Odysseus you say?

Christopher Nolan’s flick The Odyssey is probably a work of marketing genius, or maybe not, we will see.

Many are now saying ‘based’ culture warriors and those repelled by certain very outré casting choices have got it wrong and it is actually good.

However, you will never convince me the casting was not epic trolling: a black actress as Helen of Troy, possessed of face unlikely to have launched a thousand ships, at least not in her direction; an African-American rap singer; a transgender actress playing Sinon (a character actually from Virgil’s Aeneid); and the goddess Athena played by Zendaya Coleman, an actress known for practicing economy of expression.

I have not seen Nolan’s Odyssey and probably never will, not for any particularly ideological reason but because of what an old chum of mine with whom I did Classics observed after seeing it.

“They replaced the trickster polytropos Odysseus with some other chap, who strangely was also called Odysseus.”

Yes, my friend is a bit of a wag, but he does read Latin and Greek, and if I am going to watch something called The Odyssey, I want the protagonist to be Odysseus, not just called Odysseus.