The Odyssey & the gift that broke the world
"Lying Odysseus replied, 'I will tell you the truth completely.”
Homer — or whoever assembled the Odyssey out of centuries of oral retelling — did not have to write it that way. He could have simply let Odysseus speak, the way he does everywhere else in the poem, and left the reader to catch the deception unassisted, the way most of the poem's other victims never do. Instead, at the exact moment his hero opens his mouth to promise his own grieving father complete honesty, the poem stops and tells us, flatly, that he is lying. It may be the single most self-aware sentence in the Western canon, and it is a line that hardly anyone who leaves the Odyssey calling Odysseus a hero has ever had to sit with.
There is a moment in Christopher Nolan's adaptation where the film stops being about a man trying to get home and reveals what it was actually about all along. A crime so total that the auteur suggests it unravelled the moral architecture of the Bronze Age itself. The Sack of Troy, critics and reviewers agree, is not framed by Nolan as merely a military victory. It is staged as a breach of ‘xenia’ — Zeus's law of hospitality, the sacred obligation owed to the stranger at the door — so grave that it broke something in the world that no peace treaty could put back together.
The Trojan Horse in this reading, was not a cunning stratagem produced by wily Odysseus’ intellect at its most inspired. It was a gift, and gifts are supposed to be sacred.
That the Greeks turned the one ritual object hospitality could not refuse into the very instrument of its violation is, according to a recent essay in The Guardian by Joseph Earp, the real horror animating Nolan's film. Not monsters nor ‘gods’, but the end of a shared grammar of trust and the civilisational collapse that follows when a gift freely given, the last thing you can rely on, turns out to be a weapon.
It is a good thesis, and I want to take it further than The Guardian piece does. Because framing this as "the end of politeness" undersells what is actually being described, whether by Nolan’s intention or not. Politeness is a social nicety, but Xenia was more than etiquette; it was law, backed by the belief in a god who wandered the earth disguised as a beggar precisely so that no one could ever be certain who they were mistreating.
What collapses in penultimate episode of Trojan War is not manners. It is the fiction that power submits to any law at all, sacred or otherwise, once it decides the reward is worth the sacrilege. That fiction, it turns out, is exactly the one we are watching collapse in real time, in Iran and in Gaza, under men who have discovered, as Odysseus and the Greeks discovered inside the horse's belly, that the surest way to violate a rule is to first be mistaken for someone honouring it.
Of heroes and villains
For all its flaws, Nolan's film, by the account of its defenders as much as its detractors, gets something right that a great deal of Western commentary on both Iran and Gaza gets wrong: it locates the crime with the parties dressed as the aggrieved.
As the classicist Theo Nash argued in Slate, pushing back against Emily Wilson's now-viral LRB review, the architecture of Nolan's plot depends on the audience understanding that it is the Greeks, not the Trojans, who offend Zeus. The horse is described as dressed explicitly as a gift, exploiting the one ritual a besieged city could not refuse without itself violating xenia. Elliot Page's Sinon — the "sinless" Ithacan sent to sell the lie and killed presenting it — is, in Nash's reading, deceived by his own side.
Wilson dismissed this detail as muddled plotting, but Nash identifies it as the entire point. Catastrophe, once set in motion by a lie sincere enough to fool even its own messenger, cannot be recalled by anyone. Least of all the man who authored it.
By both critics' accounts, when Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca and slaughters the suitors, the film resists letting this read as straightforward heroic homecoming. The suitors are grotesque, certainly. But the disorder they represent, the total breakdown of guest and host, sacred and profane, was set loose at Troy. The mess Odysseus cleans up in his own hall is, in the most literal sense, his own mess.
But it is worth being precise about where that disorder actually starts, because Nolan's clean division of the war into violated and violator, as reported, is tidier than the tradition he is adapting. Troy did not simply suffer a crime against xenia; on the classical account, it committed one first. Paris was a guest in Menelaus's own house in Sparta when he left with Helen, his host's wife. He was not a stranger denied hospitality, but a guest who repaid it by robbing the man who fed him, a violation Aeschylus's Agamemnon treats as grave enough to license the entire Greek expedition in the first place.
The horse, then, is not the origin of the catastrophe. It is the catastrophe's escalation, the moment a proportionate grievance is answered with a disproportionate, civilisation-ending one. That correction does not let the Greeks off the hook, rather it sharpens the indictment. The crime Nolan's film locates in the horse was never simply "violating xenia". It was taking a real grievance and using it to license a response so total that it broke the very rule both sides claimed to be avenging.
If you hear the echo of October 7 in this, then you get the point. The Ancient Greeks understood a pattern that recurs whenever vengeance mistakes itself for justice. An initial crime, however real it may or may not be, becomes the warrant for a response that exceeds every limit. Until the distinction between punishment and annihilation collapses.
Odysseus himself, upon ridding his hall of the suitors, does not stop with those who had usurped his house. In the classic tradition, he orders the twelve serving women accused of consorting with the suitors to drag the corpses into the courtyard, scrub the blood from the walls and floors, and wash clean the very slaughter their master has just wrought. Only when they have finished are they led outside and hanged together "like thrushes or doves caught in a snare," one of the poem's most chilling similes. That they are slaves, and that any relationship they had with the suitors could scarcely have been a matter of free choice, counts for nothing. The goatherd Melanthius fares worse still, mutilated alive before he is left to die.
Homer presents these killings as the restoration of justice, yet even in antiquity, the audience could not help but notice how the logic of vengeance outgrew its original grievance. This is the deeper irony of the Odyssey. The man who returns to restore order does so by importing into his own household the methods that won him Troy. What follows the Trojan Horse is a world in which the distinction between combatant and dependent, guilt and proximity, has dissolved.
All of this inverts the story we have told ourselves about Odysseus for three thousand years. Western culture has never quite been able to decide whether the man is a hero or a con artist, and it has resolved the ambiguity, again and again, in his favour, calling the same act "cunning" when he does it and "treachery" when anyone does it to him. The Trojan horse is taught in classrooms as the triumph of intellect over brute force, Odysseus treated as the best of strategists, the man who wins wars with his head rather than his sword. Rarely is it taught as what it unavoidably is: the single greatest act of bad faith in the Western canon.
An uncomplicated man, or an unreliable one?
Wilson's frustration with Nolan's film centres on Odysseus himself, whom she found flattened, reduced to a man defined by guilt rathe/r than by the cunning her own translation's opening line ("Tell me about a complicated man") tried to foreground.
She is not wrong that the film simplifies. But there is a deeper complication that neither the film nor Wilson's review quite reckons with, and it is one classicists have circled for decades. Odysseus is not just a complicated man. He is an unreliable narrator, in the strict, structural sense.
A significant portion of his most famous adventures — the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the descent to the underworld — are not narrated by Homer through his own voice. They are narrated by Odysseus himself, to the Phaeacians, a captive audience whose hospitality he is actively soliciting and whose ships he needs to get home. Every act of heroism in that account is self-reported by the one man with every incentive to make himself look resourceful rather than reckless, principled rather than a pirate. We do not have an eyewitness account of Odysseus blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus. We have Odysseus's own version of it, delivered to strangers whose gifts depend on being impressed.
Should he be trusted? The question is rarely asked by the lay audience, because storytelling convention has already answered it for them: of course he should, he's the hero. But a man who lies for a living, who invents a new backstory in nearly every port he visits, who tricks a Cyclops with a pun on his own name — Odysseus famously answers ‘Nobody’ when Polyphemus demands the man who blinded him identify himself — and then cannot resist shouting the real one across the water out of vanity, getting his men nearly killed for the pleasure of being recognised; this is not a trickster compelled by circumstance. Deception is his method, his brand, his entire theory of survival.
What the epic asks us to admire as cleverness is, from the vantage point of everyone on the other end of it, indistinguishable from what got Troy burned. The tradition simply changes the name of the crime depending on whose side is telling it, and Nolan's insistence on the guilt gnawing at Damon's Odysseus is, whatever Wilson thinks of the script's dialogue, at least honest about where that guilt should be aimed.
This is not a fringe reading, either. Classicists have long noted that the poem's own internal audience treats Odysseus's stories with more credulity than his behaviour has earned. The Phaeacians reward him handsomely for an account no one present can verify. Because hospitality to the shipwrecked stranger was owed regardless of whether his tales checked out. Treating every unverifiable guest as a potential liar was itself the failure the poem punishes elsewhere, in the Cyclops's cave.
Odysseus survives, in part, because the ethical system he keeps exploiting is structurally unable to interrogate him. He is less a hero who outwits monsters than a man who found the one blind spot in the rigorous moral code of the world he inhabits, and built a career out of living inside it.
Beware the Greeks bearing gifts
It is not difficult to see why an essay written for The Guardian in the summer of 2026, would reach for this material to explore the collapse of shared norms. We are, after all, watching something structurally similar play out in real time across Western democracies.
But there is more at stake than the disappearance of politeness or social niceties. As Trump and his cohort dismantle the rules-based order, from trade to conflict, the world of the Bronze Age collapse suddenly looks less like ancient history and more like a preview of what’s to come.
When the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran earlier this year, they began by violating an unspoken rule that had held, however imperfectly, for decades: you do not try to kill a country's head of state. Israel's assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, alongside members of his immediate family, marked more than a tactical escalation. It announced that a category of target long treated as exceptional was now, under sufficiently compelling circumstances, legitimate.
Khamenai’s killing was not unlike the fate of Troy’s king Priam, who was cut down at his own household altar as the city burned around him. It is Xenia's final violation in the epic tradition, killing a man not on the field of battle but inside the one space meant to be inviolable, with a family he could not protect.
Gaza offers an even darker mirror. If Troy's tragedy is that a besieging army dressed conquest as a gift, Gaza's is that a genocide has been dressed by Israel as a “right to defend itself”. Even as it turns humanitarian corridors into killing fields, aid distribution sites into ambush points, ceasefires floated as concessions and then abandoned the moment they cease to be useful.
Netanyahu's government has spent this war narrating itself, endlessly, as the wronged party protecting its hearth against a monstrous enemy. Much as Odysseus narrates himself to the Phaeacians, the sympathetic survivor rather than the man who lit the fire. And much like his audience, the world has largely taken the narrator's word for what happened inside spaces it was never allowed to independently verify.
Gaza is not the underworld, and its dead are not a poet's invention. But the epistemic structure is the same one Homer built into his poem three millennia ago. Whoever controls the telling, controls whether an act reads as vengeance or as justice.
October 7 is not where this particular violation of xenia begins. It is only the most recent chapter of one. In the years after 1945, the Palestinian people, then living under the British Mandate, took in Jewish survivors of a horror Europe had just finished inflicting upon them, enacting precisely the obligation the Phaeacians extend to a shipwrecked Odysseus who has nothing left but his story. The Nakba is the moment that obligation was answered with dispossession. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from homes that had, within living memory, made room for the very people who would now empty them. It is the structure of the Trojan Horse almost exactly, only reversed and stretched across generations. The guest received under an obligation of shelter becomes, once inside, the one who tears down the household that sheltered him.
The first rules-based order
It is worth pausing on where xenia actually comes from. The stock explanation, that hosts feared their guest might be a god in disguise, is true, but not the whole story. Treating it as such makes xenia sound like superstition rather than the sophisticated institution it actually was.
Comparative work on Indo-European cultures suggests the custom is older and more practical than the myth of Zeus lets on. Versions of the same guest-code recur across cultures with a shared linguistic ancestry, from Greece to South Asia, which points less to a single religious fear than to a solution to a shared problem.
Travel between settled places in the ancient world was genuinely dangerous, and the spaces between them were often wide, resource-poor, and lawless in the sense that no single authority's writ ran there. A traveller crossing that gap had almost nothing to bargain with except the expectation that whoever took him in would, in turn, be taken in himself by someone one day.
Xenia, in this light, is less a sacred belief than an early form of mutual insurance. It is a reciprocal obligation invented by people who had no shared sovereignty to enforce a contract, and so had to make the contract sacred instead, because the sacred was the only enforcement mechanism available.
That is precisely the gap international law was invented to fill three thousand years later, and precisely why the Trojan horse translates so cleanly into the present. Diplomatic immunity, the laws of war, the protections nominally owed to civilians and aid workers and the wounded, these too are reciprocal institutions with no sovereign standing over the states that observe them. They are held in place only by the shared expectation that violating them will invite the same violation back on your own soldiers, your own diplomats, your own hospitals.
What actually destabilises Nolan's Bronze Age, then, is not the erosion of courtesy between equals. It is the discovery that the party enforcing the sacred law is also the party most willing to violate it once it decides the reward outweighs the risk of retaliation-in-kind. The calculation only works against an adversary too weak to retaliate at all.
When the ‘gods’ stop watching
Xenia, like international law, was never a moral achievement so much as a wager that the powerful would find it cheaper to keep the rule than to break it. The moment Troy fell to a gift, that wager collapsed for everyone, ‘gods’ included.
We are living inside that same collapse now, narrated, as ever, chiefly by the men doing the sacking. What has actually changed since the Bronze Age is not the frequency of the lie. It is the machinery available to sell it, and the speed at which the sale can outrun any refutation.
The question the epic never quite lets us ask about Odysseus is the one we should be asking of the men currently rewriting Troy in real time. Nolan's film, for all that it may have gotten wrong about dialogue and pacing, at least refuses to let Odysseus off the hook for the horse. Our own moment has placed no such pressure on the men building horses of their own, and calling them gifts, waiting to see who is credulous enough, still, to open the gate.
Zeeshan Ahmad is a freelance journalist and media scholar who writes about politics, security, technology and media narratives
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author