The Odyssey-Part 6

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# L’ODYSSEE/THE ODYSSEY by (Franco Rossi, 1968)

# The Odyssey (1968 miniseries)

The miniseries was produced principally for broadcasting on the state televisions of Italy, Germany and France.There are 8 episodes in the original version, running a total of 446 minutes. Each episode is preceded by an introduction in which poet Giuseppe Ungaretti read some verses of the original poem.
Special effects were designed by Mario Bava (who outright directed the Polyphemus episode)and Carlo Rambaldi
The exteriors were shot entirely in Yugoslavia, which offered a scenery that was similar to the lands of Ancient Greece.

## Release

The show ran on television in Europe between 1968 and 1970. In Italy alone, the episodes had an audience of over 16 million viewers. The entire television series was dubbed into English, ran several times on the TVO network in Ontario, Canada, and was broadcast in the US by CBS years later in 1978. An abridged theatrical version (running only 110 minutes) was released to European theatres as well, also available in English, but the English dub was later lost. There are DVD editions still available in Italian and German.

## Reception

The adaptation is considered by some to be the most faithful rendering of Homer's epic on screen, by including most of the characters and events, as well as by attempting to fill in graphic details.

The Odyssey
Resources
in no particular order

Texts
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Odyssey (Chicago UP and Penguin Classics, 2025)
Apollonius Rhodus, Argonautica

Reference
Greek Legends and Myth
Theoi Greek Mythology
Women in Antiquity
Diotíma
The Collector
Kiwi Hellenist

Critique etc.
Barbara Graziosi, Homer: a very short introduction (Oxford UP, 2019)
Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses (I. B. Tauris, 2012)
Elton Barker and Joel Christensen, Homer: a beginner’s guide (Oneworld, 2013)
Mary Beard, Talking Classics (Profile books, 2026)
Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (A.C. Fifield, 1897)
Moses Finley, The World of Odysseus (reissued by New York Review of Books, 2002)
Maureen Alden, Para-Narratives in the Odyssey (Oxford UP, pb, 2020)
Joel Christensen (ed), The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford UP, pb, 2025)
Ruby Blondell, Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation (Oxford UP, pb, 2015)
Bettany Hughes, Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore (Pimlico, pb, 2013)
J. Grethlein, Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity(Cambridge UP, 2017)
G A Gazis, Homer and the Poetics of Hades (Part 2) (Oxford UP, 2018)
Benjamin Sammon, The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue (Oxford UP, 2010)
M.Aguirre and R Buxton, Cyclops: the myth and its cultural history (Oxford UP, 2020)
Patrice D. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (Wisconsin Studies in Classics, 2008)
C. J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics (Harvard UP, pb, 1995)
Anastasia Paneisi, Objects of Torture in Hades (2014)

Inspired Literature & Art
Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017)
Underworld, Imagining the Afterlife, Getty Museum

Movies, TV & Podcasts
Ubert Pasolni, The Return (2024)
Tom Barbor-Might, Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddlestone (2026)
Instant Classics

The Barbie Backlash

By Susan Faludi
Ms. Faludi is a journalist and the author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.”
Aug. 23, 2026

Among the many afflictions distorting our current politics, one has gone unrecognized: We’re in the midst of a zero-sum struggle over which gender gets to own the hero’s journey, that ancient story formulation in which the hero leaves home, faces monsters and temptations and returns to reclaim his kingdom and his woman from usurpers. In modern times, the question of whether the hero must be male has been contested and recontested.
The fight is about more than a story. We feud over certain foundational myths because whoever owns the myth owns the culture.
It’s hard to get more foundational than Homer. Sitting in my local wide-screen Cinemark, mid-slog through Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” a film that hardly veers from the high-testosterone, man-on-a-quest Homeric template, I was struck by an odd sensation. Hadn’t I already seen this movie, but in a different palette?
Indeed I had, in the same theater on another July day three years ago. That version featured a female protagonist who journeys by car, boat, spaceship, bicycle, snowmobile and Rollerblades to a foreign land fraught with perils. She eludes a horde of male suits who want to lock her in a box before returning to her pastel principality to find it besieged by boisterous bros. Both “Barbie” and “The Odyssey” feature a beach battle with flotillas of bowspritted landing ships and an equine theme, though the horse figure stranded on Ken’s beach is fashioned of pink plastic sand. But while the boys of “Barbie” are brawling, the girls regain the kingdom; matriarchy is restored.

To a topologist’s eye, Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Mr. Nolan’s “Odyssey” are the same objects with different shapes. The difference being that hers is suffused in Crayola hues, has wit and grossed more on opening weekend. (Ms. Gerwig and Mr. Nolan seem star-crossed rivals — Barbenheimer, anyone?) The movies themselves are hardly serious enough to serve as philosophical antagonists. Yet as major cultural artifacts only three years apart, they illuminate a serious shift in our society, going far beyond Hollywood. The showdown over the hero’s narrative is corroding our political and public life, and disfiguring our government.
Our government — all the way to the top. President Trump seems to see himself embarked on a Homeric quest. Tossed from his rightful throne in 2021, he fought his way back and is now wreaking vengeance on the infidels who betrayed him. It’s a quest with a modern twist: His rival as he sought to recover the crown was a woman. The patriarch beat her in part by avowing on the campaign trail that he would “protect” women, before continuing his decimation of their welfare once he won. Since Inauguration Day, his administration has been hellbent on reversing women’s fortunes at every level.

For a short while — with the 2017 Women’s March, #MeToo and outrage over the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision — it looked as though women had seized the hero’s mantle; they were going toe-to-toe with adversaries from a grab-’em-by-the-pussy prez to a priapic studio head to a Supreme Court injustice. In the heady moment of Brat Summer (before Kamala’s Fall), it seemed as if the heroine’s journey might even end in victory. Until the revanche. “The cavalry has arrived,” Elon Musk proclaimed on Election Day 2024. “Men are voting in record numbers.” (Well, actually not.) How did everything change so suddenly? Or, to quote Barbie: “This is Barbieland! The Barbies worked hard and dreamed hard to make it everything that it is. You can’t just undo it in a day.” Oh yeah?
The hero’s struggle resonates so universally because we’re all up against monsters of one sort or another. The monomyth promises to turn our mundane muddles into noble quests. That’s what’s at stake in the zeitgeist shift between “Barbie” in 2023 and Mr. Nolan’s 2026 he-man travelogue: Which sex gets to own that ennobling elixir? The battle is not to be found within the films themselves — which characters win or lose — but between competing claims to the archetypal story. The fight has been re-genderized. It’s no longer Menelaus fighting Paris for the possession of Helen — it’s Menelaus versus Helen. Or Odysseus versus Barbie.
Or Pete Hegseth versus Lisa Franchetti.
Nowhere is the administration’s war on women more evident than in the military itself. Admiral Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, was one of the early high-profile female casualties of Mr. Trump’s new Department of (Trojanesque) War. Women in the military are being punished systematically: their promotions denied, combat capabilities impugned, achievements scrubbed from official websites, the longstanding committee to integrate women into the military shut down and the ceremony to honor their fallen canceled. The most dramatic purges have come at the top, to women who’ve already completed their hero’s journeys, who’ve left home, gone abroad, fought their battles and returned to claim their laurels and rightful posts. Only to be met by Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s Antinous.

Between 2000 and 2018, the number of female generals and admirals had doubled. Now, thanks largely to Mr. Hegseth, the modestly decorated (mostly with tattoos) Army National Guard major and former TV host turned warlord, there are no four-star female officers on active duty in any branch, and no female candidates on the roster of likely four- or three-star appointments. (He’s also turned his sights on troops who are Black or transgender.) A New York Times analysis this month found that women’s nominations to high-ranking posts in the military are at their lowest level in a quarter century. This year, for the first time in a decade, there will be no women nominated to be admirals. (Evidently, women can still aspire to humbler posts like captain or major — women’s nominations to lower-level ranks rose in the past year.) Who are these veteran female officers relieved of their commands by the “central casting” (Mr. Trump’s words) matinee idol with the gelled hair and pocket hankie, the face that launched a thousand missiles?
Well, for starters, just in the Navy —
Admiral Franchetti: rose from surface warfare officer to command the Sixth Fleet; first woman to lead the Navy and the first permanent female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; 40 years of service. Fired from her post, no explanation. Replaced by a man.
Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield: commanded the Helicopter Sea Combat units; first female president of the Naval War College and the only woman on NATO’s Military Committee; 37 years of service. Fired from her post, no explanation. Replaced (in an acting capacity) by a man.
Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids: veteran of Desert Shield, Desert Storm and the Iraq war; commanded a carrier strike group; first woman and first Hispanic officer to head the U.S. Naval Academy; 36 years of service. Relieved of her post, no explanation. Replaced by a man.
Adm. Linda Fagan, Coast Guard; Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, Navy; Col. Julie Sposito-Salceies, Air Force; Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, Army; and on and on. These women didn’t claim heroic status; they embodied what the military has traditionally valued: service, teamwork, courage, dedication. But in terms of their mythic warrior life journeys, they are among our Odysseuses. And their elevation has enraged some Odyssean wannabes eager to enshrine what Mr. Hegseth calls “the highest male standard.”

In his book “The War on Warriors,” Mr. Hegseth maintained that so-called D.E.I. hires have made the military weak and “effeminate.” The “standard,” though, has nothing to do with military effectiveness. Were Admirals Franchetti and Chatfield, General Crosland and company fired for not being good enough? Or for being too good, with skills and experience that threatened the restoration of a masculinist culture? Small wonder the photos of Mr. Trump’s cabinet meetings — especially after the departures of Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Tulsi Gabbard — have begun to resemble the shipboard scenes in “The Odyssey”: men seated around the edge of a long wooden ellipse, with a board table standing in for a galley deck. Pull, boys, pull!
Mr. Trump’s return to power resembled a sack of Troy — with women getting the sack. A National Women’s Law Center report found that DOGE’s mass layoffs targeted departments with a “substantial majority" of female employees, though the Civil Service overall leans male. Hardest hit were Black women, especially with college and advanced degrees, whose overall employment rate last year suffered one of the sharpest one-year declines in a quarter century. After Mr. Trump fired the two Democratic female commissioners and the female general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, its new leadership urged white men to file discrimination suits, and the agency sued a Coca-Cola distributor for excluding men from a women’s forum.
Information on reproductive health, maternal mortality, employment equity and sexual violence began disappearing from government websites, along with women’s historical contributions and the words “women,” “female” and, of course, “feminism.” NASA employees reportedly received a “drop everything and reprioritize your day” advisory instructing them to delete by 5 p.m. “anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.).” The administration that insists “there are only two genders” seems determined to make it only one.
Also gone: data collection on women’s advancement, or the lack thereof. The E.E.O.C. voted to toss out the agency’s 60-year-old requirement that companies file annual work force demographic reports, claiming it burdened corporations. Is it any mystery that women have lost ground in corporate leadership two years running and their representation on corporate boards declined in the first quarter of 2026? Or that women constituted 100 percent of the decline in the labor force in December 2025, then again last month, bringing the total net job loss for women this year to 845,000? None of these women got their jobs, or lost them, because they were seen as heroes. Nevertheless, they were collateral damage in the custody fight over the hero’s journey.
That fight has filtered down to saturate workaday lives. Starting in the post-9/11 hero frenzy and accelerating in the “peak woke” era of the early 2020s, more and more ordinary struggles have been deemed heroic. For a while, thanks to feminism, women enjoyed an advantage in garnering those commendations. They didn’t just become firefighters or telephone linemen. They’d slain the Cyclops of sexism. Not to gainsay their grit, but their lionization came with a cost. The kudos over every valiant ascent excited the anger and envy of some men who, if they became telephone linemen, became … telephone linemen. In “Barbie” terms: just Ken. The backlash isn’t simply about who gets to do the job — it’s about who gets glorified for doing the job. Witness Mr. Hegseth’s book with its repeated fulminations about servicewomen showcased as heroes by a “military P.R. machine, looking for a ‘first.’”

Diversity measures were created to open up pragmatic, incremental opportunities for people long deprived. But there is nothing pragmatic or incremental about being a hero. The right sees D.E.I. as a plot to dethrone the men who once stood on Mount Olympus. For its part, the left employs the hero mythology to validate its causes, and uses journeys out of persecution, abuse, every misfortune from A.D.H.D. to PTSD, to place its contentions beyond debate and stamp even well-meaning dissenters as intolerant. The right has its own hero-martyrs. It’s a strategy to be wary of. When Purple Hearts become Medals of Honor, when suffering is conflated with valor, critique is relabeled as heresy. Surely not every victimhood drama has engendered a fascism, but every fascism has used a core myth of injustice and injury to justify its absolutism and brutality.
The purpose of civic society and government — in the democratic world, anyway — is to serve the unheroic needs of ordinary people. Not to make a mess of their lives on the way to staging a cage fight on the White House lawn. Or to assert personal virtue through a megaphone. One raised fist begets another.
Mr. Nolan’s “Odyssey” comes to an awareness, banal though it may be, of the hero’s moral peril. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is guilt-ridden over his leading role in the destruction of Troy, a violation of xenia, Zeus’ law of hospitality. In Homer’s original epic, the reckoning is more existential. Odysseus tries to console the despondent ghost of Achilles, now in Hades, telling him the Greeks “honored you as a god” immortalized by brave deeds. Achilles retorts, “By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man — some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive — than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” It’s a desire that Odysseus shares. When Calypso offers him eternal life if he will remain on her island, he refuses. He’d rather go home to his wife and family — and lead a mortal’s existence.
That immortality offer disappeared from Mr. Nolan’s script but was present in Ms. Gerwig’s. In the finale, Barbie can opt to remain a timeless toy in Barbieland, waking up forever in her Dreamhouse to her “best day ever.” But she is determined to return to the real world, to become an ordinary adult woman with all the difficulty, messiness and mortality that implies. However convenient or trite such movie sentiments may be, they are instructive. They suggest there’s another way to end the story. Can we free our civic life from heroic imperatives, return our governance to the humble and the human?
The object of any healthy politics is not to win but to prosper. We are all soldiers in that quest, and none of us heroes.

Susan Faludi is a journalist and the author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” and, most recently, “In the Darkroom.”

# ‘The Odyssey’ Gives Us the Hero We Deserve

By B.D. McClay
B.D. McClay is a critic and essayist.

July 26, 2026

#

Some people are going to tell you that the problem with Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is that it’s about modern people, not ancient people. Not me. It is about modern people, but so is everything else made by modern people. If you want to encounter the ancient world, you have to open a book. (Homer is available in several translations; I like Richmond Lattimore’s.)
Other people are going to tell you that the problem with Mr. Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is that he’s using an ancient text to revisit his own preoccupations: heroism, guilt, memory and the nature of time. Not me. I like an artist who’s not afraid to keep gnawing at the same bone.
No, for me the problem with Mr. Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is something else. It’s Odysseus.
To refresh briefly for those who don’t remember the story and haven’t seen the movie: Homer’s two epic poems, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” follow the story of the Trojan War, when the abduction of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, triggers a huge conflict. The Greeks lay siege to Troy for 10 years, with great losses on both sides, and finally achieve victory when Odysseus tricks the Trojans into bringing a horse full of soldiers into the city. Odysseus, sailing home in victory, then angers Poseidon, the god of the sea, delaying his homecoming by another decade. When he finally makes it back, he discovers his home is full of suitors courting his wife, Penelope, and plotting the demise of their son, Telemachus. Penelope has cleverly kept the suitors at bay through trickery, but she’s been betrayed by some of her servants and cannot hold out much longer.
One thing that may strike contemporary readers of Homer is that Odysseus is one of a handful of epic heroes whose motivations actually make sense to us. He doesn’t want to be in Troy; he wants to be home. He is devious and clever without being an out-and-out scoundrel, and he’s generally motivated by curiosity and a thirst for knowledge.

In Mr. Nolan’s hands, however, wily Odysseus becomes a different, if still recognizable, type: the halfway hero. He’s a man who in some way fails to be a father, a man who dirties himself in the name of a higher cause but then discovers that the cause wasn’t worth it, a man with the power to change the world but who, in the end, either fails to do so or
Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Mr. Nolan’s previous film, this halfway hero seems protected from self-knowledge, either through culpable naïveté or blinding arrogance. Mr. Nolan’s Odysseus, for instance, is shocked that once he gets the Greeks into Troy, his comrades loot it and kill the inhabitants. He plucks his bow while hunting out of a sense of sportsmanship and, when his ships set sail to go home, he decides not to take provisions from Troy because, he says, they’ve taken enough from the city already.
This is, as mentioned, an Odysseus for modern people, and modern people struggle with the idea of true heroes. A figure who identifies what needs to be done and then does it without tremendous inner conflict? What’s the point of that? Such a person will make most modern audiences feel only like failures. Perhaps contemporary viewers don’t trust the idea of a sharp, decisive leader, or perhaps the notion of doing something without feeling bad about it seems inherently villainous to them. In contemporary politics, Americans tend to alternate between people who tell us nothing can be done and people who swear everything can be done, both of which disappoint in their own ways. So Mr. Nolan’s Odysseus, who struggles after doing something that turns out to be the wrong thing, feels like a particularly compelling figure.
In stories, we seem to be drawn to these halfway heroes: people who sort of know what to do but have a lot of trouble doing it and whose eventual moment of personal resolution somehow fixes everything in the end. In its least artful forms, this turns art into an ersatz therapy session in which you forgive yourself for your failures — and then you save the world.
Mr. Nolan is more artful than that. His heroes are often exceptional men who cause problems, then agonize over how to make amends. The fact that they are men is no accident. Their failures at both masculinity and intimacy are essential to understanding them. They aren’t good men, in the sense of upstanding members of the community who work toward building something better. And they aren’t bad men, which is to say violent parasites. Instead, they’re halfway heroes, charismatic but hollow people who deem love as something best shown by their absence because their presence proves to be too dangerous.
The problem that shapes “The Odyssey” is what has happened in the neglected homes while the men have been away. The suitors who pester Penelope to marry one of them are lesser men than Odysseus, and in the absence of men like Odysseus, no one has taught them how to behave. The generation they represent has gone astray, and there’s no fixing it.
It isn’t giving too much away about the movie to say that, much like Mr. Nolan’s interpretation of Batman, and even his Oppenheimer, his Odysseus decides to become a sin eater, someone who atones for the misdeeds of others — seeking not only to rectify the disorder that has overcome his home but also to make amends for the entire Trojan War. His solution to the disastrous generation that lies between his own and his son’s is the same as in the poem: Odysseus kills the suitors. They are dangerously weak men, not strong enough to rule or to exhibit self-control but strong enough to terrorize the elderly, the blind, women and children. In the film, Odysseus tries to keep his son’s hands clean of blood, but he fails, so the project of creating a genuinely innocent new generation is over before it’s started. But having taken all this violence onto himself, Odysseus can attempt to purify his home simply by retreating and leaving it again.
In real life, outside the movies, we are certainly presented with many examples of dangerously weak men, much like the suitors: men whose conception of being a man begins and ends with a sense of being able to humiliate others, men who live off the work of others while contributing nothing, men who are manipulative cowards who love to tell tales of their own virtue. When we try to imagine alternatives to these men, we come up with the halfway hero — someone who can’t prevent a crisis but will try mightily to fix the mess he made. As one of Mr. Nolan’s characters in a different film said, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” — an epigram that applies equally to Batman, Oppenheimer and Odysseus.
It’s not Mr. Nolan’s job as an artist to give us a solution to these dilemmas, and in some ways, I’m glad that in “The Odyssey” he doesn’t really try. Still, I watched the ending of his “Odyssey” with a kind of resignation. Maybe, to riff on another well-known line from one of Mr. Nolan’s movies — “not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed” — halfway heroes seem to be the heroes we want, because certainly they’re the ones we think we need right now. But we could deserve another kind of hero entirely.

B.D. McClay is a critic and essayist.