The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: What Critics Get Wrong About Homer’s ‘Odyssey’

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Homer’s Odyssey was not written as a straightforward account of the Bronze Age. It emerged from centuries of oral storytelling that preserved faint memories of Mycenaean civilization, absorbed the customs of the Greek Dark Ages, and incorporated warfare, agriculture, politics, and language from Homer’s own time. The collapse that followed the Trojan War transformed ruined palaces, forgotten tombs, and distant rulers into stories of Cyclopes, demigods, and legendary heroes. That complicated history also challenges criticism of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation, since Homer’s poem itself blends multiple eras rather than presenting a historically exact picture of ancient Greece. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. There are Mycenaean relics, and then over those four or five centuries of Bartic transmission, there's a lot of dark age things. And then there's the majority of it, I would say 55 to 60 percent, Homer being a unique genius. We know that he drew on things from his own contemporary world. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for The Daily Signal.

Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, is in the news lately, primarily because Christopher Nolan has produced a three-hour, and I can use the word impressionistic, retelling of the Odyssey. And a lot of people have criticized it, a lot of people like it. I'm going to talk about the film later in one of our episodes, because I have now seen the new film, and Jack Fowler and Sammy Wink and I have talked variously about it. But I wanted to today just talk about The Odyssey as a work of literature and history.

A lot of people, I think, have the wrong impressions. We hear that Homer wrote this or wrote that. He did not write it. It was composed orally. What do I mean by that? I mean, the actual incident of a Trojan war probably occurred somewhere between 1,200 BC, and 1,100 BC in the last gasp, so to speak, of the Mycenaean palatial culture in Greece.

Now, the Mycenaeans were Greek speakers, but their mode of economic, cultural, political organization was more near Eastern, more like the Hittites or the Egyptians. In other words, they had palaces that in sort of a totalitarian fashion parcelled out food and shelter and land and then received taxes and tribute at a central clearinghouse, all recorded on linear B tablets, the Greek language, but without the Phoenician-like alphabet, which had not

been invented yet. So when that collapsed, whether it was because of the Dorian invasion, or whether it was because of sea peoples who swept in and destroyed these vulnerable centrally located palaces, In Mycenaean civilization, if you decapitated Gla or Thebes or Mycini or Argos, then the entire structure would have no central direction. There was not a lot of independent autonomous people. So this culture vanished right after the Trojan War. And we should remember that because in the poem, a lot of people have trouble getting back from Troy. And when they get back, what they find is not good.

Odysseus comes back, suitors in his house. Agamemnon comes back. He's killed. Ajax doesn't come back. I could go on, and that might reflect the oral poetry's attempt over subsequent centuries to show that there was an actual Misenian event. So what's happened is the society collapsed, and we probably saw a one-tenth of the population survived,

And there was not sophisticated agriculture anymore, monumental building. None of the signs of the Mice Indian prosperity and security. It was a dark age. A small, scattered, decentralized population, more herd, goat, sheep, cattle raising than intensive farming and more confined to the Greek peninsula itself rather than a Mediterranean-wide seafaring people. During this depression area, I guess we would call it analogous to the European Dark Ages,

roughly from the 6th century AD to 900 AD, all writing of the Mycenaeans was lost, people lost all knowledge of what had gone on, and after, oh, we could say, 20 or 25 generations, they magnified what little they remembered about the Mycenaeans, as you would expect. This was the era of Greek myth-making. So when a farmer or a herder or anybody walked by a Mycenaean palace and ruins, he said the Cyclops must have built it. Or if he fell into a Tholos tomb, he'd say there were great demigogs who built this. And the tales of the Mycenaean lords then became exaggerated when they were carried on generation after generation by schools of bards. Perhaps they were

disabled, perhaps they were blind like Homer reputally was, but they kept the stories alive. Now, we only have two of them. The Odyssey about the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War and the Iliad, four or five day snapshot of the ten-year-long

war. But we know there was probably 20 or 30 tales about the kidnapping of Helen, the sack of Troy, whatever happened to Agamese. Memnon, et cetera, et cetera. In these oral poems, then, Homer would get together with people,

and over about a day and a half, almost two days, he would recite 1,200 lines, the entire poetry, by memory. Now, because there are things repeat, one third of the poem is repeated. That's the way the oral poem, the oral poet, composed. So if he wanted to go move from the calypso scene back to a very different atmosphere on Ithaca, then he could just plug in entire type scenes,

how to build a raft, how to build a fire. And these repetitions can be from the noun adjective, swift-footed Achilles, long-suffering Odysseus, or they can be a whole line or a whole page in a modern text. But it was not written down. Somehow, Homer was probably the last generation, in this bardic tradition, when the city-state re-emerge under a Western concept that we would call Western civilization. Sophisticated learning, writing returns with a Phoenician alphabet, history, rhetoric, science, all of that starts to re-emerge, or get born, maybe is a better word.

And the last version of Homer is written down, and the Bartic tradition ends. So Homer, then, is the authoritative text for these stories. and we don't know his predecessors. Now, very quickly, well, what's the history of it then? The history of in the Odyssey and the Iliad, there's little, tiny little memories of Mycenaean civilization five, six hundred years earlier. In the second book of the Iliad,

there's a catalog of ships, and they name all the places where the Greeks came from. And believe me, Homer, in that period when he composed at 750, had no idea where some of those places were. There's a mention of a silver studded long sword or a boar's tooth helmet. He doesn't know what those are. He just knows that they sound old and they're carried down generation, generation, generation

in the bardic oral tradition. We know that there are some grammatical forms that are not ionic like those that Homer composed when he was probably a resident of now Western Turkey or the Cycladic Islands. I should say the islands near the coast of modern Turkey are Ionia. And we call that the Ionian dialect. That's what most of the Iliad and Odyssey are composed. And remember, 12,000 lines, but it's in a hexameter, dactylic hexameter. Da-ta-da-da-da-da-ta-da-ta-ta-ta-da-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

The line ends don't rhyme, but they have the same shared meter. And here and there, there's what we call Arcadio-Sypriot grammatical signs, and that we know that when the Mycenaean palaces fell, people fled to Arcadia and Cyprus, and maybe some of that, their dialect got included into the Bardic tradition. So there are Misenaian relics, and then over those four or five centuries of Bardic transmission, there's a lot of dark age things. and that would be a primacy of javelin throwing or archery over close combat, or it would be more tales of goat herdsmen and lamb herdsman and cattle than olive growing or grain growing or grape growing. And then there's the majority of it, I would say, 55 to 60 percent, Homer being a unique genius, and the one bardic poem,

we know of in that long tradition, the one closest to the city-state and the one whose version was recorded and therefore saved with a written text because writing had re-emerged. We know that he drew on things from his own contemporary world. And there is intensive agriculture. Laertes' farm is intensively farmed. There are people in assemblies now that vote. We know in the Iliad there's a mention of mass warfare, not just chariote. or javelin or archery, but masked, heavily armed people with spears that would resemble Homer's own time with phalanx or what we call Hoplite warfare. Let me just finish then.

What do critics get wrong? They criticize Christopher Nolan because there's not Bronze Age armor, but there isn't in Homer either. They're just little traces of evidence from the Mycenaean or Bronze Age. They criticize him because the dialogue, and that's from a different translation by Emily Wilson. There are better translation. Richard Latimore's is the best. But the dialect in Homer is repetitive, as I said, and it's formulaic, and it doesn't approximate what most people are speaking. So if you're going to criticize the colloquial verse of Matt Damon, you have a point in that Homer's own poem when people heard it in 750 orally recited or they read it 100 years later when it was composed or redone with a written text. It would have sounded archaic and not necessarily colloquial.

These are just some of the items that are in the background of Homer's Odyssey. and to the degree that they frame a film version or to the degree that a director should work within both the poem and the historic realities in which it was composed, I'll talk about in a subsequent one of our talks. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hanson for The Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal.

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