Democratic Patriotic Popular Movement NIKI
Over the past few days, a major debate has erupted across social media, following rumors that Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated Odyssey closely follows the queer reinterpretation of classical antiquity. It has leaked, though without any official confirmation yet, that Achilles may be portrayed by Ellen Page (the actor who transitioned and is now known as Elliot Page), while Helen of Troy may be played by Lupita Nyong’o, a Black actress.
These choices, if they are indeed true, are the product of an ideological fixation that wages war against anything connected to tradition, inherited truth, and the fundamental anthropological patterns of Greek (and consequently Western) civilization. The West is essentially choosing to renegotiate its relationship with the past on entirely new terms. Who could forget the uproar caused by the BBC’s Troy series, which cast the Black actor David Gyasi as Achilles? Moving in the same direction is the translation of Emily Wilson on which Nolan reportedly based his adaptation. A translation that aspired to become an ideological “correction” of Homer, “cleansing” him of words and meanings associated with patriarchal and androcentric readings. Humanity, it seems, found in Wilson the moral courage willing to confront the “corruption” of a work that, for 2,700 years, had supposedly corrupted the souls of the young including Alexander the Great himself, who famously kept the Iliad at his bedside.
The frenzy of identity politics has flooded public discourse, public space, art, and universities alike, with insatiable expansionist tendencies. But why does it insist on staking its claim on ancient Greek civilization as well? Why does it desire an Achilles stripped of his epic heroism and of the form that once inspired terror in the Trojans? To answer this question, we must understand that Homer belongs to the foundational myths of Western civilization. Through his work, the West reflected upon heroism, glory, honour, death, fate, courage, the historicity of virtue, and the tragic nature of human existence. But once you shift the center of gravity toward sexuality, you deconstruct the founding myth in order to renegotiate your identity, to gain control over the cultural imagination of both the present and the future.
The argument usually made in favor of such interventions is the
“freedom of art.” But how free can art truly be when it moves almost
exclusively in one direction? When Hollywood, universities, cultural
institutions, platforms, and state funding all converge around the same
ideological pattern? Could it be that this supposed “nonconformity” has
itself become a new form of cultural imperialism? An imperialism in
which anything traditional must be branded outdated, morally inferior,
and stripped of legitimacy.
We have reached the point where the freedom of Art means freedom only
for those who call themselves progressive, whose mission is to
“moralize” tradition by reconstructing it according to their own
ideological obsessions. And so texts are censored, comedies are
silenced, reactions are suppressed, historical truth is forgotten, and a
new past is manufactured without the consent of the societies that
inherited it.
In the end, the answer to the question posed by the book Who Killed Homer? is simple: those who insist, instead of reading Homer, on reading themselves into him. Those who, rather than engaging through Art with other worlds, transform it into a tool of perpetual self-affirmation.
And Homer is just one more victim. The greatest victim is the new generation, in whose consciousness will be inscribed a genderless, neutered Achilles, severed from the heroic ideal, from the era that he belongs to, from the anthropology he embodies. And he too will be added to the long line of “heroes” desecrated upon the masterpieces of humanity, solely in order to normalize the new kind of human being they are determined, at any cost, to impose upon us
Dr. Ioanna Stergiou
Head of Culture & Sports Thematic Group
