TRUST the ancient Greeks to have a word for it: ‘hubris’. It means usurping attributes or powers that invoke divine retribution. Aristotle detected it in “naive men [who] think that by ill-treating others, they make their own superiority the greater”. Nothing has changed because humans have not evolved since then. They have learned more but understood less.
Human nature behaves still with the same strengths, weaknesses, prejudices and foibles as the characters did in the days of the ancients — whether from the ages of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, or the Mahabharata, or the Tilism-i-Hoshruba. Battlegrounds have changed: the psyche of combatants hasn’t. For example, both Homer’s epics can be transposed seamlessly into a modern setting, just as Shakespeare’s plays can be performed in a contemporary context or modern dress without losing their dramatic force.
Hollywood, having exhausted ancient Rome as a source, has reached beyond, to ancient Greece, producing two popular blockbusters: Troy in 2004, and TheOdyssey in 2026. Both used Homer’s narrative as a crucible of ideas, adapting them to modern taste. Some purists have denigrated these films for deviating from the text. Classicists like Mary Beard and Emily Wilson have expressed outrage at the liberties Hollywood has taken with Homer. Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017, and her version of his Iliad, which took her six years to compile, appeared in 2023.
Understandably, she feels a certain proprietary ownership of Homer. She has expressed severe reservations about the use made by Christopher Nolan of her work as the bedrock of his latest film The Odyssey. Her criticism might have had more sting, had one reviewer in The Atlantic not thought her own translation as “distractingly modern”. Wilson’s book version of The Odyssey is 592 pages long. As an audiobook, it takes 13 and a half hours to narrate. Christopher Nolan’s film is just under three hours long, a welcome abridgement.
Do Homer’s epics have relevance for us today?
In approaching both Wilson’s translation and Nolan’s cinematic interpretation, one must remember that these epics — like orally transmitted dastaans — were never fixed texts. They were added to or subtracted from according to the mood and temper of each audience. They became ‘fixed’ only after they had been committed to writing.
They have retained their appeal over the centuries both for the variety and skill of narration by bards and for the creative imagination of every listener. Each mind played within itself a version of the drama being recited. Films are no less. Nolan’s personal adaptation should be appreciated in that context. He uses ancient costumes to suggest authenticity. He plays primitive drumbeats as background music rather than modern orchestration. The nearest parallel was John Williams’ score in Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws (1975), in which the increasing heartbeat of the hungry shark as it approaches its victim heightens the tension.
Nolan’s inclusion of modern dialogue (for example, ‘dad’ instead of ‘father’) may grate upon the ears of purists. Such colloquialisms resonate with young audiences. They need to be introduced to Homer gently.
Nolan’s film will be memorable, though, for two unforgettable scenic images. One is the stunning tableau of the wooden horse left by the devious Greeks as a gift for the unsuspecting Trojans. The horse lies half-embedded in the wet sand — a monstrous portent of the carnage soon to befall Troy. The second is Nolan’s brilliant visual recreation of Circe converting Odysseus’s sailors into swine. Nolan shows Circe massaging human muscle and converting it into porcine flesh. Those three minutes of cinematic genius are compensation enough. The rest of the film is a bonus.
Do such epics have relevance for us today? Yes. If Aristotle were transported into the streets of any world capital — Washington, D.C., Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Riyadh or Islamabad — he would recognise that hubris has remained an immutable condition, unchanged since his time. It was fatal then; it is equally dangerous now.
Hubris has been described as “the insolent encroachment upon the rights of others”. Since its creation, Pakistan has been a laboratory for every type of political alchemist. It has endured guided democracy, benevolent dictatorship, Islamic socialism, national reconstruction, green revolutions, yellow tractor and cab schemes, and now proposed ‘structural reforms’. None has ever yielded an orderly tread into a stable future.
Pakistan’s present population is over 240 million. By 2040, it will exceed 400m. That is the forecast not by idle sociologists but by the minister of state for health Dr M.A. Bharath. We are breeding like cockroaches and will pay the price. Hubris in leaders often leads to a fumbling myopia. They need a corrective. They should heed the classics.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2026
