TRUST the ancient Greeks to have a word for it: ‘hubris’. It means usurping attributes or powers that invoke divine retribution. Aristotle detected it in “naive men [who] think that by ill-treating others, they make their own superiority the greater”. Nothing has changed because humans have not evolved since then. They have learned more but understood less.

Human nature behaves still with the same strengths, weaknesses, prejudices and foibles as the characters did in the days of the ancients — whether from the ages of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, or the Mahabharata, or the Tilism-i-Hoshruba. Battlegrounds have changed: the psyche of combatants hasn’t. For example, both Homer’s epics can be transposed seamlessly into a modern setting, just as Shakespeare’s plays can be performed in a contemporary context or modern dress without losing their dramatic force.

Hollywood, having exhausted ancient Rome as a source, has reached beyond, to ancient Greece, producing two popular blockbusters: Troy in 2004, and TheOdyssey in 2026. Both used Homer’s narrative as a crucible of ideas, adapting them to modern taste. Some purists have denigrated these films for deviating from the text. Classicists like Mary Beard and Emily Wilson have ex­­­­pressed........

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