But shouldn’t Ancient Greek cure stupidity? Let’s ask Emily Wilson

It’s been a fantastic odyssey, so let’s celebrate. Two weeks on and we’re still here discussing it. It’s sparked reactions across the board – a sign of an absolute masterpiece: memes on Instagram and book sales. Amateur young philologists, myself included, and in any case, it is more rewarding to round off this July surrounded by Greek scholars than with Vannacci’s videos, Roggero’s story and complaints about the sweltering heat. Everything was going well and we were satisfied with this cinema money well spent, when the one disappointment – absurd, unexpected – arrived from the person one would least expect. A contrarian – who, unfortunately, has the credentials to speak – raises a finger and has his say. I’ve got nothing against contrarians; they’re actually quite likeable. The only clear-headedness to maintain is knowing when you’re actually driving the wrong way down a fast-moving carriageway and pulling yourself together.

Emily Wilson, the American classicist who translated the "Odyssey" published in 2017, could have chosen not to comment on Christopher Nolan’s film, but she did. And to think that the director had actually quoted the opening lines of her translation – ‘Tell me of a complicated man’ – with admiration whilst promoting the film. Writing in the London Review of Books, Wilson dismissed the adaptation as a typically Nolanian blend of grandiosity and superficiality: a work that “has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history or war” and which lacks “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth”.

The scathing review is long and brutal, continuing with the screenplay: “The narrative structure is contrived. The writing is dreadful.” The characters, Wilson argues, lack credible motivations or the depth of Homeric heroes: “Do I really care whether this man manages to return to his wife? You’ve given me no reason to care.” Right up to the final, utterly pointless outburst: “I’d be ashamed to have written even a single line of this screenplay.” Does Nolan need a court-appointed lawyer? No. However, someone who studied classics to a high standard is deeply disappointed. But how so? Why these bitter words? Could this be the final confirmation that a classical education does nothing to foster open-mindedness, and so, if this is the result, does studying Greek merely lead to narrow-mindedness?

The accounting of history, rather than acknowledging the three or four levels of writing: at the cinema there were enthusiastic eleven-year-olds, thirty-somethings happy to have gone to the cinema, and middle-aged folk – many of them, myself included – who won a few pennies playing the ‘guess the reference’ game. Failing to realise that history is rewritten, and that those who cannot rewrite it whilst clinging like a leech to the original do so because they are incapable of it; it is always the mediocre who beg for fidelity. As for the lack of ostentation regarding the characters’ depth, that’s something to be proud of. It’s the most resounding success of the craft: working on insignificant details. Starnone once wrote: ‘No meticulously studied complex psychologies achieved through imperceptible shifts from the inner to the outer and vice versa. Throw it away, simplify’ – it struck a chord with me and I’ve never forgotten it.

“I loved that language because everything the best men have ever said was said in Greek,” Marguerite Yourcenar fills even those who made mistakes copying their classwork and got a three with a sense of melancholy. But the first to despise such self-aggrandisement would have been the Greeks themselves. We extol them as dispensers of profundity, yet in reality they loved words only as servants of things: not as a theory of argumentation, but as means of contact with reality ἐνέργε. That is to say: the language had a purpose – to be concrete, rather than romantic. Have we invented this imaginary Greek ourselves? And it suffices to add one final, obvious clarification to the embittered teacher. We’ve been given the Greek that humanists fancied themselves with, and even that so-called “original” will undoubtedly be a cover version, a reworked version. The only thing that’s certain is that the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” were written and revised over three hundred years; who knows to what extent, and by whom. So what was this Homeric Greek really like? It would be a huge embarrassment if we’d ended up using it to confirm what we think of ourselves after studying it – people of superior intellect who nit-pick at Nolan, even when they’re wrong.