How Often Do You Think About Ancient Greece?

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About a year and a half ago, the world made an important discovery: Men think about the Roman Empire all the time. This began, as all major revelations do, on social media. A Swedish influencer, Saskia Cort, who had recently started dating men, asked her Instagram followers what their boyfriends and husbands think about, one of them mentioned the Romans, and from there the question and its mind-blowing answer spread around the world. Virtually every major media outlet covered it, from The Guardian to The Washington Post (RIP) to Wired, and within a couple of weeks, the mystery of male psychology having been finally, conclusively explained, we all moved on. Only one question was left unasked—and unanswered:

What did the men of the Roman Empire think about all the time?

The answer: Ancient Greece¹.

For the ancient Romans, Greece was hugely important. Perhaps obviously, they got a lot of their culture from there—their religion, their literary sensibility, their governing style, their philosophy and science. But the Romans weren’t just the incidental inheritors of Greek culture. For the Romans, tying themselves to Greece was key to legitimizing their civilization: They ruled, they dominated, because the Greeks were their ancestors. This might not have been technically true, but for them it was spiritually true. Virgil’s Aeneid, as we all remember, is about how Aeneas fled Troy, landed in Italy, and became the progenitor of the Romans themselves. So typical: The only reason poetry exists is to prop up the people in power. No wonder there are so few poets these days.

The Romans, however, didn’t simply adopt Greek culture—they adapted it to suit their own needs. They were a different people, after all, dealing with challenges that the Ancient Greeks, with their relatively small city-states, never imagined: managing first a large democratic republic, then a world-spanning empire. Clearly, their transmutation was beyond successful, because we (men, mostly) remain obsessed with it today. The Roman world doesn’t feel so strange compared with our own: the struggles, the motivations, the politics, the relationships, the perversions of the powerful, even the meals are all relatable. Thinking about the Roman Empire is the same as thinking about a post-apocalyptic world of zombies and murderous robots: What would we do if we lived in vastly changed material circumstances—but remained at heart ourselves, unchanged?

And this is why we don’t think as often about Ancient Greece: because the Greeks were aliens. Not actual extraterrestrials, I feel like I should note, although there’s probably a conspiracy theory for that, but really fundamentally different in how they saw the world and man’s place in it.

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I’m bringing all this up because of Christopher Nolan. The celebrated filmmaker behind Oppenheimer, the Dark Knight movies, Inception, Memento, and, unfortunately, Tenet is now at work on his next movie, an adaptation of The Odyssey. Now, you know I love The Odyssey, because surely you’ve read my 2011 attempt to recreate Odysseus’s sea journey from Troy to Ithaca without a map or a smartphone. So believe me when I say that although The Odyssey is an indisputably great work of literature, it’s also, by our contemporary cultural sensibilities, a very strange one.

To start with, let’s take Odysseus’s relationships with women. When the story opens, after various preambles involving the gods and Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, our hero has been held captive for seven years by the nymph Calypso. Who, of course, he’s been sleeping with. Yes, he was her captive, but come on. And earlier, he had spent a year on the island of Circe, a goddess and a witch with whom he was also sleeping in “her splendid bed.” Both relationships are a lot more complicated than that, involving the will of the gods and so on, but the important thing is that for the Greeks, these extramarital affairs were a non-issue. Nowhere that I can remember does Homer bring us the potential revelation of Odysseus’s infidelity to Penelope. The sex happens because that’s how men and women (and witches, goddesses, and nymphs) related in their world. Odysseus sure as Hades isn’t conflicted about it.

And so: How is Christopher Nolan going to present these details in a way that will allow us to continue to see Odysseus as a hero? I mean, Nolan’s good at presenting morally conflicted protagonists, but still, there’s an audience to consider here.

It’s not just the sex. Consider that every member of Odysseus’s crew dies. In the Hollywood filmmaking tradition, this is just not done. Heroes save their comrades—that’s the point of being a hero. Sure, a couple of them can die, even most of them, as in The Poseidon Adventure, but not all. And while Odysseus saves them at various points in the epic—like in the cyclops’ cave—he fails in the end, and seems relatively untroubled by this.

This is, again, because the Greek idea of a hero is not our idea of a hero. While both valorize, uh, valor, and strength and cunning, they split on the notion of morality. What a hero achieves is the important thing for the Greeks—how he both defies the will of the gods yet fulfills his gods-determined destiny. The non-heroes in his tale are true NPCs, disposable, only relevant insofar as they propel our hero toward new heroic deeds. How he behaves toward them is mostly irrelevant. If they mattered, they’d be heroes, too, and they’d have their own stories to tell.

This is what I mean by alien. Today we care—or we profess to care—about the character of heroes. Who they are is as important as, often more important than, what they do. What would it be like to live in a world whose heroes were, by our standards, amoral? That was Ancient Greece.

But in that time and place, heroes were also seen as a breed apart—descendants of the gods themselves, in one way or another, they existed apart from the rest of mortal men. No regular human became a hero by dint of their deeds; heroes were born to the role, not made. And for regular humans, morality did matter. The Cynics I wrote about yesterday were entirely concerned with issues of virtue and public behavior, and how those were often at odds. And perhaps that concern was exacerbated by living in a world whose heroes were amoral, their actions immortalized in song and literature and upheld as divinely sanctioned. Can you imagine living in such a place, whose leaders are driven by hypocrisy and greed, and who uphold as divine paragons of virtue those whose strength and deviousness far outweigh their concern for the helpless?

Maybe Ancient Greece is not as alien as I suggested.

In any case, I am clearly not the only one who thinks about Ancient Greece all the time. Besides Christopher Nolan, there’s the philosopher Agnes Callard, who’s famous for her unconventional relationships and who has a new book out, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, whose idea is that, as Laura Kipnis put it in The New Republic, “true thinking should be dangerous to your intellectual equilibrium.” Although I’m not a fan of Callard, I believe I’m going to have to read that.

More interesting to me are the novelists who take on Greek myths and epics, rewriting them from the inside out. The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller, is probably the most famous one, a retelling of Achilles’ story that revolves around his relationship with his lover, Patroclus. It’s good, but I enjoyed her follow-up, Circe, much more—the way it gave a fullness of life to a character who’s portrayed in The Odyssey as nothing but a seductive, deadly witch. It also provides a surprising take on Odysseus’s own post-Odyssey existence, which I won’t spoil here but has a darkness that feels real in a way Homer could never have sung.

Likewise, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason, adds to the epic by “rediscovering” 44 fragments of the tale, each of which spins it off in different directions: Odysseus married to Nausicaa, Odysseus discovering his Penelope remarried or dead, Odysseus fleeing the battle of Troy to become a wandering bard. Each story adds to the strangeness of the canonical one, expanding our sense of what could have been but also how this saga of homecoming has influenced everything that has followed.

There are other books, too—The Silence of the Girls, about the women who supported the Greeks in their siege of Troy, and Stone Blind, which pulls a Circe on Medusa—not to mention the many, many transpositions of Greek myth onto the present day, from the Percy Jackson series to Hadestown and Kaos, sadly cancelled after a single fascinating season.

None of these, however, has quite reached the level of popularity of, say, Gladiator. Are they too thinky, too lore-dependent? Or just, with their gods and monsters intervening in the lives of us mortals, too weird for audiences raised on the lush, relatable decadence of Ancient Rome? Maybe Christopher Nolan will change the game. If not, we could always ask Ridley Scott to do one—his Prometheus was, if I recall correctly, pretty damn alien. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: The Third Thumb

Am I weird for wanting this? Whatever. I just love the idea of expanding how the body works, and this does exactly that—in part because this mechanical extra thumb is controlled by your toes. The human brain is awesome, isn’t it?

Notes

1. Probably.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt