The Odyssey Gets Its Moment, and Classical Culture Gets Questioned

By Andy — 2026-07-27 — Literary News

Someone spent a quarter of a billion dollars on Homer.

Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey released July 17—massive, shot in IMAX, starring half of Hollywood—and by the same week, Lit Hub published Rebecca Solnit's essay on classical culture and the history of women being told to shut up. Both arrived in the same handful of days. The coincidence is almost too neat.

Solnit's piece opens with something a scholar named Mary Beard tracked down: the earliest recorded example in Western literature of a man telling a woman to be quiet. It's in the Odyssey. Telemachus, Penelope's son, tells his mother her voice doesn't belong in public. From there, Solnit argues "classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture."

Which is uncomfortable timing.

The film is grand, technically ambitious, probably stunning in 70mm. Matt Damon as Odysseus. Zendaya as Athena. Anne Hathaway as Penelope. It is, by most measures, what a certain kind of cinema-goer desperately wants: big, expensive, mythological. But Nolan is directing a story about a man who takes ten years to get home, while the woman waiting for him appears mostly as a faithful fixture. And that's the whole problem Solnit is circling.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's not just about what's on screen.

The real issue is what we keep teaching ourselves when we teach this poem. The tradition of erasing women from classical literature doesn't stop at Homer—it gets inherited, rewritten, weaponised, and passed down as cultural inheritance. Every retelling is a choice. Nolan made one. Solnit is asking what it means that we keep making the same choice.

There's something almost mournful about this. A director who clearly loves technique and ambition, who likely has genuine feelings about Homer, has inherited a poem. He's been faithful to it. And fidelity, in this case, means preserving a design where the hero's journey matters and the wife waiting matters less.

None of this means the film is bad, or that Nolan is careless. It just means we're still asking the same questions at the same stories, and mostly getting the same answers.