The Colour of Helen, the Chains of Ithaca
Race, misogyny and the long editing of Homer
A Black Helen can stop a conversation. Twelve hanged slave women often don’t start one. A missing epic rarely enters it at all.
The casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has revived a familiar argument. Helen was Greek, the objection goes. Casting a Black actor imposes contemporary diversity upon the past. One critic put the principle plainly: you wouldn’t cast Winston Churchill as Black.
That sounds decisive. It isn’t.
We routinely accept actors who don’t share the exact height, build, age, voice or eye colour of the people they portray. Drama isn’t forensic reconstruction. Yet Churchill’s whiteness wasn’t as incidental as his eye colour. It formed part of the imperial, social and political world through which he exercised power.
A Black Churchill in experimental theatre might expose something interesting about British identity and the manufacture of national heroes. In a naturalistic biography, it would change the historical meaning of the character.
So bodies matter, but not always in the same way.
The useful question isn’t whether an actor perfectly resembles the person portrayed. It is whether the difference alters the forces acting upon that person.
Helen is not Churchill.
Helen before the Greeks
Helen of Troy isn’t a documented historical woman whose complexion can be recovered. She belongs to myth. In some versions she is the daughter of Zeus. Her beauty becomes the cause, excuse or symbol of a war involving gods, prophecies and heroes who converse with the dead.
There may be memories of real Bronze Age conflicts beneath the Trojan stories. But the Iliad and Odyssey developed through a long oral tradition and were shaped centuries after the period in which the war supposedly occurred. They combine inherited memory, poetic invention and the assumptions of later communities. Modern scholarship increasingly understands them as products of collective performance rather than books composed by one identifiable author at a desk. (cambridge.org)
Even calling Helen simply “Greek” hides a difficulty.
The coalition attacking Troy is usually called the Achaeans, Danaans or Argives. Homer rarely uses “Hellenes” and not as a general name for the entire force. Thucydides later noticed this, observing that Homer did not collectively call the warriors Hellenes or oppose them to a unified category of barbarians. (scaife.perseus.org)
The poems contain a sense of shared identity, but not Greekness in the modern national sense.
Nor are the Trojans presented as a racial opposite. They worship the same gods, speak to their enemies without interpreters and inhabit a recognisably similar social order. Hector is no less human than Achilles. Priam’s grief gives the Iliad one of its greatest moments of moral recognition.
Even Agamemnon’s name carries a warning against taking the surviving text too literally. It appears to contain the name of Memnon, the Aithiopian king whose own epic has almost entirely disappeared: Memnon, the steadfast one, and Agamemnon, the very steadfast. That does not make Agamemnon Aithiopian. It tells us that both figures have reached us through Greek language, whatever older journeys their stories may have taken. Memnon’s foreignness has already been translated before we meet him. The Greek name is evidence of transmission, not a passport.
The conflict is between coalitions, households and heroes. It isn’t a war between white Europe and a racially alien East.
The world around them is wider still. The gods visit the “blameless Ethiopians”. Odysseus’s world contains Egyptians, Phoenicians, Sidonians and Libyans moving around the Mediterranean through trade, war, piracy and migration. (scaife-reader.perseus.tufts.edu)
This doesn’t prove that Helen was Black. It establishes something more useful. The ancient Mediterranean cannot be reduced to the modern fantasy of an entirely white Europe gazing towards a separate Africa.
Homer’s sea isn’t a wall around civilisation. It is the road running through it.
The books that disappeared
We speak of the Trojan story as though Homer supplied its complete and authoritative form. He did not.
The Iliad covers only a short episode near the end of the war. It doesn’t include the judgement of Paris, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Trojan Horse, the fall of the city or the death of Achilles. The Odyssey supplies memories and fragments, but most of the story belonged to a much larger body of poetry.
The Cypria told of the origins and opening years of the war. The Aethiopis included the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the Ethiopian king Memnon and the death of Achilles. The Little Iliad and Sack of Ilium continued through the fall of Troy. The Returns followed the Greek leaders home. The Telegony carried the story beyond the Odyssey to the death of Odysseus.
These works formed what became known as the Epic Cycle. Almost all have disappeared. What remains comes largely through fragments, references and summaries written by later authors. (cambridge.org)
The surviving Homeric epics are not the natural and complete form of the myth. They are the survivors.
Other archaic poetry complicates the picture further. Hesiod offers different accounts of gods, labour, justice and human decline. The Homeric Hymns present gods through devotional stories. Archilochus sounds nothing like heroic epic. Sappho turns poetry towards desire, memory and relationships between women.
These weren’t footnotes to Homer. They belonged to a crowded culture of song and competing stories.
Yet they didn’t survive equally.
Sappho was among antiquity’s most admired poets and her work once circulated in collected editions. Most of it now reaches us through quotations and damaged papyri, sometimes preserved because scraps were reused, discarded in Egyptian rubbish or protected by dry sand. (cambridge.org)
It would be absurd to conclude that archaic Greek culture contained only a fragmentary female voice.
The fragment is ours, not hers.
What survives is not a neutral sample of everything once sung, written or believed. It is what happened to be copied, quoted, taught, stored, recovered and valued.
The canon is literature, archaeology, curriculum and luck.
Misogyny in the architecture
The wider tradition also makes it harder to treat Homeric misogyny as a few unfortunate passages.
Hesiod’s Pandora makes the first woman a beautiful trap sent by Zeus in retaliation against men. Semonides catalogues types of women by comparing them with animals and materials, usually to their disadvantage. Such poetry helped reinforce solidarity among men by ridiculing and excluding women. (cambridge.org)
This doesn’t mean every ancient Greek man held the same view or that every poem can be reduced to hatred of women. Literature is more complicated than a census of opinions.
But misogyny isn’t present only when someone declares women inferior. It can be built into the architecture of a story.
Men act. Women are exchanged, guarded, married, abducted or recovered.
Helen is blamed for a war fought by men who chose to sail, kill, loot and enslave. Briseis and Chryseis become property through which Achilles and Agamemnon measure status. Cassandra can see the future but cannot make men listen. Andromache understands what the war will do to her family but has no power to stop it.
The Odyssey appears to offer women more room. Penelope is intelligent and strategic. Athena directs much of the action. Circe and Calypso command their own domains.
Yet their possibilities remain tightly framed.
Penelope’s virtue lies largely in waiting for her husband and preserving his household. Clytemnestra becomes her terrible opposite, the unfaithful wife who murders the returning king. The poem contrasts the woman who safeguards male ownership with the woman who threatens it.
Circe and Calypso possess autonomy, but that autonomy is dangerous. Each delays the wandering man’s return to wife, son and household. Their power is an obstacle in a male journey.
Athena is immensely powerful, but safely divine. She can move through male spaces because she can assume male forms and escape the vulnerability imposed upon mortal women.
Even Penelope’s voice has limits. Early in the Odyssey, Telemachus tells her to return to her room and leave public speech to men. Mary Beard has called it Western literature’s first recorded example of a man telling a woman to be silent. (newyorker.com)
The poem can admire female intelligence while restoring male authority.
That may be how patriarchy works most effectively. It doesn’t require women to be stupid. It requires their intelligence to operate within boundaries established by men.
The people owned by the hero
The same structure governs slavery.
Odysseus isn’t only a sailor, strategist, husband and king. He is the master of a household containing enslaved people.
Eumaeus, routinely softened into the loyal swineherd or servant, was kidnapped as a child and sold. His affection for Odysseus’s family doesn’t make him free. It shows how enslavement can be absorbed into the language of loyalty, family and good service.
War produces more human property.
Women from defeated communities are distributed among victorious warriors. Briseis belongs to Achilles until Agamemnon takes her. Chryseis belongs to Agamemnon until her father’s appeal and Apollo’s plague force her return.
The dispute opening the Iliad isn’t about whether a woman can be owned. It is about which man has the right to own her.
The Odyssey reaches its most disturbing expression of this logic after Odysseus returns home.
Once he and Telemachus have killed Penelope’s suitors, twelve enslaved women are made to remove the bodies and wash the blood from the hall. Telemachus then hangs them.
Older translations often call them maids, serving girls, sluts or whores. Those words quietly rewrite the scene.
A maid sounds employed. A disloyal servant sounds responsible. A sexually promiscuous woman can be presented as deserving punishment.
An enslaved woman is harder to blame so comfortably.
These women did not control their labour, movement or sexual availability. Whatever relationships occurred between them and the suitors took place inside an occupied household and among people with little power to refuse powerful men.
Emily Wilson has shown that previous English translations frequently added misogynistic abuse with no direct equivalent in the Greek. The women became “sluts”, “whores” or “disobedient maids”, turning their execution into something readers could approve. Wilson’s use of “slaves” changes the scene not by modernising it, but by removing the euphemism. (newyorker.com)
Suddenly the homecoming looks different.
Odysseus restores order, but it is his order. His wife, son, house, weapons, land, animals and enslaved people return to their proper places. The poem presents this as justice because justice is being viewed from the master’s chair.
That is a greater challenge to our picture of the hero than Helen’s skin.
The hands between us and Homer
We often talk about an ancient text as though it travelled intact from its author’s mind into a modern paperback.
It did nothing of the sort.
Before the Odyssey became a written text, its stories were performed, remembered and recomposed. Oral poetry isn’t a recording played back perfectly from memory. Performers work within inherited patterns and episodes. Variation is part of the tradition, not necessarily a failure to reproduce an original. (www-current.chs.harvard.edu)
Writing brought preservation, but also selection.
Editors at Alexandria compared manuscripts, selected readings and marked lines they considered doubtful. Some verses known to ancient scholars don’t appear in the medieval copies from which modern editions descend. (www-current.chs.harvard.edu)
Copying then continued for centuries.
Every manuscript required materials, labour and an institution willing to preserve it. Copying one text meant not copying another. Works central to education were repeatedly reproduced. Others became scarce, fragmentary and finally lost.
No conspiracy is required. Survival can be shaped by cost, fashion, educational use, religion, changing language and accident.
But the absence of a conspiracy doesn’t make the outcome neutral.
Homer survived more completely partly because generations decided he was indispensable. Much of the Epic Cycle did not. Sappho’s substantial body of work became a constellation of fragments.
Then came translation.
Every translator decides whether a person is a slave, servant, maid or attendant. They choose whether a woman is cunning or deceitful, faithful or passive, sexually autonomous or promiscuous. They use modern words carrying centuries of moral judgement.
Transcription preserves. Editing arranges. Translation interprets.
Each is a lens.
We haven’t received Homer directly from Homer, whoever Homer was. We have received Homer through performers, festivals, Alexandrian editors, papyrus fragments, medieval manuscripts, printers, scholars and translators.
Many hands carried the text. Those hands also shaped what arrived.
Which changes disturb us?
Historical drama always modernises the past.
Ancient characters speak contemporary English. They express themselves through modern acting conventions. Their relationships are adjusted to make them intelligible to present-day audiences. Their armour, buildings and rituals are selected from incomplete and contradictory evidence.
We usually accept these compromises. Then a Black actor appears and accuracy suddenly becomes sacred.
Let’s be real: the argument isn’t only about historical method. It is also about cultural ownership.
Who owns Homer? Who gets to embody beauty, royalty and heroism? Who is permitted to stand inside the imagined opening chapters of Western civilisation?
For centuries, European culture treated ancient Greece as its ancestral portrait. Greece became more than a complex collection of Mediterranean societies. It became an idea of Europe before Europe, recruited to explain who had supposedly invented reason, beauty, democracy and civilisation.
The surviving marble helped. Stripped of much of its original paint, classical sculpture appeared to offer a gleaming white antiquity ready for modern Europe to claim. The whiteness of the damaged object was mistaken for the intention of its maker. (newyorker.com)
A Black Helen disturbs that family photograph.
That doesn’t make every casting decision beyond criticism. A production can be clumsy, tokenistic or historically incoherent. Representation isn’t an all-purpose solvent that dissolves every question of evidence and context.
The Churchill objection retains some force because certain identities are inseparable from the systems surrounding them. A white actor playing Nelson Mandela in a naturalistic biography would erase the racial classification through which apartheid acted upon him. The change would remove the mechanism of the story.
But Helen is a mythological figure whose body has been repeatedly reinvented. Her Blackness changes a visual tradition. It does not erase a documented racial experience through which her life was lived.
Casting freedom narrows when embodied identity is central to the history portrayed. It widens when we enter myth, allegory, theatrical convention or deliberate reinterpretation.
Genre matters. Evidence matters. Power matters.
A single prohibition against casting across colour cannot do all that thinking for us.
Sharing the inheritance
Living in England, I want the history and mythology surrounding us to be available to everyone who lives here.
A Black British child shouldn’t be told, subtly or otherwise, that Homer, Shakespeare, Arthur, medieval England and the country’s accumulated mythology belong to somebody else. These stories have become part of a shared cultural inheritance. No ethnic group should hold the permanent casting rights.
There is real value in allowing actors from different backgrounds to play queens, warriors, gods and philosophers without each appearance requiring an explanation.
Yet inclusive casting can become suspiciously easy.
Put diverse actors inside the palace and a production can congratulate itself without asking who built the palace, who cleans it or who can be killed when its owner returns.
Everyone may now compete to play the queen while the enslaved women remain nameless at the edge of the frame.
That is representation among the elite. It isn’t yet inclusive history.
Nor is it enough to insert different faces into the version of antiquity that happened to survive. We should also ask which works disappeared, which voices became fragments and which judgements were added by later hands.
A genuinely enlarged history must notice the captive, the foreigner, the child sold across the sea, the woman whose service was compulsory and the poet whose words survive on torn papyrus.
Otherwise we produce a multicultural aristocracy presiding over the same invisible underclass.
Historical accuracy is an account of power
I don’t think skin colour is irrelevant. Nor do I think every drama must reproduce a presumed racial appearance regardless of genre, evidence or purpose.
Skin colour is neither a sacred requirement for visual matching nor a trivial cosmetic detail.
Its significance depends on what a production is claiming, what history can establish and whether race formed part of the power acting upon that person.
This is why Helen, Cleopatra, a fictional Norman knight and Winston Churchill cannot be treated as versions of the same casting problem. One is mythological. One is a documented ancient ruler from a particular dynasty. One might be an invented character placed in a historical setting. One is a photographed modern statesman whose identity was embedded in Britain’s class and imperial order.
History requires judgement, not a colour chart.
Nolan’s casting is useful because it prompts the question. It need not provide the answer.
Why does a Black queen appear to require justification while a slaveholding hero arrives as the neutral, historically authentic default?
Who gets to be beautiful? Who gets to be heroic? Who receives a name, a voice and a homecoming? Who is kidnapped, inherited or ordered to wash blood from the floor?
And who decided which version of that story would reach us?
Historical accuracy isn’t simply a matter of making the past look right. It means examining power within the story and power over the story.
The deepest distortion in a modern Odyssey would not necessarily be a Black Helen. It would be an ancient world scrubbed clean of slavery and misogyny, presented as securely and uniformly Greek, then handed to us as though no singer, editor, scribe or translator had touched it along the way.
We don’t possess the past itself.
We possess what survived the journey.
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