It’s fine to fight about the ‘Odyssey.’ Ancient people did too.

Donna Zuckerberg is a classicist, author of “Not All Dead White Men,” and writer of the newsletter Myth Takes.

As a scholar of ancient Greek literature, I’ve heard a lot of my colleagues worry that our discipline is becoming irrelevant. I wonder if it’s a relief to them to see just how much people care about Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”—how angry the internet is capable of getting about every single detail, from the Batman-esque helmets, to Tom Holland’s Telemachus using the word “dad,” to the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and her twin sister Clytemnestra. It turns out a lot of people have a lot of opinions about what fidelity to an ancient text should mean.

There’s a long tradition here. Very long, in fact. Arguing about Homer is almost as old as the Homeric texts themselves.

The ancient poet Sappho participated in some early Odyssean discourse about 2600 years ago. In a poem about how beauty is a matter of taste, she wrote that while there are those who would argue that a regiment of cavalry, or infantry or an armada is the most beautiful thing, she knows it’s whatever you love the most. Her proof? Helen, who left her wealthy husband Menelaus for the much more attractive Paris, thereby launching the Trojan War and sending Odysseus on his course. The “Iliad” spends hundreds of lines cataloging ships, celebrating the large battle formations of war, and Sappho sweeps it aside to elevate the woman who is so often reduced to a ship-launching face.

The ancient philosopher Plato also dabbled in hot takes on Homeric works, a culture that was alive and well in Socrates’s Athens, in “Ion.” In the dialogue, a professional performer of the Homeric epics—known as a rhapsode—claims that nobody has, or ever has had, as many or as good ideas about Homer as him. (Give this man a podcast!) Socrates isn’t convinced, and asks a series of careful questions that undermine the entire premise of the rhapsode’s argument.

In the Hellenistic period, scholars built entire careers arguing about fine points of Homeric word choice and bracketing off lines of text they believed were later additions.

Hundreds of years later, in the second century BCE, the rhetorician Lucian sent up this scholarly tradition in his “True History,” one of the earliest works of science fiction. After a trip to the moon where the narrator witnesses a war between two alien armies, he travels to the afterlife to interview Homer. He asks him: Who of all the people screaming opinions about his work actually gets it right?

Lucian’s Homer responds by essentially saying: Almost all of them.

He wrote every single line, he tells Lucian, even the ones Hellenistic scholars suspected were inauthentic.

Lucian was making fun of the academics, probably. We think. But the Homeric discourse machine never stopped churning.

At the end of the 19th century, the novelist Samuel Butler wrote “The Authoress of the Odyssey,” arguing that the “Odyssey” was actually written by an unmarried young lady who lived in Sicily in roughly the 11th century BCE. Butler was a professional satirist so a lot of people assumed “Authoress” was another work of satire. But he remained firm that no, he was dead serious: Only a woman would have ascribed such interiority to the epic’s female characters and made a bunch of dumb errors about seafaring and livestock. Speaking on behalf of feminist readers of the “Odyssey”: Thanks, I guess?

Today, scholars argue over all kinds of interpretations of the text. But so do civilians. Some of the biggest fights have revolved around translation. It was less than 10 years ago that Emily Wilson’s rendering of the “Odyssey” made waves because she chose the word “complicated” to describe the epic’s titular character.

Not even the odious fighting about race—literally, about the skin color of mythological characters—is new. (See: the decades of bickering about historian Martin Bernal’s controversial, theoretical 1987 work “Black Athena.”)

Elon Musk has been posting disparagingly on X about Nolan’s decision to cast a Black woman as Helen of Troy. And yet, Odysseus is described often throughout the epics as short and dark. For some reason, almost nobody is mentioning that Nolan could have (or maybe should have) cast a Black actor instead of Matt Damon.

Anytime I read someone online being uptight and prescriptive about the “Odyssey,” I think, “This person has no idea just how bizarre the entire genre of ancient epic really was.” There’s no doubt that the ancient world was more diverse, more colorful and just weirder than we could possibly imagine. That’s actually my favorite part about studying this material. One moment it seems completely fresh, modern, and relevant as it touches on eternal themes: What does it mean to come home? What makes a good marriage? How does growing up without a father shape a young man’s life? The next moment, it veers into the strange: Odysseus naked on a beach beseeching a virginal princess for clothes or Helen casually drugging her houseguests to improve the vibe at a party.

There’s a small library of lost epic texts that people in antiquity also thought of as being Homeric. These stories are stranger still.

The “Telegony,” for example, revolves around Telegonus, a son of Odysseus and the sorceress Circe. When Telegonus comes of age, Circe gives him a spear with a poisonous stingray barb as a tip and tells him to go reunite with his father. Unfortunately, when he does, there’s a slight case of mistaken identity; Telegonus ends up killing Odysseus. To make up for it, he marries his (stepmother) Penelope. Then, Penelope and Odysseus’s son Telemachus marries Circe.

Imagine the kind of fighting we could be doing about that.