This is part 1 of a two-part column series by Aju Media Group's senior columnist Abe Kwak.
A single film has summoned the world back to the seas of ancient Greece, nearly 3,000 years after Homer first sang of them.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has filled theaters in major cities around the world and rekindled an extraordinary interest in Homer, Greek mythology, the Trojan War and the origins of Western philosophy. Film critics, historians, philosophers, writers and ordinary moviegoers have all entered the conversation, each finding a different meaning in the same ancient voyage. In South Korea, too, the enthusiasm has been strong enough to suggest something approaching an “Odyssey phenomenon.”
A story born almost three millennia ago has returned to the center of global popular culture through the most advanced technologies of 21st-century cinema.
Some groups have gone so far as to rent an entire IMAX theater to watch the film together, followed by discussions with prominent film critics. Afterward, one reads reviews and essays, each approaching the work from a different direction. Historians speak of myth and antiquity. Philosophers examine human nature and fate. Film critics analyze Nolan’s visual language and cinematic architecture.
All are illuminating.
Yet the more explanations one hears, and the more interpretations one reads, the clearer becomes the question that first remained after the theater went dark.
Must great art yield only one answer?
The moment a film leaves its director’s hands, does it not enter the life of every person who watches it? One viewer sees a family. Another remembers a war. Another thinks of youth, failure, love or waiting.
Great art does not end when the screen goes black. It begins again when the audience walks out of the theater and carries it into life.
The most powerful question The Odyssey left with me was, in the end, unexpectedly simple:
What is a human being?
How did humanity emerge from a world ruled by gods into a world in which human beings think and choose for themselves? And now, confronted by an artificial intelligence of our own making, what kind of human beings must we become?
Nolan revives an ancient myth in a contemporary cinematic language. Yet the question could hardly be more modern.
We send spacecraft beyond the familiar reaches of the solar system. We build machines capable of learning human language and absorbing vast stores of human knowledge. And still we stand before essentially the same questions that confronted Homer’s men and women thousands of years ago.
That is why Homer’s Odyssey is great.
Its greatness does not lie merely in its age.
Empires have risen and vanished. Dynasties have disappeared. Religions and philosophies have been born. Humanity has passed through the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, arriving now at the threshold of artificial intelligence.
Yet Odysseus is still alive.
A true classic is not a relic preserved under glass. It is a work that asks a new question of every new age.
That is why a classic never grows old.
Homer sang of a Greek warrior crossing the Mediterranean, but within that voyage reside the permanent problems of humanity: desire and fear, love and betrayal, pride and restraint, war and peace, temptation and responsibility, death and homecoming.
What Nolan ultimately finds behind the mythology is the human being.
Odysseus is a hero, but never a perfect one.
He is strong, yet vulnerable. Clever, yet capable of error. Brave, yet afraid. At times he becomes intoxicated by his own intelligence and success, and his pride brings new suffering upon himself and those around him.
He wins a war and loses his way.
The Trojan War is over, yet he cannot return home.
A man who conquers the world but cannot return to himself; a civilization capable of astonishing achievement but unable to guarantee happiness; a species that accumulates immense knowledge without necessarily knowing how to live — in these respects, the Odysseus of 3,000 years ago and the humanity of the AI age are not so far apart.
Nolan’s film brings this vast mythological world into modern cinematic form.
Drawing upon Homer’s Odyssey, it follows the long and perilous homeward journey of Odysseus after the Trojan War. Matt Damon plays Odysseus; Tom Holland his son, Telemachus; Anne Hathaway his wife, Penelope; and Robert Pattinson Antinous, one of Penelope’s most dangerous suitors. Zendaya appears as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Samantha Morton as Circe, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, John Leguizamo as the loyal swineherd Eumaeus, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus and Elliot Page as Sinon.
But behind the spectacle lies an ancient human drama.
1. The Odyssey: A Man Who Won the War but Could Not Get Home
At the center stands Odysseus, played by Matt Damon.
He is king of Ithaca, a small island kingdom west of mainland Greece. But Odysseus is not merely another warrior skilled with the sword.
Among Homer’s heroes, what distinguishes him is not brute force but intelligence: cunning, judgment, adaptability and command of language.
If Achilles represents strength, and Hector honor and duty, Odysseus represents the thinking human being.
He leaves home because of the Trojan War.
His wife, Penelope, and his young son, Telemachus, remain in Ithaca while he sails to battle.
The war lasts 10 years.
And when it ends, his suffering does not.
His journey home consumes almost another decade.
The simplest way to describe the architecture of The Odyssey is therefore this: a man spends 10 years fighting a war and nearly 10 more trying to return home.
But those 20 years are not merely a measure of time.
They are the story of a warrior slowly becoming a husband again, a father again, a human being again — after passing through temptation, terror, loss and death.
For 10 years the united Greek armies cannot breach Troy.
Its walls are formidable. Its defenders refuse to surrender.
Then comes the stratagem that ends the war:
the Trojan Horse.
The Greeks construct an enormous wooden horse and hide Odysseus and other elite warriors inside it. The Greek forces then create the illusion that they have abandoned the war and sailed away.
The Trojans, believing the horse to be a trophy of victory, drag it inside their city.
Night falls.
As Troy celebrates and sleeps, the Greek soldiers emerge from the horse, open the gates and admit the army waiting outside.
The city that force could not conquer falls to deception and intelligence.
Nolan’s film includes both the enormous horse and Sinon, played by Elliot Page. The figure of Sinon is elaborated less in Homer’s Odyssey than in later Greek and Roman traditions, most famously in Virgil’s Aeneid, where he helps persuade the Trojans to bring the horse within the city walls.
The war ends.
But that is precisely when the true Odyssey begins.
Odysseus boards his ship with one destination in mind:
Ithaca.
There waits Penelope, who has endured years without her husband, and Telemachus, the son who scarcely remembers his father.
But the sea will not release Odysseus so easily.
In Homer, Poseidon, god of the sea, becomes the great divine obstacle to his return. Nolan shifts much of this divine intervention toward the realms of nature, memory, guilt and human psychology.
That change makes the modern significance of the story — the movement from the world of the gods toward the world of man — all the more vivid.
Polyphemus: Intelligence and Pride
Among the most famous episodes is Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus, the Cyclops — the one-eyed giant.
Odysseus and his companions enter an enormous cave stocked with sheep, goats, cheese and food.
But its owner is no man.
He is Polyphemus.
The giant traps them inside, sealing the entrance with a massive stone, and begins devouring the sailors.
No ordinary force can defeat him.
Here Odysseus turns to his greatest weapon:
intelligence.
In Homer, he gives Polyphemus wine and tells the Cyclops that his name is “Nobody.”
When the giant falls into a drunken sleep, Odysseus and his companions drive a sharpened, heated stake into his single eye.
Polyphemus howls in agony.
Yet when neighboring Cyclopes ask who is attacking him, he answers, in effect, “Nobody.”
And so no one comes to his rescue.
Odysseus survives through language and intelligence rather than strength.
But what happens next is more important.
Once safely away, unable to resist the temptation to boast, Odysseus reveals his true identity.
He is Odysseus, king of Ithaca.
It is a catastrophic act of pride.
Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon.
The sea god’s wrath now descends upon the hero.
Odysseus’s intelligence saved him.
His arrogance imperiled him again.
Such is Homer’s understanding of humanity.
Our greatest gift and our greatest weakness often live side by side.
Circe: The Woman Who Turns Men Into Swine
Odysseus and his companions eventually arrive at the island of Circe, the beautiful and dangerous enchantress.
In Homer’s world, Circe possesses the power to transform human beings into animals.
She casts a spell upon Odysseus’s companions and turns them into pigs.
It is one of the most enduring symbols in The Odyssey.
A human being who surrenders reason and self-restraint to appetite can descend into the animal within.
With the aid of Hermes, Odysseus resists Circe’s magic and eventually restores his companions to human form.
He nevertheless remains on her island for a significant period.
And this raises a question that runs through the entire epic:
Why does a man who so desperately wants to return home repeatedly stop, linger and succumb to temptation?
The answer is one reason the Odyssey remains great.
Homer does not portray his hero as a saint.
Odysseus desires. He hesitates. He fails.
And still he begins again.
He is not human because he is heroic.
He is a human hero because, after being shaken again and again, he keeps searching for the road that leads home.
Into the Underworld: Asking the Dead for the Way Home
Odysseus even descends, while still alive, into the realm of the dead.
There he consults the spirit of the prophet Tiresias, asking how he can return to Ithaca.
He encounters the spirit of his mother as well.
He survived the battlefield, but while he fought and wandered, those he loved grew old and died.
From this point on, the meaning of homecoming deepens.
Home is no longer simply a place.
It is the place one must reach before time itself disappears.
The Sirens: Beauty Calling Human Beings Toward Destruction
Then come the Sirens.
Their song is irresistibly beautiful.
Sailors who hear it lose reason and sail toward their deaths.
Odysseus devises a solution.
He orders his men to seal their ears with beeswax.
But he himself wants to hear the song.
So he commands them to bind him tightly to the mast — and, no matter how desperately he begs, never to release him.
The song begins.
Odysseus struggles violently.
He commands his men to untie him.
They refuse.
The ship sails safely past.
It is one of the most extraordinary images of desire and self-government in Western literature.
Odysseus does not pretend that temptation can be abolished.
He does something wiser.
He acknowledges his own weakness and constructs, in advance, a mechanism that will prevent his weaker self from destroying his better judgment.
Civilization itself may depend upon that insight.
Scylla and Charybdis: When Every Choice Has a Cost
Then comes an even crueler dilemma.
On one side waits Scylla, the many-headed monster.
On the other churns Charybdis, a whirlpool capable of swallowing an entire ship.
There is no path without danger.
This is also the tragedy of leadership.
Not every decision offers a good outcome.
Sometimes there is only the responsibility to choose the lesser catastrophe.
Odysseus chooses the path past Scylla, sacrificing six men rather than risking the destruction of all.
The hero survives.
But the people beside him disappear one by one.
Odysseus is therefore not a hero who marches triumphantly from victory to victory.
The nearer he comes to home, the lonelier he becomes.
Calypso: Choosing Mortal Love Over Immortality
At last, after losing nearly everyone, Odysseus is washed ashore alone on the island of Ogygia, home of Calypso.
In Homer, Calypso wishes to keep him with her.
She can offer him what mortal life cannot:
the possibility of escaping human finitude.
Yet Odysseus does not ultimately want to become a god.
He wants to return to Ithaca.
He wants Penelope.
He wants his son.
He wants his home.
Here one of the deepest themes of the Odyssey emerges:
It may be better to live finitely as a human being with those one loves than to live forever without them.
Another War Was Already Underway in Ithaca
While Odysseus wanders, Ithaca is anything but peaceful.
Its king has been gone for nearly 20 years.
Many assume he is dead.
Noblemen crowd into the palace and compete for Penelope’s hand, knowing that marriage to the queen could also deliver political power.
Among the most dangerous is Antinous.
Penelope refuses to surrender.
In Homer, she uses intelligence to resist.
She announces that she will choose a husband after finishing a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes.
By day she weaves.
At night she secretly unravels what she has woven.
She defeats time with patience.
This is the famous weaving of Penelope.
If Odysseus battles monsters across the sea, Penelope battles time within the palace.
She, too, is an Odysseus.
Telemachus: The Boy Who Goes in Search of His Father
And another human being is growing.
Telemachus.
He was a child when his father sailed for Troy.
Now he is a young man.
Yet his palace has been occupied by suitors consuming his father’s wealth and pressuring his mother into marriage.
Telemachus leaves home to discover whether Odysseus is still alive.
He seeks out veterans of the Trojan War and asks what they know.
Among them are Menelaus, king of Sparta, and Helen.
The fact that the opening books of Homer’s Odyssey belong largely to Telemachus matters greatly.
The father is trying to return home.
The son must leave home in search of the father.
They travel in opposite directions and finally meet.
This is more than a reunion.
It is the story of a boy who grows into a man in the absence of his father.
Ithaca at Last: The King Returns as a Beggar
After nearly 20 years, Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca.
But he does not enter as a king.
He disguises himself as a poor beggar and enters his own kingdom unnoticed, seeking to discover who remained loyal and who betrayed him.
In Homer, one of the most heartbreaking recognitions comes not from a human being but from an animal.
Argos, Odysseus’s old dog, has waited for his master through the passing years.
Ancient and neglected, he recognizes Odysseus beneath the disguise.
And after seeing that his master has finally returned, Argos dies.
Then comes the final trial.
Penelope declares that she will marry the man capable of stringing Odysseus’s bow and shooting an arrow through the aligned openings of a series of axes.
One suitor after another fails.
Then the ragged beggar takes the bow.
He strings it.
The arrow flies.
The king has returned.
Odysseus and Telemachus fight together against the suitors occupying the palace.
For the first time, father and son stand on the same battlefield.
Penelope’s Final Test: Homer’s Bed, Nolan’s Golden Pin
Even then, Homer does not allow recognition to come cheaply.
Penelope must know whether this man is truly her husband.
Twenty years have passed.
His face has changed.
His body has changed.
Life has changed him.
So she sets one last test, referring to a secret known only to the two of them.
Their marriage bed was built by Odysseus around the trunk of a living olive tree rooted in the earth. It cannot simply be moved.
Only Odysseus understands what Penelope means.
At that moment she knows.
The man before her is her husband.
Nolan does not reproduce this celebrated episode exactly. In the film, a golden Athena pin associated with Penelope becomes an important sign of recognition.
The details differ.
The meaning does not.
The war is over.
The voyage is over.
The monsters have been survived.
And a human being has finally returned to the person to whom he belongs.
Ultimately, The Odyssey is the story of a homecoming.
But homecoming does not mean merely returning to a physical house.
It means the warrior becoming a husband again, the soldier becoming a father again, the figure who contended with gods becoming human again.
2. The Trojan War: The War Before the Homecoming
To understand The Odyssey, one must first understand the war that precedes it.
Why did Odysseus go to Troy?
Why did the kings and heroes of Greece sail across the Aegean?
Why did Achilles and Hector die?
In mythic tradition, it begins with a wedding and a golden apple.
The sea goddess Thetis is marrying the mortal Peleus.
Many gods are invited.
Eris, goddess of discord, is not.
Enraged, she throws a golden apple into the celebration.
Upon it are words meaning:
“For the fairest.”
Three goddesses claim it:
Hera, queen of the gods;
Athena, goddess of wisdom;
and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty.
Who is the most beautiful?
The judgment is ultimately placed in the hands of Paris, prince of Troy.
Thus comes the famous “Judgment of Paris.”
Each goddess offers him a reward.
Hera promises power.
Athena promises wisdom and victory in war.
Aphrodite promises the most beautiful woman in the world.
Paris chooses Aphrodite.
There is one problem.
The most beautiful woman, Helen, is already married.
Her husband is Menelaus, king of Sparta.
Paris nevertheless brings Helen to Troy.
Depending on the ancient tradition, Helen is abducted, persuaded or leaves voluntarily.
But to Menelaus, the result is the same:
humiliation.
He appeals to his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who becomes commander of the Greek coalition.
The great warriors gather.
Achilles, the greatest fighter of Greece.
Odysseus, king of strategy.
Menelaus of Sparta.
Ajax, the mighty warrior.
Nestor, the veteran king.
And Agamemnon, commander of them all.
They cross the Aegean with a vast fleet and lay siege to Troy.
On the other side stand the defenders:
Priam, the aging king of Troy;
Queen Hecuba;
Paris;
and, above all, Hector, Paris’s brother and Troy’s greatest warrior.
Two names must be remembered.
For Greece, Achilles.
For Troy, Hector.
Their collision produces the greatest tragedy of the war.
Achilles: The Strongest Warrior, and Yet Entirely Human
Achilles is nearly invincible.
His mother is Thetis, a goddess.
In a famous later tradition, Thetis immerses the infant Achilles in the River Styx, granting near invulnerability. But she holds him by the heel, leaving that one place untouched.
From this story comes the expression “Achilles’ heel” — a fatal weakness.
That particular version, however, is not found in Homer’s Iliad itself. It belongs to later mythological tradition.
The Trojan War lasts 10 years.
Yet Homer’s Iliad does not narrate all 10 years from beginning to end.
It focuses primarily on a period near the war’s conclusion and on the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon.
Agamemnon takes Briseis, a woman awarded to Achilles as a prize of war.
Achilles sees it as an intolerable insult.
He refuses to fight.
The greatest Greek warrior withdraws from battle.
The war turns.
Hector drives the Greeks back.
Patroclus, Achilles’s closest companion, can no longer bear to watch the Greek forces suffer.
He puts on Achilles’s armor and enters battle.
The Trojans believe Achilles has returned and recoil in fear.
But Hector kills Patroclus.
When Achilles hears the news, something within him collapses.
His rage is no longer directed at Agamemnon.
It turns toward Hector.
Achilles returns to war.
Everything changes.
Hector knows that he may die.
He has a wife, Andromache, and a young son.
Yet he cannot simply run away.
He is a prince of Troy.
He bears responsibility for his city.
At last Achilles and Hector meet before the walls of Troy.
Hector dies.
But victory does not ennoble Achilles.
Consumed by rage, he ties Hector’s corpse to his chariot and drags it behind him.
It is the moment when triumph threatens to destroy the victor’s humanity.
Then comes one of the greatest scenes in the Iliad.
Priam, Hector’s elderly father, secretly enters the Greek camp at night.
The king of Troy kneels before the man who killed his son.
He begs for Hector’s body.
Achilles looks at the old king and thinks of his own father.
The two men weep.
One has lost a son.
The other has lost a beloved companion.
For a moment they are no longer enemy king and enemy warrior.
They are simply human beings joined by grief.
Achilles returns Hector’s body.
The Iliad moves toward this profoundly human moment.
The war, however, continues.
In later traditions Achilles is killed by an arrow shot by Paris, sometimes said to have been guided by Apollo.
The greatest warrior in Greece is gone.
Yet Troy still stands.
Then the intelligence of Odysseus becomes decisive.
When strength fails, thought must fight.
The Greeks build the horse.
Odysseus and selected warriors conceal themselves within it.
Sinon helps convince the Trojans to bring it into the city.
The Trojan priest Laocoön warns against trusting the Greek gift.
His warning goes unheeded.
The horse enters Troy.
Night falls.
The people celebrate what they believe to be the end of war.
Then, while the city sleeps, the horse opens.
Odysseus and the Greek soldiers emerge.
The gates are opened.
The Greek army pours in.
Troy, after 10 years of resistance, falls.
There is victory.
But almost no one is truly happy.
Troy burns.
Priam is killed.
The royal house collapses.
Women and children are enslaved or taken captive.
Hector is dead.
Achilles is dead.
Paris dies as well.
Those who caused the war, those who tried to prevent it, and those who fought most bravely are swept away by it.
Greece has won.
Yet strangely, one searches in vain for the true victor.
Agamemnon returns home only to be murdered in a cycle of vengeance involving his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Ancient traditions and tragedies differ in detail, but the great commander’s reward is not a glorious homecoming.
It is death.
Menelaus and Helen endure their own difficult return.
Countless soldiers never see home again.
And no one pays a longer price for the journey home than Odysseus.
The strategist who helped bring down Troy goes back to sea.
Ahead of him wait storms, Cyclopes, Circe, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Calypso, temptation and death.
He no longer seeks victory.
He seeks no empire.
He wants no new glory.
He wants one thing.
Home.
That is why the Iliad and the Odyssey form one continuous story while offering profoundly different visions of humanity.
The Iliad is a story of war.
The Odyssey is a story of return.
The Iliad, through Achilles and Hector, asks how a hero dies.
The Odyssey, through Odysseus, asks how a human being survives — and becomes human again.
For Achilles, the central value is glory.
For Hector, responsibility.
For Odysseus, homecoming.
For Penelope, fidelity and endurance.
For Telemachus, growth.
And above them all stand Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Aphrodite and the other gods.
Yet something extraordinary happens as the stories advance.
At first the gods seem to determine everything.
A quarrel among gods helps begin the conflict.
A god raises the wind.
A god blocks the sea.
Gods influence victory and defeat.
But what remains at the end is not the gods.
It is the human being.
Penelope, who waited.
Telemachus, who grew to adulthood without his father.
Odysseus, wounded and aged, returning after losing nearly everyone around him.
Read together as a single story of civilization, Homer’s two epics reveal a remarkable movement:
from the conflicts of the gods to the wars of men;
from the wars of men to the homecoming of one man;
and finally to the question:
What is a human being?
That is why humanity has remembered Odysseus for nearly 3,000 years.
And it is here that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey speaks directly to our time.
Artificial intelligence can remember more than we can.
It can calculate faster.
It can generate human language and images.
And so we must ask once again:
What makes a human being human?
For Odysseus, the answer was never perfection.
He erred.
He boasted.
He succumbed to temptation.
He lost almost everything.
But he never completely forgot the place to which he must return.
Ithaca.
There was something there more important than a throne.
Penelope.
Telemachus.
A community for which he bore responsibility.
Odysseus’s greatest victory, therefore, was not the destruction of Troy.
Troy was the victory of Odysseus the hero.
Ithaca was the victory of Odysseus the man.
And at that moment the story passes from the world of the gods into the world of humanity.
From the Iliad to the Odyssey comes one of civilization’s great humanistic movements:
from force to intelligence;
from conquest to return;
from war to ordinary life;
from glory to responsibility;
and, ultimately, from a world in which gods determine human destiny toward a world in which human beings begin to think, choose and bear the consequences of their choices.
3. Christopher Nolan: A Director Who Has Spent His Career Filming the Human Being
Looking back across Christopher Nolan’s work, one begins to understand why he would eventually arrive at Homer.
Nolan has always filmed the human being.
He simply approached humanity indirectly — through memory, dreams, time, space, war and science.
In Memento, he asks what happens to human identity when memory collapses.
If I lose my memory, am I still myself?
In Inception, he destabilizes the boundary between dream and reality and turns unconscious desire, memory and guilt into cinematic architecture. It is a world that inevitably touches the questions raised by Freudian psychoanalysis.
In Interstellar, Nolan enters the worlds of relativity, black holes, time and astrophysics, yet what he refuses to abandon is the bond between a father and his daughter.
In Dunkirk, he explores survival under the extremity of war.
In Tenet, the direction of time itself becomes a problem of human choice.
And in Oppenheimer, the triumph of human intelligence becomes the power to destroy humanity itself.
What responsibility falls upon science, the scientist and civilization when knowledge becomes a weapon capable of annihilation?
The forms change.
The question beneath them does not.
What is a human being when memory becomes unreliable?
What remains of us when dream and reality collapse into one another?
What does love mean when time and space themselves are distorted?
What should humanity do when it acquires powers it may not be morally mature enough to wield?
Now Nolan travels nearly three millennia backward and asks the same question of a man wandering among gods and monsters:
Can a human being remain human to the end?
In that sense, The Odyssey feels both like a new departure and like the origin point toward which Nolan’s entire career has been moving.
He films time — and finds the human being.
He films space — and finds the human being.
He films war — and finds the human being.
He films science — and finds the human being.
And after filming myth, what remains is again the human being.
However large Nolan’s cinema becomes, its conclusions repeatedly return to something small and intimate.
Interstellar travels across the universe only to return to a father and daughter.
Oppenheimer confronts the atomic bomb only to leave us with the human conscience and the burden of responsibility.
And The Odyssey, after filling the screen with gods, monsters, war and oceans, leaves behind a single mortal man who wants to go home.
Here one cannot help thinking of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
Chihiro’s parents enter a strange world, encounter unattended food, surrender to appetite and are transformed into pigs.
In Homer, Circe turns Odysseus’s companions into swine.
There is no need to claim a direct line of influence between the works without evidence.
The more fascinating truth is that, across thousands of years and across the immense geographical distance separating the Mediterranean from Japan, the same human symbol appears again:
When human beings cease to govern desire and allow desire to govern them, they risk surrendering their humanity.
That is the power of a classic.
A classic is not copied intact.
It is reborn within another culture, another era and another human life.
4. From Mythos to Logos: From the World of the Gods to the World of Man
This, to me, is the most important way to read The Odyssey.
In the mythic world of ancient Greece, the gods intervene directly in human life.
Zeus presides over order.
Poseidon shakes the sea.
Athena aids mortals.
Aphrodite governs love.
Human beings are weaker than gods and smaller than fate.
Yet as we travel through the Odyssey, the human figure becomes increasingly distinct within that divine universe.
Odysseus thinks.
He judges.
He chooses.
He makes mistakes and suffers the consequences.
Then he thinks again and chooses again.
Fate exists.
But within fate, human beings must still act.
One of the great achievements of ancient Greek civilization was not that it abolished the gods.
It was that, even in a world crowded with gods, it began to discover the human right to think and the human responsibility to choose.
At some point, human beings no longer looked at thunder and felt satisfied merely to call it the anger of a god.
They began to ask:
Why does thunder occur?
What is the world made of?
What is justice?
What is the good life?
How should human beings live?
This is the movement from mythos to logos:
from myth toward reason;
from received explanation toward inquiry;
from a world explained for us toward a world we attempt to understand for ourselves.
We should not reduce history by claiming that Greek philosophy emerged directly from one literary work.
But Homer’s epics, in their profound exploration of character, fate, choice and responsibility, formed part of the cultural and intellectual soil from which Greek philosophy grew.
Thales and Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would continue the questioning.
Human beings turned their gaze not only toward the cosmos but toward themselves.
Who am I?
Why do I exist?
How should I live?
Three thousand years later, those questions have not disappeared.
AI has made them more urgent.
Artificial intelligence learns from human language and knowledge.
It writes.
It draws.
It composes music.
It generates video.
It analyzes vast quantities of data.
Physical AI, joined to robotics, is moving rapidly into domains once reserved for human physical labor.
The steam engine expanded human muscle.
The computer expanded calculation.
The internet expanded connectivity.
AI now enters territories human beings long regarded as uniquely their own: language, reasoning, creativity and judgment.
And so the questions change.
What does it mean for a human being to write when AI can write?
What is human creativity when machines make images and music?
Where does responsibility lie when AI analyzes information and assists decisions?
What is wisdom when a machine remembers more and calculates faster than any person?
We can find part of the answer in Odysseus.
AI may calculate the fastest route to Ithaca.
It cannot decide why Ithaca is worth returning to.
AI has no Penelope waiting.
No Telemachus longing for a father.
An algorithm has no homeland.
To calculate a destination and to choose the purpose of a life are entirely different acts.
Human beings possess that “why.”
We love.
We remember.
We accept responsibility.
We seek to make a meaningful whole from the lives we have lived.
*The author is a senior columnist of AJP.
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