Costumes and material culture

The standard there is no way to meet

There is no configuration of costume and equipment that is simultaneously faithful to Homer and accurate to the Late Bronze Age, because Homer is not accurate to the Late Bronze Age. The poems contain bronze weapons and iron tools, tower shields and later round bossed shields, a boar’s-tusk helmet four centuries obsolete, chariots used as taxis rather than as fighting platforms, and Phoenician traders from the poet’s own world.

A production must therefore choose which it is being faithful to. The useful critical questions are whether it chose coherently and whether the choice serves the material. Full background at weapons, ships and palaces in the Odyssey.

The objections raised, assessed

The helmets

Marketing imagery showing a Corinthian-type helmet with a red plume drew immediate objection from commentators who pointed out that the Corinthian helmet is an Archaic and Classical form, roughly half a millennium after the poems’ nominal setting, and that the properly Homeric headgear is the boar’s-tusk helmet.

The objection is technically correct and proves less than it appears to. The boar’s-tusk helmet appears in exactly one passage in the poems, in a book widely regarded as among the latest material in the Iliad. The Corinthian helmet is the shape every viewer recognises as Greek, which is a legitimate reason for a film to use it and an illegitimate reason to call it accurate.

The stronger version of the criticism, made by an ancient historian writing at Tales of Times Forgotten, is about uniformity rather than type: the equipment reads as issued rather than as accumulated, where both the archaeological record and the poems show variety. Homeric warriors bring their own gear and it is described individually. That is a real point about texture.

The ships

Widely criticised as Norse rather than Aegean, and the production did use the Draken Harald Hårfagre, a modern reconstruction of a Viking longship, as a working vessel across locations.

This is the material objection we consider best founded. The Odyssey’s ships are open, oared, sailed, drawn up on beaches overnight and dark with pitch, with crews of twenty or fifty; Geometric-period Greek ship depictions correspond reasonably well. A Scandinavian hull form roughly two millennia later is a visible departure from both the poem and the record, and unlike the helmets it is not a departure that buys legibility — a Greek galley is not a harder image for an audience than a longship.

Trousers and spurs

Both reported as appearing and both anachronistic. Greeks regarded trousers as characteristically barbarian dress and the poems do not have them; spurs are a considerably later development.

Minor, and worth recording, because they indicate a costume department working from a general antique register rather than from a period.

Agamemnon’s armour

Reported as a dark helmet and suit corresponding to nothing in the Greek record. This is design rather than reconstruction. It is also the kind of choice that reads to audiences as historical because it appears in a film that is otherwise scrupulous.

The palette

The best of the material criticisms, made by Myke Cole in Slate. Ancient equipment was polished; Homeric bronze in the text gleams, flashes and dazzles. The muted, grimy register the film shares with most modern historical cinema is a contemporary convention, not an observation about antiquity, and it is a departure from the poem’s own descriptions rather than merely from the archaeology.

What the film gets right

Several things, and they are the kind of detail that indicates research rather than atmosphere.

The great hall follows the megaron plan, which corresponds reasonably to the excavated halls at Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns and to what the poem describes. Penelope’s loom is reported as the vertical warp-weighted type, which is correct and is the kind of thing productions routinely get wrong. Ludwig Göransson’s score is reported to incorporate reconstructions of the aulos and the kithara, which are the instruments the poems name. The opening bard is reported to keep time with a staff, which is a specific and defensible reading of how rhapsodic performance worked.

None of these is spectacular and all of them are harder to get right than a helmet.

Assessment

The costume and material culture is a deliberate composite in the way most screen antiquity is a composite, and the poem it adapts is a composite too, which removes most of the force from most of the objections.

What survives: the ships, which depart from both the poem and the record without gaining legibility; the palette, which departs from the poem’s own insistence on brightness; and the uniformity, which flattens a variety both sources show. Against those, a set of quiet correctnesses — the megaron, the loom, the instruments — that indicate a production which did the reading and then made design decisions anyway.

That is an ordinary and defensible position for a film to be in. It is not the scandal it was reported as.