Christopher Nolan’s retelling of Homer opened in cinemas last Friday, and within hours the Twitterati had found their storm. It was not about the film’s craft at all. It was about skin.Several of the film’s Greek gods and legendary beauties were cast with actors of colour, and a sizeable corner of the internet decided this was the real story. The objection, stripped of its noise, ran roughly like this: the ancient Greeks imagined their gods and their great beauties as fair, marble-pale, the visual ideal of a particular time and place, and to cast otherwise was to rewrite that inheritance rather than honour it. The counter-argument, just as loud, pointed out that these are gods, not census records — figures out of myth, reimagined by every generation that has ever told the story, and that arguing over the correct complexion for a goddess says considerably more about the arguer than about Homer. Comment sections filled up. Think-pieces followed within the week. The film’s own social media account eventually switched off replies altogether.
None of this is new. It is, in fact, close to three thousand years old.
II. A Complaint as Old as the Poem Itself
Seneca, writing privately to his friend Lucilius nearly two thousand years ago, grew impatient with exactly this kind of talk. In his day, the argument was not about casting but about geography and chronology — where, precisely, had the wandering king been blown off course, which sea, which island, and in what order had it all happened. Other scholars busied themselves asking whether the wife back home had truly stayed faithful through two decades of absence, or whether one poet could really be credited as the first of his kind.
He thought this was all beside the point, and said so rather sharply, in the course of a longer letter dismantling the fashionable liberal education of his day for mistaking the accumulation of facts for the cultivation of wisdom. The value of the poem, he argued, was never going to be found in settling its trivia. It lay in what the poem asked of the person reading it. Not where was he lost, but what does it mean to be lost, and how does one find one’s way back. Not was she faithful, but what is faithfulness, and how does a person actually live it out.
He was, in effect, accusing the scholars of his own time of missing the wood for the trees — of turning a book meant to change a life into a set of quiz questions.
III. The Sirens Were Never Out at Sea
Read this way, the old story stops being a travelogue and becomes something closer to a mirror. The wandering king is not a specific man on a specific sea two thousand years before satellite navigation. He is anyone who has been knocked off the course they had planned for themselves by something they never saw coming — a diagnosis, a betrayal, a failure, a war, a simple change of luck.
Nor are the creatures he meets along the way zoological curiosities to be catalogued and forgotten. The Sirens, whose singing is so beautiful that sailors steer themselves onto the rocks just to hear more of it, are every temptation that promises pleasure and delivers ruin — the shortcut, the addiction, the flattering lie we would rather believe than the harder truth, the distraction dressed up as desire. The one-eyed giant who traps men in his cave is the single, narrow, blinkered way of seeing the world that swallows people whole when they refuse to look at a problem from more than one angle. The witch who turns men into swine is what happens to a person who trades their own judgement for comfort and stops noticing the trade has been made. The twin horrors guarding the narrow strait, one that swallows ships whole and one that wrecks them piecemeal on the rocks, are the impossible choices life keeps setting — no clean way through, only a decision about which loss you are willing to live with. And the storms that scatter the fleet, again and again, just as home comes into view, are the setbacks nobody warns you about — the ones that undo the plans you had made and leave you further from home than when you started, not because you did something wrong, but because that is simply what a long journey costs.
None of these are obstacles between the man and his destination. They are the journey. The years he loses are simply what it costs, for most people, to become someone worth returning as.
And the home he is trying to reach is not a set of coordinates. It is whatever a person is quietly, stubbornly trying to become — the version of themselves they set out for, before the world intervened.
Understood like this, Seneca’s complaint still holds. Memorising the plot, arguing about the route, debating the faithfulness of a wife long dead — none of it teaches anyone anything. The only question worth asking of the story is the same one worth asking of a life: what is it demanding of me, and am I answering?
IV. Ikigai and the Many Roads to One Point
There is a modern idea, borrowed from a small fishing culture on the southern coast of Japan, that gets at something similar. The Japanese call it ikigai — roughly, one’s reason for getting up in the morning — and it holds that a well-lived life sits at the meeting point of four things: what a person loves, what they happen to be good at, what the world will actually pay them for, and what the world genuinely needs from them. Where all four overlap, there is a kind of purpose worth getting out of bed for.
What tends to go unsaid is that this meeting point is a single spot, but the roads leading to it are not. No two people arrive there by the same path, and no single path is the correct one merely because it worked for someone else. One person reaches it through decades of quiet, unglamorous discipline in a single trade. Another arrives by accident, having failed at three other things first. A third finds it only after the very storm that seemed, at the time, to have ruined everything. The destination may be one point on the map. The number of ways of getting there is not finite at all.
This is, in its own way, exactly what the old Greek story was trying to say. The point was never to describe one man’s specific route home. It was to insist that everyone is on some route home, whether they have named it yet or not, and that the monsters and the storms along the way are not proof of failure — they are simply the toll.
V. Or Perhaps There Is No Destination at All
And yet all of this — Seneca, the Sirens, Ithaca as a stand-in for the self one is trying to become — still quietly assumes that arrival is the point, that the twenty years at sea only matter because they end somewhere. There is an older and gentler counter-argument worth holding up against Seneca’s, not to defeat it but to sit beside it. It says the pilgrimage was never in the arriving. It was in the walking.
A journey that changes nobody who takes it is barely worth calling a journey at all, and a destination reached without having been altered on the way to it is not much of a homecoming — it is merely a return address. What actually matters, on this reading, is not the point on the map but what has been quietly rearranged inside the traveller between the first step and the last. Whether the traveller ever technically arrives becomes almost a side issue.
There is a small, true story about Franz Kafka that says this better than any argument can. Walking in a Berlin park one autumn, he came across a little girl crying because she had lost her doll. Kafka told her the doll was not lost at all — she had simply gone off travelling — and promised to bring a letter from her the next day. He kept the promise, and kept it again the day after, and for something like three weeks he returned to that park with letters written in a doll’s voice, describing the places she had seen, the friends she had made, the small dramas of a life being lived somewhere out in the world. By the time the letters stopped, the doll in them had grown up, and had explained, gently, that she would not be coming back the same. The little girl had stopped grieving long before that. She had not received her doll back. She had received three weeks of a story, and somewhere inside that story, without anyone announcing it, she had grown up a little herself.
Nobody in that story ever got their doll back. The doll was never really the point.
VI. What the Gita Had Already Said
It turns out an older text closer to home had already found a way to hold both of these ideas at once, without forcing a choice between them.
Its answer, stripped to its essentials, is that a person’s task is to act — fully, honestly, and without holding back — while surrendering any claim on what the action produces. Do the work asked of you as though your whole worth depended on it, and let go of the result as though it did not concern you at all. Attachment to the outcome, it argues, is precisely what keeps a person from doing the work well; anxiety about the destination is what makes the wandering feel unbearable rather than instructive. Notice what this quietly does to the argument between Seneca and the doll: it does not ask a person to choose between minding the destination and minding the journey. It asks a person to do the walking with their whole attention, and to stop mistaking the arrival for the reason they set out.
Put the ideas side by side and something interesting emerges. The Greek story insists the destination is a version of yourself you have not yet become. The Japanese idea insists there is no single correct road to get there. The story of the doll insists the road was doing its work on the traveller long before any arrival was in sight. And the older Indian text insists that the road itself, walked properly and without grasping at where it leads, was the only part that was ever truly anyone’s to control.
VII. The Question Worth Sitting With
None of this requires anyone to have seen the film, read the poem, or studied the texts. It requires only an honest look at the last stretch of one’s own road — the sirens that nearly worked, the storm that seemed, for a while, like the end of the story rather than a chapter in it, and the shape of the home a person is still quietly trying to get back to, if a destination is even the right way to think about it at all.
The argument over whether the casting was right, or whether the story stayed faithful to the original, will be forgotten within the month. The other question will not go away quite so easily.
What is your Ikigai? Where is your Ithaca. And is it the arriving that will have mattered, or is it already happening, unannounced, somewhere in the middle of your crossing.
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All in Black and White: Helen of Troy in Shades of Grey
KBS Sidhu
·
Jul 22
All in Black and White: Helen of Troy in Shades of Grey