Movie-makers turn again and again to the savage warrior tales of Homer for inspiration. With the release of the epic 'Troy' imminent, classicist Mary Beard assesses the appeal of stories that are now nearly 3,000 years old
In Jean-Luc Godard's brilliant movie about movie-making, Le Mépris (Contempt), the plot turns on the tensions in the making of a film of Homer's Odyssey. The serious-minded director - Fritz Lang played by Fritz Lang - wants to create something true to the spirit of the Greek original. The brash American producer wants to add more sex and more mermaids and to have the whole story updated with some pop psychology on the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope. The struggling scriptwriter is caught in the middle of this dispute, while his pretty wife (Brigitte Bardot) inexorably falls into the arms of the brash producer. The car crash with which the film ends kills off more than the errant couple: it draws a line under the vulgar "sword and sandals" plans for The Odyssey and reclaims the epic for a different kind of high-minded, non-commercial cinema.
The Odyssey was an apt choice by Godard. For there is probably no work of ancient literature that has been more often, or more imaginatively, adapted for the cinema. Some movies take the story of Odysseus - or, to give him his familiar Latin name, Ulysses - and his eventful return home to Ithaca from the Trojan war pretty straight. The silent cinema enjoyed picking out, and lingering on, individual episodes. Georges Méliès's Ulysses and the Giant Polyphemus (1905) was an early "horror" treatment of the hero's encounter with the one-eyed cannibalistic Cyclops. Later adaptations, from Kirk Douglas's grand epic, Ulysses (1954), to a 1990s made-for-television American mini-series, occasionally take on all 24 books of the Homeric original. More often, though, recent movies have used Homeric themes as meta-narratives or metaphors for homecomings of many different kinds.
For example, the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? charts a heroic trio's escape from a chain gang and the attempt by one of them (appropriately named Ulysses) to get home and rescue his wife from the clutches of a "suitor". The narrative sees brilliant reworkings of Homeric episodes: John Goodman as a one-eyed Cyclops at a Ku Klux Klan meeting, and Homer's "cattle of the sun" massacred not by Odysseus's starving companions but by an engaging bank robber.
Other games in the same vein are played by Cold Mountain, Sommersby (interweaving The Return of Martin Guerre with The Odyssey) and Ulee's Gold (the emotional, rather than physical, return of a Florida beekeeper, played by Peter Fonda). You don't, in fact, have to do much to present a story in Odyssean terms. Often a smattering of key names will do. Ulee's Gold rings all the obvious bells with its Penny (Penelope), Helen and Ulee himself. Even the Coen brothers, whose film parades the most direct descent from The Odyssey, claim never to have read Homer at all.
The reason for this popularity is clear enough. The Odyssey, the second of the Homeric epics (composed probably in the late eighth century BC), has come to define the essential and archetypal narrative, the ancestor of all stories in western culture - from spiritual journey through space odyssey to road movie. Man makes his way home from faraway adventure, encountering all kinds of troubles and struggles en route, but gets there in the end.
What his apparently virtuous wife has really been doing while waiting for him has always been a matter of dispute, and often adds a twist to the tale. The behaviour of the Homeric Penelope has been a puzzle since antiquity itself. Surrounded by suitors who are after the absent master's wealth and the absent master's bed, she fobs them off by saying she must finish her weaving before making her mind up - and by cannily unpicking it each night. But many critics have felt that she was less dismissive of these suitors than she might have been. As Samuel Butler, the 19th-century satirist, author of The Way of All Flesh and proponent of the mad fantasy that The Odyssey was written by a woman, mused: "Sending pretty little messages to her admirers was not exactly the way to get rid of them. Did she ever try snubbing? Nothing of the kind is placed on record . . . Then there was boring - did she ever try that?"
Just like any road movie, The Odyssey is rooted in questions of fidelity and adultery, trust and deception. No wonder it makes a good film.
So what then of The Iliad, the first epic of western literature, composed a few decades before The Odyssey by a poet traditionally assumed to be the same "Homer", though in fact the identity of the writers is next to impossible to ascertain? It is The Iliad that is claimed as the inspiration of Wolfgang Petersen's new film Troy, starring Brad Pitt as the sultry Greek hero, Achilles, and some glittering old-stagers in the supporting cast (Julie Christie as Achilles's divine mother Thetis, Peter O'Toole as Priam, the elderly king of Troy). Has The Iliad traditionally matched The Odyssey in cinematic popularity? At first sight, the Iliad story - centred on the mythical Trojan war - has a lot going for it: the destructive power of the most beautiful woman in the world (Helen of Troy, whose moonlight flit from her dreary Greek husband Menelaus with Trojan lover-boy Paris started the war between Greeks and Trojans); the clash of two global superpowers in the shape of the Greek (i.e. western) alliance and (eastern) Troy; and the most memorable secret weapon of mass destruction ever invented, the famous wooden horse, which conveyed the frontline Greek troops into Troy, thereby ensuring the obliteration of the city.
The trouble is that, although The Iliad tells part of the story of this war, it does not recount in any detail the elopement of Helen, nor does it mention the Trojan horse. The Iliad is, in fact, a tiny mise en scene, the story of just a few days in the 10-year conflict between Greece and Troy. It is hardly the story of the war at all, but as its first word ("wrath") proclaims, it is a complex moral tale about the anger of the hero Achilles. This anger is prompted, in the first instance, by commander-in-chief Agamemnon taking away from him a particularly desirable female captive, and reaches its catharsis when he agrees to ransom the horribly mutilated body of his Trojan arch-enemy, Hector, back to Hector's father, Priam. There is saturation bloodshed throughout most of the 24 books of The Iliad, but there are no winners or losers. At the end, the ruse of the Trojan horse still lies in the future, as does the final victory settlement, which sees Helen packed back off to Sparta with husband number one, Menelaus.
A few films have taken the Trojan war in general as a theme. Steve Reeves, the big "sword and sandals" star of his time, featured in a couple of 1960s B-movies on the Trojan horse and the aftermath of Troy's defeat. The story of Helen prompted a similar treatment in a Robert Wise production of 1956, in which the young Brigitte Bardot had a walk-on part.
More interestingly, Alexander Korda directed his then wife Maria in a silent version of The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927). This was based not on The Iliad but on a novel about Helen by John Erskine, which turned her story into light comedy, or even bedroom farce. (The film was nominated in the first year of the awards for one of the shortest-lived Oscar categories, Best Written Titles, which quickly became obsolete with the advent of talkies.)
But beyond these general Trojan war themes, only a box-office flop, Marino Girolami's Fury of Achilles (1961), was an attempt to adapt The Iliad as a story in its own right. And however much Wolfgang Petersen has flagged the Homeric origins of Troy (along with its archaeological accuracy, special effects and flexing pecs), it too will have strayed a long way beyond The Iliad to find the beginning and end of its story. The Trojan horse, recreated for the film in Malta, is drawn partly from a flashback in The Odyssey, but mainly from Virgil's Roman epic, The Aeneid, written more than half a millennium later.
Nonetheless, whatever its relationship to the Homeric original may be, Troy (like Gladiator and Oliver Stone's upcoming Alexander) is rooted in classical antiquity and will, no doubt, send thousands of viewers back to Homer's texts, or at least persuade them to find out more about the ancient world.
So what do professional classicists think about this? Inevitably, their reactions vary. Some have already taken the devil's shilling and become advisers for these Hollywood blockbusters. Their experience has been mixed.
Kathleen Coleman, professor of Latin at Harvard, notoriously fell out with the Gladiator team she was advising and refused to have herself listed as "academic consultant" in the credits (classical colleagues accused her of "blushing all the way to the bank").
Oxford-based Robin Lane-Fox is rumoured to have waived his fee as adviser on Alexander in return for a role in the cavalry charge.
Among those of us who look on, a few will be curmudgeonly, carping at inaccuracies or misrepresentations of the original texts, but the majority will welcome the publicity for their subject. Many (me included, I should confess) will already be penning articles on the 'Pittian Moment in the Reception of The Iliad' or devising new courses on Classics in Film or The Trojan War in Popular Culture. The chances are that Troy will have a longer life in a university department near you than it will in your local multiplex.
- Guardian Service
• Mary Beard is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge
Troy is released on May 21st