In Defense of Agamemnon's Helmet
Listening to the voices hodiernal, hesternal, and nudiustertian.
Today, Yesterday, Before
When it comes to the presentation of any ancient work to an audience today, three voices must be considered: the hodiernal, of course, the hesternal, and the nudiustertian1. Different artists and presenters will emphasize these differently, and their decisions in this regard are not neutral or without consequence. As a lover of antiquity and tradition, I of course favor the ancient voices. A presenter whose guiding light is hodiernal relevance will, I believe, end up either making something completely irrelevant to an audience of today, or make a completely new work in which novelty speaks to the novel, and the ancient voice is silenced.
There is a pagan instinct, present in many conservatives, to consider what is most ancient to be most excellent, whatever is nearest the source to be best. When such folk present ancient work, they try to eliminate the hodiernal and hesternal. Any authentic presentation of Shakespeare must be Elizabethan to its core, or at least what the presenter understands Elizabethan to be. The loss here is the loss of all the interpreting voices of our parents. We should love the traditions of interpretation handed down to us within our own cultural stream; yes, we give preference to some and maybe even reject others, but there must at a minimum be an acknowledgment that no great work arrives to us uncommented on. From there we make our own decisions. Anyone familiar with how translation actually works will be aware of how interpretive any translation is; in the world of classics, many “great” older translations bowdlerize, and many newer translations editorialize.2
Although many unbalanced presentations of old and ancient works, as considered through this lens of today-yesterday-before, are trash (I think of the Anthony Hopkins King Lear), many are wonderful (I think of the Ralph Fiennes Coriolanus3). The responsible thing is to be aware that all three voices exist; if they are to be rearranged and reprioritized, it must be done thoughtfully, as a chorusmaster would do it.
Just as none of the voices may be eliminated without [dire] consequence, so one may not be exalted high above the others without a reckoning.
“Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead…Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”4
The Irony of the Overly Righteous
There is a particular response to the release of the teaser for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey that I will here address. It is impelled by the instinct, or in some cases, conscious philosophy, that older is better by virtue of being closer to the source. Even before the release of the teaser, when photos of actor Matt Damon in his armor were released, this reaction began to stir.
Once the preview came out, things popped off a bit.
This preview is fun, and funny…except that so many really sincerely wish something like this had been done.
In a nutshell, this is the reaction:
“The Odyssey (and The Iliad, for that matter) are Bronze Age tales, stories of the Myceneans. The movie is not projecting a Bronze Age aesthetic, as archaeology and history brings it to us. Therefore the movie is unfaithful to its source material.”
To be fair, much of this reaction, which I will call historicist, is focused on one particularly spectacular piece of armor: Agamemnon’s helmet. And it is, indeed, an outrageous helmet. Cynics were particularly quick to point out that it looks Bat-Manny, and given that this is a Christopher Nolan film, the memes wrote themselves.
Homer’s work presents a particular difficulty for historicists. There is one more voice in the chorus than usually must be managed with old works. If we consider only the voices I laid out earlier, we will travel through our time and our voices, through the voices of our interpreting ancestors, to the source…aye, there’s the rub. The source is multifarious, is a bunch of compilers over centuries. The Dorian Dark Age, itself mythical, and its stories, come to life over decades and centuries as part of an oral tradition and are incarnate in blind Homer5, who is conducted to us by the “classical” Greeks6.
Why people are insisting that a film based on an epic poem that was not only preserved, but lived and grew in the oral tradition, and that was set down centuries after the events it described, be “historically accurate” to the Bronze Age is beyond me.
The aesthetic of this movie cannot be whatever the filmmakers want it to be, at least not without great consequence. More than anything, Homer’s stories are Greece, not Mycenae, speaking to us. As one reads Homer and the work of the Golden Age poets/playwrights touching on the same stories, one sees that the Greeks are reckoning with these stories as their stories, of their ancestors…but we must accept that these are Greek rather than Mycenaean tales.
The tradition of portraying Agamemnon bombastically on stage is ancient. It fits his character in Homer’s work, and is practically demanded by how he is portrayed in truly classical Greek work.
It is more faithful to Homer, and to the many voices of the past, to have Matt Damon and his compatriots running around underdressed. It is more faithful to the sources in all their variety, to give Agamemnon an outrageously crested hoplite helmet. It is more true to stage this movie like an Athenian play than as an archaeological recreation, because
AS WE ALL KNOW
myth is truer than history.
It may be that, in the context of the film, Agamemnon’s helmet is too ridiculous to bear. On the other hand, it may be that most of the online helmet-haters have never read The Odyssey, not even a prose version for juveniles.
Man, I knew I’d get here in the end: y’all, save your souls and read more poetry.
I hope the movie’s good.
If you are not a fan of the use of obscure or made-up vocables, you will not enjoy this Substack. Be gone, and no hard feelings. In this case, by the way, the vocables are obscure rather than invented: of today, of yesterday, of the day before yesterday.
My own personal take on the ancient translations of the Greeks is this: restore all the pederasty. Let people, including older high school students, see the Greeks for what they were. And let Christian teachers and students, even as they take what is good, see from what depths God saves us…including stygian hellenic depths.
Yes, Ralph Fiennes of The Return, a take on a portion of the Odyssey.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. Chapter 4, Ethics of Elfland.
I’m a believer, how ‘bout you?
-ish, yes, I know. That’s my whole point.
I'm with you. It's quite possible Nolan even wants to allude to the imagery of Batman, not to reference the character specifically but that imagery that evokes that imposing authority which has been a part of the language of film since his own Batman trilogy. It's so visually easy to tell what's going on in that scene.
The 300 Spartans at Thermopylae did not go into battle in only their underwear. But I will die on the hill that the Spartans would have *loved* the movie "300" and how they are portrayed in it. There's accuracy and then there's *aesthetics*.