Who decided the Gods were white?
Nolan changed almost everything about Odysseus, but the internet is only angry about Helen's face
“Is the plan to finish reading this before you see Christopher Nolan’s adaptation?” asked the man behind the till at the Oxfam on St Giles in Oxford two weeks ago. I had just come across a 1963 copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey, covered in marginalia: underlinings, cramped and illegible notes, a date on the flyleaf, and two pages at the back that suggested a classics student had owned it.
“I’ve booked this evening’s show,” I said.
He bagged it slowly. “Good luck.”
He was right. I got about as far as Telemachus leaving for Pylos before the lights went down a few hours later, in a booth at the back of a café-cinema. It was a tiny room with no air conditioning and the doors propped open because of the heat, so that the sound of the toilets flushing around the corner came in under the sound of the sea. It was not how Nolan intended it (or maybe it was?), if social media is to be believed, with its liturgy of 70mm and IMAX and the one true aspect ratio. I liked it anyway.
Reading the rest afterwards only made the reception of the film stranger. Nolan’s Odysseus is not Homer’s Odysseus. The dialogue is not anything a rhapsode ever sang. But almost none of that has been what most people objected to. The loudest objection has been about Helen, played by a black actress, Lupita Nyong’o.
Elon Musk had been at it since January, six months before release, when the casting was still a rumour: Nolan, he wrote, “has lost his integrity.” Days after the film opened he called Nolan a worm who had desecrated the Greek poet, and then announced that Grok would produce a full-length film that was “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” Matt Walsh, the conservative commentator, had already put the real objection more directly than anyone: he did not believe Nyong’o was “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Never mind that Helen is a mythological figure. Or that her father was Zeus, who took the form of a swan, mated with the queen of Sparta, and produced her from an egg. She was not a historical woman; there are no bones or grave to exhume. She has lived in the imaginations of many civilisations, each of which painted her according to its own idea of beauty, and that idea was handed to them ready-made by their century and their culture. The row over Helen’s face is not really a row about Helen. It is a row about whose imagination gets to be the default.
For if Helen was the daughter of the God of gods, who decided the gods were white?
Jesus of Nazareth is widely considered the most-reproduced deity on earth. He is also a first-century Galilean Jew who would have looked like a first-century Galilean Jew: brown-skinned and dark-eyed. The earliest images of him, painted on the walls of Roman catacombs, show a beardless young man in a tunic. As the religion travelled north the face travelled with it. Byzantium gave him the long hair and the beard. European painters gave him European features, Ethiopian and Coptic painters gave him theirs, and for several centuries these were simply local ways of picturing a local god.
What fixed the Jesus of today was industrial printing. In 1940 an American commercial artist named Warner Sallman produced a soft-focus, fair-skinned, chestnut-haired Christ. Head of Christ was reproduced more than 500 million times — on bulletins and calendars, prayer cards and bookmarks and stationery — and tens of thousands of wallet-sized copies went out to American servicemen during the Second World War. Writing in the New York Times in 1994, William Grimes reckoned that when the votes for best-known artist of the century were counted, both Picasso and Warhol would be buried in a landslide for Sallman; his was the picture of the divine that was printed at a scale nobody else could match, and in less than a century his adaptation became a fact.
In India, Raja Ravi Varma took European oil technique and applied it to the Hindu pantheon, and the lithographic press carried the results across the country. From the 1890s his oleographs went out by the crate to shops and homes and railway waiting rooms, and they were a genuine democratisation: gods who had lived inside temples were suddenly portable, cheap, and accessible. They were also, almost without exception, fair. The dark deities came out pale, or a decorous blue.
Then in 1923 a small press was set up in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, to print cheap scripture, and Gita Press became the largest religious publisher the country has ever had: Bhagavad Gitas and Ramcharitmanases, priced so low that most households of modest means could own the epics outright, in editions that eventually ran into the hundreds of millions. Bound into all of it was a visual style descended directly from calendar art: a milk-pale Sita or a Ram whose darkness had been diluted to a pastel hue. As the mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has written:
Somehow, an unnaturally blue Krishna was preferred over a naturally dark Krishna. ‘Because blue is the color of the sky, of ether, of divinity,’ we were told. No one dared point out that Krishna and Shyam were both proper nouns and common nouns which referred to gods as well as the color black.
This is how the idea of what our gods looked like reached us — as calendars hung in our grandmothers’ kitchens and into diasporic homes continents apart. That is how the gods of a brown country came to be pictured as fairer than the people praying to them.
So when people insist that a Greek demi-god who came out of an egg must be fair, I understand the instinct. But it is not an ancient intuition surfacing. It is a manufactured image reproduced so many times that it now feels like history.
I am a firm believer in creative licence for world mythologies. If adaptations did not take liberties we would not have Joyce’s Ulysses or Atwood’s Penelopiad. My question is why Nolan’s casting of Nyong’o is considered a liberty too far.
Changing Helen’s race is more conspicuous than changing someone’s hair colour, obviously, though it is telling that Book 4 of the Odyssey is titled “The Red-Haired King and His Lady” and Nolan’s Menelaus is bald, with a black beard; Homer is more specific about Menelaus’ physical features than about Helen’s, and yet Helen is the one who has caused the furore. Similarly, Daniel Mendelsohn, who has translated the poem himself, asked why nobody objected to a Bostonian playing the king of Ithaca.
If the objection is genuinely about fidelity to Homer, the standard has to hold everywhere, and Nolan’s Odysseus is further from Homer’s Odysseus than Nolan’s Helen is from Homer’s Helen. Homer’s Odysseus is polytropos, the “complicated man” of Emily Wilson’s translation: witty, manipulative, flirtatious, endlessly talkative, morally slippery, a liar who takes visible pleasure in the lie. He is an adulterer who spends a year with Circe and seven with Calypso. He boasts when silence would save him and talks himself into more trouble than he talks himself out of. Nolan strips most of this away and gives us a dark, brooding, guilt-heavy modern hero whose defining quality is devotion to home and his love for Penelope. That is not a trim, it is a different man. Wilson goes so far as to call him the opposite of Homer’s: an “uncomplicated man”.
But what interests me more than the casting is the assumption that somewhere behind the film sits a fixed original, and that the further you drift from it the worse you have behaved. Homeric epics have never worked like that. There may not even have been a singular Homer; Samuel Butler, the nineteenth-century novelist and translator, argued in The Authoress of the Odyssey that the poem was the work of a Sicilian woman. It came out of centuries of oral performance, reshaped by each singer for whatever hall she or he was standing in, before anyone thought to write it down. What we argue over is a late snapshot of something already remade a thousand times by people who would have found our reverence for the exact wording strange.
And what the Greeks themselves did to Helen is far more radical than anything Nolan attempted. In Euripides’ Helen, the real woman is whisked to Egypt by the gods, where she waits out the war while Greeks and Trojans butcher each other over a phantom lookalike. That is a rewriting so complete it hollows out the cause of the Iliad, and it was staged in Athens in front of an audience who knew the traditional version perfectly well and went home arguing about it, presumably, rather than demanding the poet’s cancellation.
In Dante’s Inferno, Odysseus rots in the eighth circle of hell for the fraud of the Trojan horse, and Dante invents for him a final voyage past the Strait of Gibraltar, where he drowns — a death Homer never mentions. Tennyson makes him a Victorian icon yearning “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”. Joyce turns him into a Jewish advertising canvasser walking around Dublin on a single day in June 1904. Atwood hands the story to Penelope and the twelve hanged maids, while Madeline Miller hands it to Circe.
Even reading Homer in English is an adaptation. Chapman’s Homer is not Pope’s, Pope’s is not Butler’s, Butler’s is not Fitzgerald’s — the one on my desk, with the pen marks in the margins — and none of them are Wilson’s. Most of the people currently incensed about fidelity have met the Odyssey only through somebody else’s rewriting of it.
Perhaps part of the reason we instinctively picture the ancient Greeks as white is embarrassingly literal: the white statues we’ve inherited. As Margaret Talbot wrote in The New Yorker, that pristine marble was itself an accident — the colour had worn away — but Europeans eventually turned the accident into an aesthetic, which birthed into an idea about civilisation and race.
The white marble we associate with Greece was never meant to be white. Ancient statues were painted; but over two millennia, much of the pigment simply disappeared. When the neoclassicists built an aesthetic theory around the purity of naked stone, they were admiring damage and calling it design. The race theorists who followed went further, taking the bare marble as evidence of ancestry. What is now defended online as the authentic ancient world is, in part, a nineteenth-century invention.
The correction has been on public display for years. The German archaeologists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann have spent decades reconstructing ancient sculpture in its original colours, and have exhibited the results worldwide, including at the Met. In those reconstructions, Hellenic statues are not white.
The Bronze Age evidence points elsewhere in any case. DNA from Aegean remains of Helen’s supposed era indicates mostly dark hair and brown eyes, with blond and blue uncommon, which matches what the Mycenaeans painted on their own walls. Homer’s epithet for Helen, leukōlenos, usually translated as “white-armed”, is read by most scholars as a stock descriptor for aristocratic women who stayed out of the sun: a marker of rank rather than race.
Race, though, is an essentialist category — one we treat as carrying a fixed inner nature — so, Nolan’s Odysseus can lose his cunning and it’s still easy for us to see that as interpretation. A complexion cannot move, for we file that under identity. But that instinct is younger than the poem being conscripted to defend it.
The Odyssey has lasted three thousand years by being sung and enacted differently in every hall, disowned by its own poets, sent to Egypt, dragged into hell, relocated to Dublin, retranslated by every generation, argued with in pen by a student in 1963 whose name I will never know. The idea that it might not survive an actress’ face is the least Homeric thing about this argument.