The Parallel Lives

The award-winning director Christopher Nolan will release his latest film, “The Odyssey,” this Friday, July 17. Already critics are praising the film, and expect it to win Nolan additional Academy Awards. “Oppenheimer,” won Nolan seven Oscars at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Matt Damon plays the title role of Odysseus, Anne Hathaway his wife Penelope, Tom Holland their son Telemachus. Charlize Theron plays the role of Calypso, and Samantha Morton is Circe.

About 700 B.C., at the very beginning of Western Civilization’s literary output, an author named Homer collected the Greek’s oft-repeated oral stories about the war against Troy and wrote them down in two books: first “The Iliad” and then “The Odyssey.”

Scholars speculate that Homer may have written the latter perhaps thirty years after the first.

In both epics, Homer relied upon a poetic style called dactylic hexameter. That refers to six feet per line, and each foot includes an initial stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, for a total of eighteen syllables per line of a standard ancient Greek text.

A note: certain English words are dactylic: poetry, difficult, mockingbird, and alphabet.

Homer composed 15,693 lines for “The Iliad,” 12,110 lines for “The Odyssey.” Each book he divided into twenty-four books, that corresponded to twenty-four papyrus scrolls.

In 2018, a British scholar, Emily Wilson, published an English translation of “The Odyssey,” but she used a different poetic style, that of iambic pentameter, only ten syllables per line and each line she divided into five pairs, one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.

Here is a line of an English translation from “The Odyssey,” written in dactylic hexameter.

“But when he had bathed all, and anointed himself with olive oil.” (VI, 227)

Here is Emily Wilson’s translation of the same passage written in iambic pentameter:

“But when he was all clean and richly oiled.”

Note that Wilson’s translation is shorter, less wordy.

“The Iliad” is a story of war, of the Greeks who sailed across the Aegean Sea to Troy, a city on the western coast of Asia Minor, to besiege that city for ten hard years.

“It covers a few crucial weeks during the tenth and final year of that war. It does not include the inciting cause of the war, the abduction of Helen, nor does it include the Greeks’ means of defeating Troy, by a gift of a wooden horse that contained Greek warriors hidden within.”

“The Odyssey” is a story of a single man, Odysseus, who fought in that Trojan War, but then was forced to struggle for an additional ten years to return to his kingdom in Ithaca, in Greece, and reunite with his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus.

Odysseus’s adversaries included: Poseidon, the god of the sea, who places a curse upon Odysseus. There is a Cyclops, a giant one-eyed monster, whom Odysseus blinds. There is Calypso, a sea nymph who falls in love with Odysseus and holds him captive for seven years.

There is a Greek sorceress, Circe, who transforms Odysseus’s crew into pigs, and there is Charybdis, a ship-destroying whirlpool.

Yet, Odysseus survives all the obstacles that the gods pitch at him and presses toward home.

What does Homer teach us in his two books? That it is hard to vanquish an enemy in a war in a foreign country, and that is as hard to find a path to return home to wife and son.

Emily Wilson begins Book 1, Line 1: “Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life.”