Casting the ancient world: source fidelity, artistic freedom and cultural context

What this page is for, and what it refuses

Casting a culturally specific ancient work raises real questions about adaptation, and those questions are worth asking carefully. They are also the questions most reliably used as cover for something else, so it is worth saying at the outset what this page will and will not do.

It will assess each decision on six grounds: source correspondence, character identity, genealogy, cultural location, production intent, and adaptation coherence.

It will not argue that any performer is incapable of a role because of race, ancestry, nationality or sex. It will not make claims about anyone’s ancestry. It will not generalise about any group of performers. And it will not use the vocabulary of replacement, invasion or contamination that attaches itself to this subject, because that vocabulary is not an argument and its presence is a reliable sign that no argument is being made.

A performer can give a strong performance in a role whose casting logic is textually disputable. Those are separate judgements and this page keeps them separate.

Start with what the poem actually says

The first thing to establish is how much physical description Homer supplies, because most of this argument is conducted as though the answer were “a great deal”. It is not.

Homer never describes Helen’s appearance. The most famous statement of her beauty in the Iliad is an effect rather than a description: the old men on the wall watch her pass and agree it is no wonder men have fought so long — and then say she should go home. There is no hair colour, no complexion, no feature.

Penelope is periphrōn, circumspect, far more often than she is anything visual. Telemachus is chiefly described by his resemblance to his father. The epithets that dominate Homeric characterisation are about capacity and lineage, not appearance.

Odysseus is the exception, and the exception is instructive. At Odyssey 16.172–176 Athena restores him from beggar to himself, and the text describes his skin turning dark or tanned again and his beard darkening. At 6.230–231 and again at 23.157–158 she makes his hair fall in a way the Greek compares to a hyacinth flower.

Those lines are real and they are hard to use. The colour terms are contested; the hyacinth comparison is about the fall and texture of the hair and has been rendered by translators in radically different ways; and every one of the descriptions occurs at a moment of divine transformation rather than as a neutral statement of what the man looks like. Anyone who tells you these lines settle a modern casting argument in either direction is overreading them.

Ancient identity is not modern race

This is the substantive point and it cuts against confident positions on both sides.

The Greeks had a strong sense of difference between themselves and others, and it was organised around language, custom, cult and political form rather than around skin colour or descent as modern racial taxonomy conceives them. The word barbaros is about speech. The categories that mattered were polis, genos, dialect, and which gods you sacrificed to.

The Mediterranean of the epics is also mobile and connected. The Odyssey has Phoenician traders as a routine presence, has Menelaus wandering to Egypt and coming back rich, and mentions the Ethiopians as the people at the ends of the earth among whom Poseidon is feasting while the plot begins. It is not a homogeneous world and it does not present itself as one.

Two conclusions follow, and both are uncomfortable for the people who most often argue about this.

Projecting modern racial categories backwards onto Homeric society is an anachronism, and arguments that a character “was white” in a sense the Greeks would have recognised are asserting something the sources do not contain.

And the reverse move is also unsound. Citing the ancient Mediterranean’s diversity as though it licensed any casting whatever proves too much: the Greeks were a specific people with a specific language, religion and set of institutions, and the Odyssey is their poem about their gods and their household law. Cultural specificity is real even where racial categories are not.

Four kinds of casting, distinguished

Source-faithful casting tries to match descriptions the text supplies. For Homer this is a thin programme, because the text supplies almost none.

Colour-blind casting treats appearance as irrelevant to the role and casts on performance. It has a long theatrical history and is the default in most stage practice.

Colour-conscious casting treats appearance as meaningful and uses it deliberately — to make a thematic connection, to comment on the material, or to reconfigure who a story belongs to.

Doubling is a distinct convention: one performer in two roles, to make a relationship visible. It is ancient practice — Greek theatre ran on it — and it is what the film does with Helen and Clytemnestra.

These are different things and they warrant different responses. A production is entitled to any of them. What an audience is entitled to is enough clarity to know which one it is watching.

The decisions, individually

Lupita Nyong’o as Helen and Clytemnestra

Two decisions bundled together, and they should be separated.

The doubling is good practice with excellent precedent. The two are sisters in the standard tradition, and the film’s structure sets Agamemnon’s catastrophic homecoming against Odysseus’s — which is exactly what the poem does, invoking the Agamemnon story in Books 1, 3, 4, 11 and 24. Making that parallel visible in one face is a legitimate and intelligent device.

The framing of them as twins is a separate matter and is a simplification. The genealogies of the children of Leda are contested in antiquity, with paternity distributed between Zeus and Tyndareus in ways that differ between sources. We record it as a minor tidying rather than a distortion.

On the casting as such: Homer gives no physical description of Helen whatever, so there is no source description to depart from. The objection that would need to be made — that a character is defined by an appearance the film contradicts — has nothing to rest on in this case.

Zendaya as Athena

Athena is a goddess who in the poem appears as a Taphian nobleman, as Mentor, as a shepherd boy, as a girl with a pitcher, and as a bird. Her defining attribute is glaukōpis, a word about eyes whose meaning — bright-eyed, grey-eyed, owl-eyed — has been argued over for centuries. She does not have a fixed appearance in the text; changing appearance is what she does.

The substantive question about this casting is therefore not who plays her but what the film does with her, and the film does something significant: it connects the goddess with a young Trojan priestess killed during the sack, making her presence readable as the hero’s guilt. That is a real reduction of a figure the poem treats as an independent power with her own interests and her own amusement. It is a change of conception, not of appearance, and it is the criticism worth making here.

John Leguizamo as Eumaeus

The change that matters is not who plays him. It is that the film makes him blind and makes him Odysseus’s former tutor.

Homer’s Eumaeus is a working swineherd who drives off dogs, kills piglets, cooks, and sleeps outside with the animals under arms. He is not blind — the blind figure in the Odyssey is Demodocus the bard. And he is a slave, bought by Laertes, who says of himself that Zeus takes away half a man’s worth on the day he is enslaved.

Turning a slave into a tutor is a change of social fact. The poem uses his position to say something specific about what the household it depicts is made of, and the tutor cannot carry it. This is a source-fidelity objection with real content, and it has nothing to do with the performer.

Elliot Page as Sinon

Sinon is not in Homer. He belongs to the Epic Cycle and, for nearly every reader who knows him, to Aeneid 2 — roughly seven centuries after Homer, and from the Trojan side.

Importing from the wider tradition is not the same as invention and has the best possible precedent, since the tradition did nothing else. But audiences will attribute the character to Homer, and the film’s invented connection between Sinon and Antinous is entirely new. The criticism is about the provenance of a character, not about casting.

The absence of Greek performers

This is the objection with an actual argument behind it, and it was raised in Greece: a film adapting the foundational work of Greek literature, shot in part on location in Greece, has no Greek performer in its principal cast.

It is worth being precise about what this claim is and is not. It is not a claim that any performer was unsuitable. It is not a claim about anyone’s ancestry. It does not imply that a role requires a particular descent to be played well.

It is a claim about which people a large production chooses to include when it draws on their inheritance and films in their country. The standard answer — that international financing at this budget depends on internationally bankable casting — is honest and is an explanation rather than a justification. The objection is answerable by the production, and to our knowledge it has not been answered.

The core question, answered

When a production changes the visible ancestry or source-described appearance of a culturally specific character, is the change irrelevant, a legitimate theatrical convention, a deliberate reinterpretation, a contradiction of the source, a distortion of the cultural setting, or insufficiently explained?

For this film, on the evidence, our answers are these.

For Helen and for Athena the question does not arise as posed, because there is no source-described appearance to contradict. Homer does not supply one. The doubling of Helen and Clytemnestra is a legitimate theatrical convention.

For Eumaeus there is a genuine source contradiction, and it concerns blindness and social status rather than appearance.

For Sinon there is a provenance problem: a character imported from a later and different tradition and presented as part of Homer.

For the absence of Greek performers there is a cultural-location argument that we regard as the strongest of the casting objections, and which is a matter of the production’s relationship to a living culture rather than of fidelity to a text.

What there is not, on the evidence available, is a case that the film contradicted Homer’s descriptions of how anyone looks. That case gets made loudly and it does not survive contact with the poem, which barely describes anyone.

Why the distinction is worth defending

Precise criticism is stronger than loud criticism, and on this subject it is also the only kind that stays honest. The Eumaeus objection is real and checkable. The Sinon objection is real and checkable. The Greek-representation argument is real and is about a production’s conduct. Each of those can be put to a film-maker and answered.

An argument that a character was of a particular appearance because everyone knows they were cannot be put to anyone, because it rests on nothing. It is also the argument that most reliably turns into something uglier, and the reason this page states its limits at the top.

The wider question of how studios handle culturally specific European material is taken up separately, with its counterarguments, at When adaptation becomes replacement.