What Maine’s combat veterans taught me about the Odyssey | Opinion
Homer's Odyssey Finds New Audience in 2026 Film; Thomas College President Offers Perspective
Thomas College President Jeannine Diddle Uzzi has spent years studying how ancient texts speak to modern audiences. She led reading groups on Homer's Odyssey with combat veterans from 2014 to 2019, in partnership with the Maine Humanities Council and Portland Vet Center.
Now, as four translations of the 3,000-year-old Greek epic sit on national bestseller lists this summer, Uzzi sees a striking parallel in Christopher Nolan's recent film adaptation.
"Like many veterans, Odysseus yearns for homecoming but finds that reality fraught, perhaps even a bridge too far," Uzzi said. "When the veterans in my reading groups learned that upon his return home, Odysseus did not recognize his beloved Ithaka, they could relate."
Nolan's film makes a bold creative choice by centering the veteran experience. The director uses the term "veteran" four times throughout the film, often pairing it with "Trojan War" in the same manner contemporary Americans might say "Vietnam veteran" — language Homer never used but that resonates with modern viewers.
In the film, the sirens' song forces Odysseus to confront an uncomfortable truth: he might not actually want to go home. Nolan also imbues his protagonist with a sense of regret absent from the original, having Odysseus lament that "we violated all that is sacred between people."
Uzzi argues this departure from strict historical accuracy serves a larger purpose.
"Does he engage his modern audience on its own terms and help us make meaning of an ancient text? Absolutely," she said.
One clever translation involves xenia — the ancient Greek concept of hospitality bound by Zeus' law. Nolan renders this into a concept Americans readily understand: the Golden Rule. Uzzi welcomes this approach.
"We no longer need hospitality in the way the Greeks did, but we desperately need the Golden Rule," she said. "The Greeks valued hospitality because they believed they might encounter a deity in disguise; valuing hospitality also helped guarantee safety for all travelers."
Nolan takes another creative risk with the character of Agamemnon, presenting him in a manner unmistakably inspired by Darth Vader. The audience never sees Agamemnon's face; instead, Nolan confronts viewers with what appears to be a human spine at the back of the character's helmet. Uzzi, who recalled the childhood terror of meeting Lucas' villain in 1977, finds the parallel fitting.
"Agamemnon evoked in me the childhood terror I felt meeting George Lucas' similarly caped villain back in 1977," she said. "Nolan gets that right, too: the Trojan War was never about Helen. It was, in modern terms, a war for oil."
Not all classicists share Uzzi's enthusiasm. Emily Wilson, whose translations of both the Iliad and Odyssey have been widely praised, recently wrote in the London Review of Books that she "would be ashamed to have written any part of this script."
Uzzi disagrees. She calls Nolan's adaptation a triumph of human creativity at a time when artificial intelligence poses what she describes as "the greatest historical threat to human creativity."
"Most impressive about Nolan's Odyssey is the human creativity it took to transform an ancient, 12,000-line poem into a film that moved millions in under three hours," Uzzi said. "I would not be ashamed."
