Everyone's suddenly a Homer expert after watching Nolan's The Odyssey

Suddenly, every sit-down, whether in Delhi's Greater Kailash 1 or Kolkata's Mt Olypub, is a symposium, every dinner party a lyceum, and every social feed an update of H D F Kitto's The Greeks. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has turned mild-mannered CAs and charming gynaecologists into Homeric Simpsons, all eager to point out that Odysseus never wore leather boots, that Penelope's loom was mis-threaded, or that the sirens sang in the wrong key in the movie.

This is not about fidelity to Homer, but about telling the world you're a classicist by dint of last reading an abridged version of the Iliad just after watching Brad Pitt play Achilles in the 2004 action epic, Troy. Spotting 'errors' in Nolan's latest adaptation has become the post-World Cup sport.

Criticisms like 'Nolan not casting an actual Cyclops to play the Cyclops Polyphemus is so unnecessarily woke,' and 'None of the dialogue is delivered in dactylic hexameter - it's like the film doesn't even care about the source material!' are being tossed around grandly. So, be a tosser, too.


That Homer himself was less concerned with factual precision than with storytelling grandeur isn't the point for this lot. The point is to appear smarter than the next pedant. So, while it remains 2026: A Space Odyssey, go spout your Homeric knowledge, with one hand on Google or ChatGPT under the table.