On the Odyssey, because

Christopher Nolan filmed the Odyssey in Greece without a single Greek actor. Here are almost 3,000 words on why that's not surprising.

Hi folks. It’s been a while. Life has lifed very hard, and I will write about the abominable saga we’ve been going through (which has lowkey made the news) at some point. But before that, something completely different. Nolan’s Odyssey.

This is one of the most annoying things I’ve ever had to write but given we’ve had every sort of take in the past few weeks, and that it touches on something I’ve been meaning to write about for nearly six years, I couldn’t resist. I know you didn’t ask for it, but here’s almost 3000 words on why I think the absence of Greek actors is just one link of a chain that goes back centuries, with its effects most visible in the 2010 Greek debt crisis.

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Last week the Guardian published a piece by Chris Cotonou asking a question that shouldn’t need asking in the year of our lord 2026: why is Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey - a $250 million production, filmed in Greece, with Greek government permits - entirely devoid of Greek actors? Not one. It’s not even an isolated incident - the Netflix series “Kaos”, also based on Greek mythology, didn’t feature any Greek actors either. Many such cases. But back to the Odyssey.

The film, out next month, sports Matt Damon as Odysseus, Zendaya as Athena, Travis Scott as a bard. It was designed, in the words of one of its stars, to “represent the world.” Of which Greece, apparently, isn’t a part.

Cotonou’s piece is measured enough, identifying the exclusion and the long history of this trope, and makes the (correct) observation that ancient Hellenic stories are treated as a shared western inheritance, a world literature, with the Greeks themselves somehow incidental to them.

A well-natured conversation I had the following day showed exactly why this argument is so difficult to make without it being immediately taken the wrong way. On one side, Elon Musk and the culture-war machinery, pretending to be offended by the casting of Lupita Nyong’o, a Black actor, as Helen of Troy - a complaint with nothing to do with Greek representation and everything to do with the usual reactionary nonsense. On the other, the reasonable liberal objection that Homer predates the nation-state, that identity is constructed, that Greeks have no more claim on Odysseus than anyone else. Both positions agree, from opposite directions, that the actual Greeks can be ignored. But neither asks why that feels so natural in the discourse.

This is what I want to talk about: not the casting (of which Matt Damon as Odysseus is honestly my biggest peeve), but the structure that makes the casting invisible as a problem.

Because the mechanism that produces this outcome is old and has a specific logic. A dead culture is universally available. It has no living claimants to contest the terms of its inheritance, no government to demand repatriation, no people to be inconvenienced by the uses to which it is put. Ancient Greece was adopted as the founding myth of Western civilisation at precisely the moment it could be treated as finished - a civilisation of marble and memory, not of living people with opinions about their own past.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who did more than almost anyone to establish the most commonly held understanding of the classical Greek aesthetic, never visited Greece. He built his entire system from Roman copies, mostly found in Rome. His Greece was a purely intellectual construction, insulated from any contact with the actually existing Greek-speaking world.

When Western Europeans did go to Greece, the encounter with living Greeks was mostly experienced as disappointing, if not annoying. Byron loved the idea of Greece but his letters show his constant frustration with Greeks themselves. I don’t blame him for this, I’m constantly frustrated with the Greeks as well. But the gap between the imagined civilisation and the people who happened to be descended from it was problem that needed to be resolved, and it was by simply omitting them.

This structure never went away, it has simply changed registers across time. In the 2010s, the debt crisis gave it new fertile ground to develop using an economic framework. The tabloid images of the Parthenon being auctioned, the cliches of Greek profligacy, the German press running “sell your islands” headlines - these drew directly from a catalogue of cliches that positions Greece as simultaneously the foundation of Western civilisation and not quite inside Western normality. Central enough to claim, but peripheral enough to discipline or ignore. This contradiction is how the appropriation is maintained. A people who are perpetually “flawed” custodians of their own heritage can always be managed by those who appreciate it properly.

Nolan’s film is the cultural version of this. Built on Greek foundations, shot on Greek soil, populated by people from somewhere else.

Now, the West has a creation myth about the recovery of classical knowledge that goes something like this: the Roman Empire falls, Europe enters its Dark Ages. Centuries pass. Then, miraculously, the ancient texts re-emerge - translated from Arabic manuscripts preserved by Islamic scholars in Baghdad and Toledo. The Renaissance happens. Reason (with a capital R) returns. A very satisfying story. But it’s also missing an entire civilisation.

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, the Eastern Roman Empire didn’t. It continued for another thousand years, from its capital at Constantinople, a sophisticated Greek-speaking metropolis - the largest and wealthiest city in Europe for much of that period. The texts of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid weren’t lost. They were in the Patriarchal Library. The language in which those texts were written was still spoken in the streets, alongside many others. When Islamic scholars in Baghdad translated Greek philosophy and science during the Abbasid Golden Age, they were translating from manuscripts that came, directly or indirectly, through the Byzantine world. Christopher Wren, writing in the early 18th century, had traced this clearly: Gothic architecture, he argued, came from the Saracens, who had “with great diligence translated from the Greeks.” The chain was visible to him but has since been smoothed over.

When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, the scholars fled west - Bessarion, Plethon, Chrysoloras and others - carrying manuscripts with them. They arrived in Italian cities already primed by the early Renaissance and helped transform it. This sounds like a Greek nationalist counter-myth but it’s simply documented history. The role of Byzantine scholars in transmitting classical knowledge to the Italian humanists is well established in the scholarship, even if it rarely surfaces in popular accounts of the Renaissance as a moment of European self-discovery.

There is another narrative built alongside it, very popular in the 00’s: Christianity extinguished the lights and Europe entered its Dark Ages; the Arab and Persian scholars preserved the Greek texts, translated and developed them, and eventually passed them back to Europe via Toledo and Sicily. The contribution of Islamic scholarship to the transmission and development of classical ideas is real and significant - there is no dispute there. But we run into the same structural problem: it requires a civilisation of several million people to simply not have existed.

And this erasure of Byzantium is not innocent historiography. The Holy Roman Empire needed to marginalise the Eastern Empire to sustain its own claim to Roman legitimacy. The Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204 - one of the most catastrophic acts of cultural destruction in medieval history, carried out by Latin Christians against Greek Christians - required justification, which is easier if the victim is peripheral to begin with. You can only argue that the Greeks vanished if you remove the thousand years during which they demonstrably did not. This gap in the Western narrative is deliberate.

A.C. Grayling is perhaps the most prominent advocate of this account, or at least the one I’ve seen making it most prominently. In a Guardian column he argued that Christianity plunged Europe into centuries of intellectual darkness, from which it was eventually rescued by the recovery of classical learning. In this version, he ommits the Arab scholars as well, and given his New Atheist credentials it’s not surprising tho draw a timeline in which both Christian Greeks and Muslim Arabs disappear. But it’s little other than a satisfying story for a secular liberal readership. It’s also substantially wrong.

In a debate, Tom Holland pressed Grayling on where exactly the Christian destruction of classical texts was documented. Grayling fumbled, because frankly there are very few such incidents that get repeated ad infinitum and ignore completely that the most important keepers of Greek classical texts during the early medieval period were Christian - specifically, the Nestorian Christian scholars of the East, who brought Greek philosophy into the Islamic world in the first place. And behind them, continuously, the Greek-speaking Christians of Constantinople, in whose libraries at least 75 per cent of the classical texts we possess today survived without interruption.

The narrative requires what Byzantium’s existence prevents. If the Eastern Roman Empire - Greek-speaking, Christian, intellectually sophisticated, politically continuous from the 4th century to 1453 - is allowed into the story, the Dark Ages thesis collapses. Christianity can’t be the cause of the darkness if a Christian civilisation was keeping the lights on throughout. So Byzantium gets dropped. The chain runs from ancient Greece directly to the Islamic Golden Age, skipping over the thousand years in which Greek scholars were sitting in Constantinople studying and meticulously copying the texts that supposedly no longer existed.

As you can see, this is a narrative with a political genealogy. The Reformation required making the medieval Catholic period a millennium of ignorance and oppression, to justify the break from Rome. The Enlightenment inherited this frame and secularised it: the Church as the enemy of reason, the Renaissance as liberation. Both versions need the Dark Ages to be genuinely dark, which means Byzantium - Greek, Christian, and continuous - can’t be allowed to complicate the picture. And yes, there is now extensive literature that shows that even in the West, the Dark ages weren’t exactly that. But the erasure is central to the argument here.

What gets built on this erasure is the modern popular account in which Greek knowledge takes a specific route: from ancient Athens, through Arab translation, to European recovery, with no Greeks present at any stage other than inception. The people who actually spoke the language, copied the manuscripts, taught the texts to Italian humanists and in several documented cases physically carried the books to Florence and Venice - these people are written out. When Bessarion arrived in Italy after the fall of Constantinople with one of the largest Greek manuscript collections in existence, he was was delivering ancient Greek knowledge, in person, in the original language, from an unbroken tradition. The Renaissance never “rediscovered” Greece. It received a package from Greeks who had never lost it.

There is another, much more vulgar, side to this mechanism. In 1830, a Bavarian historian named Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer published a thesis that modern Greeks shared no meaningful continuity with the ancients. His core motivation was geopolitical, rather than racial: Russia was positioning itself as protector of Orthodox Christians across the Ottoman sphere, a pretext for pushing toward Constantinople. If modern Greeks could be shown to be essentially Slavicised remnants rather than heirs to antiquity, the ideological basis of Russian strategic patronage weakened considerably. But the argument required a racialised premise: that ethnic legitimacy demands continuous territorial identity and bloodline, that a people can be dispossessed of their own past by the movement of populations across their land.

That premise, once normalised, proved available for uses Fallmerayer may not have intended. The intellectual conditions it helped establish, the idea that classical Greek inheritance had migrated north and west and that the living Greeks were not its rightful custodians, contributed to a 19th-century German cultural framework in which that inheritance could be claimed by others entirely. This is the soil in which the völkisch movement grew, and which Nazi ideology later made explicit: it is we, not the Greeks, who are the true heirs of antiquity.

Ancient DNA evidence has since shown Fallmerayer’s empirical claim to be largely false¹. Genomic studies show substantial population continuity between Mycenaean-era populations and modern Greeks. This is not consistent across the country - I’m writing this as someone whose own ancestral roots are Slavic, from populations that settled the north of Greece from medieval to fairly times. But the epistemological move I’m describing - defining Greek identity against the evidence of a living, continuous population - didn’t die with the data. It’s a sad fact that this argument has been repeated to me almost entirely unprompted many times over the years. And it often changes vehicles.

Back in 2020, I meant to review a book that had just been published and which hit many of the same rocks I’m outlining here - I never got around to it due to a global pandemic, but it’s worth bringing up here. Diana Darke’s Stealing from the Saracens, was a book written in good faith, with a genuine corrective purpose: to restore and highlight the erased Islamic contribution to European architectural history.

But there are several moments where it makes the same mistake it sets out to fix, and falls into the same pitfalls I’ve described. Following Christopher Wren’s reference to “Greek refugees” among the early Gothic guild-builders, Darke clarifies that these were “not Greeks from Greece, but Byzantine Greek Orthodox Christians from Syria and the Holy Land.” The sentence is meant to be precise but it’s instead anachronistic. Greek identity across the medieval and ancient eastern Mediterranean was linguistic and cultural, not territorial.

Greek-speaking populations had been continuous in Syria, Anatolia and the Levant since the Hellenistic settlements of the 4th century BC. Anatolia remained majority Greek-speaking until 1922, when the population was forcibly removed in the exchange that followed the Greco-Turkish war - within living memory of people alive today.

To define “Greeks from Greece” as a category distinct from Greek-speaking Christians of Syria and the Holy Land is to apply a 21st-century nationalist border to a world that didn’t have one. It’s precisely the error the book is diagnosing - committed while attempting a correction.

Both moves - the Western appropriation and the progressive redistribution - share the same underlying logic. They attribute the achievements of ancient multicultural empires to peoples defined by current national borders. They flatten the genuine complexity of Greek-speaking, Aramaic-speaking, Syriac-speaking, Arabic-speaking, Latin-speaking imperial civilisations into the cleaner categories of the present. And they do so consistently and without apparent awareness, at the historical expense of a population that was present throughout and is still present today.

This logic isn’t confined to academic history books or Hollywood casting decisions. Erdoğan’s Turkey claims everything within Anatolian borders (like Homer) as solely Turkish heritage, erasing the Greek, Armenian and Syriac presence that preceded the Turkish state by millennia. Putin claims the Byzantine and Orthodox Christian mantle as a legitimating device for Russian imperial ambition in the Black Sea and the Balkans. Both are collapsing a multicultural imperial inheritance into a single modern national identity, and using that collapse to justify a present-day political claim.

The mechanism is identical whether it is wielded by an authoritarian nationalist or deployed, unconsciously, in a well-intentioned book about medieval architecture. Refusing to name it in its respectable forms makes it easier to ignore in its dangerous ones.

Nobody ever asks. That is the thing to take away here. Not whether the casting was defensible, not whether Homer belongs to everyone, not whether Greek actors exist who could have been considered. Across years of development, hundreds of production meetings, a cast of dozens assembled from across the world in the name of representing it - at no point did it occur to anyone involved that the absence of Greeks from a Greek story required an explanation. The way it looks like now is that it wasn’t ever a decision because it wasn’t even a question. The Greeks were simply not in the room, conceptually.

This is the asymmetry that the casting debate never quite gets to. Nobody demands that Americans justify their standing to make films about American myths. Nobody requires Italians to explain their relationship to Roman history. These inheritances are taken as self-evident, their living claimants visible. Greece is different. Its inheritance is held in common by Western civilisation - claimed as the foundation of democracy, philosophy and the arts - while the Greeks themselves remain somehow adjacent to it. Available as location, available as atmosphere, but not required as people.

The fact I even have to write all this shows measure of how completely the mechanism described has done its work and is largely the default. A population with three thousand years of continuous presence on the same territory, speaking a version of the same language, has to assert its own existence to a filmmaker who used its landscape and literary heritage as a backdrop.

The West of course won’t stop doing this by being shamed, because it doesn’t recognise this act of erasure as shameful. The habit runs too deep and serves too many purposes - aesthetic, political, historiographical - to simple keel over because of a bad review cycle or a social media controversy that Elon Musk has already successfully turned into a horror show of racism. What could shift it is a more honest account of what actually happened, and which is not the satisfying story of a dead civilisation whose ideas were rescued from darkness by successive waves of more dynamic inheritors, but the less comfortable story of a living one that was written out of its own history because that was more convenient for everyone else.

Fundamentally, what we have here, is an inheritance that was appropriated, in increments, by people who were simultaneously claiming to preserve it. Nolan’s film is one more increment, and it won’t be the last. But it’s a clear enough image of the structure to be useful: built on Greek foundations, filmed on Greek soil, shaped by Greek myth, but interpreted and populated entirely by people from somewhere else. The world is represented, Greece needs to only be the set.

1. Note: I hate that I even have to bring this up