquiring a healthier relationship with one’s past.
But the essay then smuggles in an oddly Christian conception of what ‘moral order’ has to mean. Homeric morality is not primarily about an interior conscience, guilt and remorse. It is much more concerned with limits, reciprocity, honour, hospitality, supplication, oath, reverence, restraint and the consequences of reckless action. Polyphemus violates xenia monstrously; the suitors violate it systematically; Aegisthus ignores a divine warning; Odysseus’ men violate a sacred prohibition. The gods may be partisan and horrifyingly disproportionate, yet the social cosmos has norms. It simply does not organise those norms around the modern idea that punishment should track individual moral culpability with mathematical fairness.
The passage about suffering becoming song is real, and here the essay reaches something much deeper. In Book 8, after Odysseus breaks down listening to Demodocus sing of Troy, Alcinous says that the gods brought destruction upon men so that they would become a subject of song for people afterward. There is a closely related thought in the Iliad, where Helen envisages herself and Paris becoming material for future song.
What makes that thought so alien is that it supplies neither justice nor redemption. Suffering receives form, memory and beauty—but it does not thereby become deserved. Epic poetry is not compensation in the Christian sense. Troy is still destroyed. Hector is still dead. Odysseus still weeps. The horror becomes singable. That is a very different answer to suffering from ‘you must face what you did and forgive yourself’.
And there is an extraordinary moment that actually gives Nolan some warrant for connecting Troy to Odysseus’ psychology without turning Homer into Nolan. When Odysseus listens to the Trojan story, Homer compares his weeping not to that of a victorious Greek warrior but to a woman mourning her husband as her city is conquered and she herself is dragged into slavery. In other words, the conqueror hears his own heroic story and Homer suddenly imagines his grief through the eyes of the conquered. That does not mean Odysseus feels modern war guilt; the poem never says he does. But it makes his relationship to Troy much less triumphalist and psychologically flatter than ‘Homer simply regards Troy as glory.’
So I would reformulate the quoted argument this way:
Nolan has not discovered a hidden moral meaning in Homer; he has substituted one causal system for another. Homer distributes causality among character, taboo, accident, monsters, gods, fate, social obligation and divine vendetta. Nolan gathers much of that bewildering plurality into the single modern category of the traumatised conscience. The result is indeed coherent and humane. But coherence is exactly what is lost. Homer allows Zeus to insist that human beings cause their own suffering while simultaneously showing human beings crushed by forces they neither deserve nor control. He allows Poseidon to be vindictive and the suitors genuinely culpable. He lets starvation mitigate a sacrilege that nevertheless receives annihilating punishment. He lets suffering be meaningless as justice while meaningful as song.
That contradiction, rather than simple divine arbitrariness, is what makes the Homeric world genuinely difficult. Nolan’s version apparently resolves the contradiction by making Odysseus’ voyage a moral reckoning. The essay is persuasive that something is lost in doing so: not ‘Homer’s absence of morality,’ exactly, but Homer’s refusal to make suffering answer to one moral grammar.
