We Are the Marauders
Still from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
About 3,300 years ago, in the region around the Mediterranean, civilization collapsed. That’s what the archaeological record shows: the spectacular disappearance of a number of thriving cultures in Greece, Anatolia, and the Middle East. The Minoan palaces, with their astonishing frescoes of acrobats jumping over bulls, fell into ruins. Cyprus, at the crossroads of late Bronze Age culture, suffered a series of devastating attacks. Powerful Egypt was hobbled.
Perhaps the most famous destruction, however, took place at the city of Troy, which was part of the Hittite empire that stretched across modern-day Turkey. The fall of Troy is, of course, the subject of the two great works of ancient Greek poetry: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Composed sometime between 725 and 675 BC, or nearly half a millennium after the events they describe, the works attributed to the blind poet Homer recount the decade-long Greek siege of Troy, the clever ploy developed by Odysseus to smuggle soldiers into the city by way of a “gift” of a massive wooden horse, and then the 10-year journey of Odysseus back to his wife and child in Ithaca.
What the books do not detail is what ultimately happened to the conquerors after the sack of Troy. The Mycenaean civilization—the disparate Greek city-states that united at the end of the Bronze Age to sail against Troy in the Iliad—suffered the same fate as the great city of Priam and Hector. Athens, Thebes, Pylos: they all became rubble. It was only in Homer’s time that Greece was able to make a comeback.
The culprits responsible for the collapse of Troy are well-known. But what about the other civilizations? Inscriptions from late Bronze Age Egypt mention a mysterious “sea people” marauding through the region and destroying the great cities of Hatti, Ugarit, and Ascalon. The people of the sea very nearly bring down the Egyptians as well but are defeated in two epic battles. Weakened by war and other factors, Egypt goes into decline.
These “sea people” figure prominently in Christopher Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey. As Odysseus makes his way back to Ithaca, he encounters rumors that these mysterious marauders have put everyone up and down the coast on alert. At a key moment in the film, Odysseus comes to a startling realization. Reflecting on the pillage of Troy and his voyage of slaughter back home to Ithaca, Odysseus understands that he and his fellow Greeks are, in fact, the notorious sea people.
It is a supremely ahistorical gloss on the source text. The Mycenean Greeks, after all, were also victims of the “sea people.” The Iliad, rather than mourn the bloodshed, celebrates the Greek victory over Troy. In the Odyssey, the eponymous character seems to show little if any regret about his role in the city’s destruction. Indeed, he seems to have little regard for the consequences of any of his actions, an obtuseness parodied to great effect by a tart-tongued Penelope in the Natalie Haynes novel A Thousand Ships.
But Nolan was not aiming for historical or literary accuracy. It would have been a fool’s errand, in any case. He was making a film about a poetic retelling of a legend whose details had been tumbled and polished by innumerable bards over the centuries. Much of the controversy around the film, fueled by the “anti-woke” polemics of the far right, have focused on the casting. Should Nolan have found a Greek actor instead of Matt Damon to play Odysseus? How to cast the goddess Athena or even the famed beauty Helen who was the offspring of a god and a mortal? Are there really any actors out there with a single eye in the middle of their forehead who could have pulled off the role of Cyclops?
Modern historians no longer think that the “sea people” were solely responsible for the decline of so many powerful entities. Probably climate change played a role, with drought pushing regions to their ecological limits and prompting people to take to the sea in search of fertile land. But Nolan was not interested in making a documentary about the late Bronze Age collapse of Troy and other cities. Rather, he was inspired by the gaps in the historical record. “The people from the sea are essentially these marauders who some believe brought about the collapse of civilization, but nobody knows their lost history,” Nolan told Vulture. “Nobody knows who they were, and there’s not a lot of information about it. There’s a lot of speculation.”
Like any good filmmaker, Nolan had an axe to grind. In designing an epic anti-war film, he turned Odysseus from a trickster into a brooder. The man behind the Trojan Horse, like the subject of Nolan’s Oppenheimer, has developed second thoughts about his great technological breakthrough. Odysseus looks upon the rape and pillage of Troy, brought about by the trick of the Trojan Horse, much as Oppenheimer considered the consequences of the atomic bomb he helped develop. Both technologies were used to end long conflicts; both technologies stir regret on the part of their creators. After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer confessed to President Harry Truman that he, like the other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, had blood on his hands.
Nolan’s Odysseus goes one step further. During the 10-year voyage home portrayed in the film, he mourns not only the men under his command who have died but also the victims of the assault on Troy. In the film, even his dispatch of the suitors who have been trying to win his wife Penelope’s hand is bound up with his contrition for previous lives lost. In a substantial departure from the text, Nolan sends his protagonist at the end of the film into exile with his wife to atone for the deaths of his fighting companions.
Much is made in the film about the violation of xenia, or the hospitality that one must show to foreigners. This divine law is upheld by Penelope back in Ithaca when she hosts all the scheming suitors, though several years of eating and drinking at their host’s expense must surely violate the statute of limitations on hospitality. Odysseus, meanwhile, flouts the law with his Trojan Horse, though surely a war requires the suspension of any rule requiring that hospitality be accorded to men with weapons.
For Nolan’s purposes, however, xenia is a necessary counterpoint to xenophobia, the hatred of strangers that pervades contemporary culture. A little more xenia and a lot less xenophobia, the filmmaker suggests with his script and his multicultural casting, would perhaps forestall the collapse of civilization toward which the world is spinning. War, the ultimate violation of hospitality shown to foreigners, is not an opportunity in the film to gain glory but just the accumulation of dead bodies and blood-stained treasure.
Nolan is nodding at the headline news. In today’s environment, America, Russia, and Israel have all used epic rationales for their murderous misdeeds. Russia is defending its civilization, Israel is seeking revenge for a surprise attack, and America is in search of lost greatness. They have identified the dangerous marauders as terrorists of one stripe or another: Hamas, Hezbollah, Venezuelans on boats, Iranian mullahs, Ukrainian Nazis.
These “heroic” nations have produced Iliads and Iliads of press releases, tweets, and self-serving propaganda. But a self-aware Odysseus, like the one portrayed by Nolan, is much harder to find. Dissenting Russians have gone into exile. A handful of politicians have stood up to the U.S. war machine. It’s the rare Israeli who challenges the colonial mindset of Zionism. Such a world could certainly use more leaders who step down in order to go on a global apology tour.
Nolan ends on a hopeful note about the fall and rise of civilizations. Yes, the Bronze Age will come to an end, but then there will be Homer and the glories of Athens just a few hundred years later. It’s reassuring to be reminded that although civilizations come and go, history and humanity soldier on.
But here’s the thing: the Greeks didn’t have nukes. Today, civilizations can disappear just like Troy. But, after Oppenheimer, there’s a chance that they might not come back.
The Odyssey of the West
August 3, 2026
Boreas, the god of the North Wind, blows Odysseus across the Mediterranean. 4th-century BCE pot, Thebes. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University.
Now Washington, like Xerxes, crosses seas,
Assured the world must bow before its might;
But nations rise beyond its old decrees,
And build without permission – or its light.–V.P.
In the London Review of Books, Emily Wilson, the renowned translator of Homer’s Odyssey from Greek to English in 2017, made her views plain about Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey. Nolan, who won an Oscar for Oppenheimer (2023), had read Wilson’s translation and borrowed from it. But Wilson felt that the interpretation had done an injustice to Homer’s original (‘I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script’, she writes). To be fair, Wilson acknowledges – as any translator would – that each translation or rendition is an adaptation. She did not like Nolan’s film (apart from it being a respite, in an air-conditioned hall during a heatwave). That much is clear. What her review, which has been widely read, circulated as well as criticised, does not interrogate, however, is not whether Nolan is faithful to Homer, but what Nolan is telling us about our own times.
Between his The Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012) and The Odyssey, Nolan has made it clear that he distrusts concentrated power (government surveillance in The Dark Knight and political persecution in Oppenheimer). Homer’s saga was a perfect place to lay out his own version of the damage being wrought in our age: the world was held together by Zeus’s law or xenia (a sacred, reciprocal guest-host relationship), to treat strangers as one would expect to be treated, which Odysseus violated – as Nolan suggests – with the Trojan Horse. That violation, rather than his other smaller acts of disrespect for the gods (such as the blinding of Poseidon’s son the Cyclops shepherd Polyphemus), destroyed the balance and brought the anger of the gods against the world. The balance had to be restored, for which Odysseus first returns home, kills the suitors who have entrapped his wife Penelope, places his son, Telemachus, on the throne of Ithaca, and then goes into a lifelong exile towards the western lands.
The comparison should never have been between Homer’s original text and Nolan’s film, but it should have been between Nolan’s film and an earlier attempt by Hollywood to depict the Homeric tragedy. In 1954, the Italian director Mario Camerini released a big budget film, Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas (fresh off his box office success with The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952). Paramount Pictures, which produced the film, selected Camerini despite his role in Italian fascist cinema (he made The Great Appeal, 1936, a propaganda film for the Italian colonial wars in Africa). Camerini’s film followed the overall plot line of Homer’s Odyssey, generously translated at that time into English by the classicist and publisher E. V. Rieu during World War II, first for his family as a way to distract them from the bombs falling on London, and then for the English-speaking audience as a way to remind them of the great classical heritage that had been torn asunder by the European wars. Kirk Douglas treated Odysseus’s trial as that of a man who had to overcome obstacles to triumph. The violation of xenia was not the core theme, nor was the disorder occasioned by that violation and by the scale of the bloodshed. Camerini’s Odysseus is animated not by guilt, but by a manly sense of duty. This was a Cold War film, with Douglas as the great American hero who would overcome trials to triumph. As in Homer, Camerini’s Odysseus does not go into final exile but merely takes his throne as is his right and rules as if there was nothing of the absolute collapse of civilisation.
Nolan does not share Camerini’s politics or his era. Camerini’s Odysseus is triumphant, while Nolan’s is exhausted and remorseful. Guilt is Nolan’s central motif: the guilt of Oppenheimer for the atom bomb’s creation and the guilt of Odysseus for the violation of xenia. There is an overpowering feeling in Nolan’s films that the Western world faces an existential challenge of leadership, that it is the West that has broken an older equilibrium, and that now disaster is before us. It is as if the liberal ‘rules-based international order’ has been so significantly eroded that the West can no longer exercise leadership over the world. Nolan’s Odysseus is not merely the West in general. He is the United States after three decades of unrestrained power: victorious, disoriented, pursued by the consequences of his own violence, and unable to imagine a world that he does not organise. Matt Damon’s Odysseus sits with Calypso (the ‘burner of ships’) and racks his memory to understand what has happened and what he must do. The medicine to help him recover, the lotus flower, is also the medicine that blinds him from action. It is when he tosses that aside (the methamphetamines, the oxycontin, the far right of a special type) that Odysseus knows his mission.
The West has violated its own order, Nolan suggests. Ithaca’s people are worried about the Sea People, who might invade at any time. ‘Our civilisation is under attack’, says Penelope to Odysseus, who says to her that their ‘Bronze Age civilisation’ will return. He comforts her, but what does he know who does not even know the nature of the threats. The contemporary Sea People are the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and all those whose refusal to submit to Western power is interpreted as barbarism at the gates. Nolan’s Odysseus does not leave Ithaca to battle them. He goes into exile as an act of contrition, leaving Telemachus to restore xenia, which in Nolan’s political imagination becomes the liberal ‘rules-based international order’.
But the problem is not merely that the United States violated an otherwise benign order. That order was built to preserve Western privilege, with its rules enforced against adversaries and suspended for allies. Nolan can imagine the hegemon’s guilt, but not the emancipation of those who have lived beneath its power. His Odysseus can confess, surrender the throne and disappear into the West, but the world must still be repaired by his son. This is the limit of the Western liberal imagination: it can contemplate contrition and even abdication, but it cannot imagine an equilibrium made by the peoples who were once treated as marauders beyond Ithaca’s walls.
As I watched Nolan’s Odyssey, I wondered what he might have made of Aeschylus’s The Persians. Written after the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, the play does not simply celebrate a Greek victory. It enters the Persian court, listens to the grief of the defeated and presents Xerxes as a ruler broken by the hubris of imperial expansion. A contemporary adaptation would require an inversion. Despite the play’s title, it is Washington that now occupies the structural position of Xerxes: crossing seas with enormous armies, confident that superior force can compel distant peoples to submit. Iran and the other states that refuse this submission stand outside the imperial imagination, not as invaders of civilisation but as evidence that the age of unilateral Western power is ending. Nolan gives us an Odysseus who feels guilty and retreats. Aeschylus might have given us something more useful: an empire forced to recognise its limits and a world that no longer waits for Ithaca’s permission to rebuild itself.
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