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Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ Is About Duty, Loyalty, and Family

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

Christopher Nolan, the renowned British director, has a new film coming out, another remake of “The Odyssey” by Homer. It’s supposed to come out July 17.  

Everybody’s been talking about it, not because they know what’s in it or they’re trying to guess how he treats this age-old epic, but because one of the stars, Lupita Nyong’o, and forgive me if I mispronounced her name, has been very vocal that, as she views the script and Homer’s work himself, there’s a matter of feminism that Homer did not highlight women sufficiently. 

Homer wrote “The Odyssey,” remember, around 700 to 650 BC at the dawn of the Greek city-state. It’s the second of his two epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and it’s a much different epic than The Iliad, which takes place in about 11 weeks on the plain of Troy.  

This is a panoramic view of the Mediterranean and traces the 20-year odyssey of the hero Odysseus to get back from Troy to the northeastern island off the coast of Greece, Ithaca. 

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What she said was that there was not a sufficient portrayal of women or they were not powerful enough. I couldn’t understand that. I taught “The Odyssey” for 20 years in English at the California State University system to a variety of students, probably 2,000 students in humanities courses, as well as a much smaller number in Greek. 

And one thing one comes away with is that there’s no literature anywhere in the world at that time that has been more deferential or more interested in women.  

Remember that Odysseus is trying to get home to his palace as king of Ithaca, and his wife Penelope is there for 20 years, and soon the suitors, and these are people who want to marry her for the purposes of expropriating the kingdom. 

She’s got to deal with them. She has no enforcer. The men of Ithaca have all gone with Odysseus to Troy, and they’ve all been lost, and their families are angry. Everybody’s mad at Odysseus. He’s not there. The suitors then represent this anger, and they want to take over, one of them at least does, the palace. 

But she brilliantly puts them off in hopes that someday he’ll come back. She........

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