Love mention of Theuth. Neil Postman opens his book "Technopoly" with that tale.
Your essay also reminds me of Adrienne Mayor's "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology"--a great read!
I also agree. There is a promethean aspect to Homer, which means it's also about man's struggle against the gods.
I mentioned to a friend that that the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Job, share a similar vein of thought. Roughly, they all deal with men coming to understand where they stand in the cosmic pecking order.
BTW, my first inclination was to re-read Odyssey, instead I picked up Eric Cline's "1177," which I've been wanting to read for years.
The Trojan Horse was a bit of carpentry and a risky con. Odysseus didn't invent a device that the world wasn't wise or ethical enough to use responsibly. It was just a strategem and it could only work once. Being wary of Greeks bearing gifts was a commonplace in antiquity.
The fact that Nolan frames it as a technology is just one of the many incomprehensible and unfortunate choices he made in adapting the poem for the screen.
Fair point! To which I would say how many technologies gain prominence or become heavily mythologized amount to the equivalent of a bit of carpentry and a risky con?
Entirely true! The biggest difference here is that even though laying the railroad tracks across the USA was a mix of carpentry and con, the trains still ran and the world truly did change even after the tricks were exposed. It didn't change because a train ran once but because holy crap, suddenly there were trains running all over the place and suddenly all the buffalo are dead.
Nolan tried to graft a kind of world-changing tech narrative onto the Trojan Horse even though practically by definition, it only worked once and did not change the world due to something inherent about the object itself, just that it led to the fall of the city.
But there is an interesting vein here as long as you go outside the film! You get a fuller description of the end of Troy in the Aeneid, where Sinon comes from. There are several Trojans who are skeptical of the horse and think the plan to bring it inside the city is lunacy. What happens? The gods, who backed and authorized the Trojan Horse plan from the beginning, suppress the defectors and change Trojan minds, all but forcing them to accept it: "And if the fates of the gods, if our minds had not been perverse, he [Laocoön] would have driven us to hack open the Greek hiding places with iron, and Troy would still be standing, and you, lofty citadel of Priam, would still abide."
The thing about mythic epics is they always revolve around the gods and/or magical interventions. We are still trapped in those stories. Fantastical stories that say that there are other forces shaping our lives. But in today's world that feels far more political than supernatural. So The Odyssey film is nothing new, just more of the same. A "thriller" with lots of battle scenes.
For a bit of levity: Imagine writing not one but two massive epic poems so good they're studied and referenced 2700 years later and still only being the second most culturally relevant Homer.
Love mention of Theuth. Neil Postman opens his book "Technopoly" with that tale.
Your essay also reminds me of Adrienne Mayor's "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology"--a great read!
I also agree. There is a promethean aspect to Homer, which means it's also about man's struggle against the gods.
I mentioned to a friend that that the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Job, share a similar vein of thought. Roughly, they all deal with men coming to understand where they stand in the cosmic pecking order.
BTW, my first inclination was to re-read Odyssey, instead I picked up Eric Cline's "1177," which I've been wanting to read for years.
I’ve never read 1117 either. Good choice and quite timely here. Report back on how you found it?
The Trojan Horse was a bit of carpentry and a risky con. Odysseus didn't invent a device that the world wasn't wise or ethical enough to use responsibly. It was just a strategem and it could only work once. Being wary of Greeks bearing gifts was a commonplace in antiquity.
The fact that Nolan frames it as a technology is just one of the many incomprehensible and unfortunate choices he made in adapting the poem for the screen.
Fair point! To which I would say how many technologies gain prominence or become heavily mythologized amount to the equivalent of a bit of carpentry and a risky con?
Entirely true! The biggest difference here is that even though laying the railroad tracks across the USA was a mix of carpentry and con, the trains still ran and the world truly did change even after the tricks were exposed. It didn't change because a train ran once but because holy crap, suddenly there were trains running all over the place and suddenly all the buffalo are dead.
Nolan tried to graft a kind of world-changing tech narrative onto the Trojan Horse even though practically by definition, it only worked once and did not change the world due to something inherent about the object itself, just that it led to the fall of the city.
But there is an interesting vein here as long as you go outside the film! You get a fuller description of the end of Troy in the Aeneid, where Sinon comes from. There are several Trojans who are skeptical of the horse and think the plan to bring it inside the city is lunacy. What happens? The gods, who backed and authorized the Trojan Horse plan from the beginning, suppress the defectors and change Trojan minds, all but forcing them to accept it: "And if the fates of the gods, if our minds had not been perverse, he [Laocoön] would have driven us to hack open the Greek hiding places with iron, and Troy would still be standing, and you, lofty citadel of Priam, would still abide."
Now *that* part sounds very, very familiar.
Not all Trojan horses are literal horses. the stratagem continues to be used to this day, which is kind of the point.
I'm a few chapters in and can imagine Nolan reading it before making his movie.
The thing about mythic epics is they always revolve around the gods and/or magical interventions. We are still trapped in those stories. Fantastical stories that say that there are other forces shaping our lives. But in today's world that feels far more political than supernatural. So The Odyssey film is nothing new, just more of the same. A "thriller" with lots of battle scenes.
For a bit of levity: Imagine writing not one but two massive epic poems so good they're studied and referenced 2700 years later and still only being the second most culturally relevant Homer.