Despite having been composed about two and a half millennia before the invention of cinema, Homer’s Odyssey has offered tempting material to generation after generation of filmmakers. Part of the appeal is, of course, the work’s age, which obviates the need for potentially frustrating rights negotiations. But what really captures a director’s imagination about retelling the story of Odysseus’ long journey back to Ithaca must have a great deal to do with the host of monsters he encounters along the way. The giant cannibal Laestrygonians; the sirens, whose call forces Odysseus to lash himself to the mast of his ship; Scylla and Charybdis, guardians of the Strait of Messina; and perhaps most memorably of all, the towering cyclops Polyphemus.
Many or most of these fearsome characters are familiar to us even if we’ve never read the Odyssey, or indeed seen any of its adaptations. In everyday speech, we invoke the sirens’ call when describing an irresistible temptation, or Scylla and Charybdis when describing any set of equal and opposite pitfalls. And it would be a rare man, woman, or even sufficiently educated child who can’t identify the defining feature of a cyclops.
But long before all of these could enter the modern lexicon, they had to be invented in antiquity. In the new Hochelaga video above, host Tommie Trelawny investigates their origins, going over theories that suggest that some or all of these monsters had already made fairly long cultural journeys of their own before Homer put them in Odysseus’ path.
The myth of the cyclops could have been inspired by elephant skulls with large central nasal cavities, or perhaps by a brutish inversion of eyes as a signal of intelligence. It could have been a series of colossal Bronze Age stone statues on the island of Sardinia that constituted the basis for the Laestrygonians. As for the sirens, which we imagine as beautiful women, the pre-Christian ancient Greeks envisioned them as strange winged creatures making promises of knowledge. Scylla and Charybdis, representations of the destructive forces of nature, were a way of reifying the Strait of Messina’s inherent perils. Whatever their origins, all these challengers to Odysseus’ homecoming still fire up the imaginations of filmmakers, especially filmmakers inclined to high-tech spectacle: Christopher Nolan, for instance, the theatrical release of whose Odyssey begins tomorrow. We all know that the hero gets home in the end, but we’ll buy tickets for the monsters.
Related content:
Watch the First Spectacular Film Adaptation of the Odyssey (1911)
An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey
Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek
Memento Mori: How Smiling Skeletons Have Reminded Us to Live Fully Since Ancient Times
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
