The characters, against Homer

Each entry states what the poem gives the character, what the film does, and what the difference costs or gains. The cast list and its sourcing is on the film hub; the figure pages for each character are linked from the entries.

Odysseus

Homer’s is polytropos and polymētis: a liar of extraordinary fluency who tells four elaborate false life stories in the second half, is praised by his patron goddess for lying to her face, tests his own grieving father for no strategic reason, and weeps constantly.

The film’s is more honourable, more merciful, and organised around guilt for the Trojan War rather than around cunning. He is reported to be given a gesture of plucking the bowstring before loading, warning an opponent so the fight is fair — an invention, and a precise index of the change.

This is the film’s largest interpretive act. Guilt is a real moral difficulty and a familiar one; the poem’s difficulty is unfamiliar, and consists in a hero whose central virtue cannot be distinguished from a vice. See Odysseus.

Penelope

Strengthened as a ruler, reported as governing Ithaca in her husband’s absence and reluctant to hand it back. That is a genuine improvement on the passive figure adaptations usually produce.

And the test of the bed is gone. In Homer she refuses to accept the man who has just killed a hundred and eight people until she has proved him, by ordering the marriage bed moved and provoking him into revealing that he built it around a living olive trunk. It is the one moment in the poem when anyone outmanoeuvres Odysseus.

Ruling competently is a state; out-thinking the cleverest man alive is an action. The film gives her the first and removes the second. See Penelope.

Telemachus

The journey is compressed to Sparta; Nestor and Pylos are cut, which is reasonable — two hospitality visits of the same shape is one more than a film can hold. The father-son relationship is expanded well beyond what Homer supplies, which is defensible, since Homer supplies startlingly little.

What is lost is the poem’s harder account of what he becomes. His development in Homer is not moral improvement but the acquisition of authority, first used to send his mother out of the hall and last used to hang twelve enslaved women in preference to the clean death his father ordered. See Telemachus.

Athena

Present, and not shown acting as a god in the Homeric manner. The film connects her with a young Trojan priestess killed during the sack, which keeps divine agency ambiguous.

The ambiguity is a defensible reading of Homeric double motivation, in which a god acts through a human faculty rather than around it. Tying her to the hero’s guilt is a different matter: the poem’s Athena is an independent power with her own interests who likes Odysseus because they share a professional specialism in deception, and she laughs at him. An emanation of conscience cannot do that. See Athena.

Circe

Reconceived as an isolated woman transforming men from fear for her own safety, her magic framed as revealing what men already are. Reported as the film’s most frightening sequence.

A change we regard as legitimate and well made, because Homer gives no motive for the transformations at all — the film fills a silence rather than contradicting a statement. Worth stating plainly that it is a change: in the poem the swine keep their human minds and are restored by an ointment, so the magic imposes a shape rather than exposing one. See Circe.

Calypso

Given the lotus flower — a drug that in Homer belongs to a different and much earlier episode — with the detention framed as easing the trauma of war.

Economical and expensive. In Homer she offers immortality and is refused, and that refusal is how the poem prices a homecoming: the hero gives up deathlessness to be mortal in a particular place with particular people. A drugged man is not refusing anything. See Calypso.

Eumaeus

Presented as blind and as Odysseus’s former tutor. In Homer he is a working swineherd, not blind, and a bought slave.

The blindness appears to import the traditional attribute of the bard and is defensible consolidation. The tutor is the more significant change, because it alters a social fact the poem is using: Eumaeus performs the best hospitality in the poem out of poverty, and says of himself that Zeus takes away half a man’s worth on the day he is enslaved. See Eumaeus.

Antinous

Robert Pattinson’s performance has been widely praised. The film gives him a back-story — military service avoided by sending a servant’s son in his place — that ties the Ithacan crisis to the war’s guilt.

Good screenwriting and an invention. Homer’s suitors have no back-stories, and the poem complicates them differently and more subtly, through Amphinomus: decent, privately warned by Odysseus to leave, troubled, staying, and killed. The poem takes care to establish that the massacre catches a man who did not deserve it.

Helen and Clytemnestra

Doubled by one performer and presented as twin sisters. The doubling makes the film’s pairing of the two homecomings legible and has excellent theatrical precedent; the twinship is a tidying of genealogies the ancient sources do not consistently support. The reunion with Menelaus is complicated, which is a fair extrapolation from a scene in Odyssey 4 that is already uncomfortable. See Helen and Clytemnestra.

Sinon

Not a character in Homer. He belongs to the Epic Cycle and above all to Aeneid 2, roughly seven centuries later and from the Trojan side. Importing from the wider tradition has the best possible precedent; the difficulty is that audiences will attribute him to Homer, and the connection the film builds between him and Antinous is entirely new.

Those who are not there

Nausicaa, Alcinous and Arete, and with them the whole Phaeacian sequence — the poem’s model of hospitality performed perfectly. Laertes, and with him the reunion in the orchard and the poem’s three-generation frame. Nestor. And the twelve hanged women of Book 22, whose absence makes the hero’s victory cleaner than Homer’s.

Each is recorded with its consequence in the ledger.