Cy Twombly, Fifty Days at Iliam: The Fire that Consumes All Before It, 1978 (fifth of ten parts), oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas. The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. © Cy Twombly Foundation.
“Tell me about a complicated man.” So begins Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, borrowing the opening line from Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation of Homer’s epic. Nolan is only the latest in a long line of Homer adapters to make the ancient epics their own. The new film, with its star-studded cast, eye-popping visual spectacle — you’ve never seen men turn into pigs quite like they do here — and sheer IMAX-optimized scale, makes an implicit claim to definitiveness. Try to top this! the blockbuster taunts. Perhaps it’s the sense that Nolan is trying to have the last word that has made his film such a hot topic, with people the world over, of virtually every ideological stripe, jostling over its meaning: it’s too woke. It’s anti-feminist. It’s an allegory for the decline of the West. It has too many battles and not enough sex. It’s a paean to Christian values. It’s the usual Chris Nolan stuff — the time-chopped story of a brilliant man displaced. It’s a statement on the idiocy, venality, and horror of war. The helmets are wrong.
Well, the helmets are wrong. Whether or not you think Benny Safdie, as Agamemnon, looks like Batman in his masklike, matte-black helmet, it’s a plain fact that this is not an accurate representation of Mycenaean battle attire of the Late Bronze Age. “Actual Bronze Age costume was much more interesting,” essayist Sam Kriss points out. “Armour was made from beaten bronze, polished and oiled until it was mirror-bright; an army on the move would have looked like a stream of liquid sunlight.” Kriss also notes that Nolan’s poetic license is in fine tradition. By the time Homer set down the tale of Odysseus’s decade-long journey upon the wine-dark sea, the era it depicts was already half a millennium in the past, and Homer's own poem is full of anachronisms, including references to Phoenician traders and iron tools that belonged to his own time. As Kriss writes, “he gives his heroes circular shields, which they wouldn’t have worn, and has them fight in phalanxes, which they wouldn’t have formed.” In other words, Homer made the old oral tale modern. The Odyssey as we know it was born an adaptation.
Ever since, writers and artists have been putting their own spin on the story of the Trojan War — its origins, its dramatis personae, its aftermath. Virgil, writing to please the Roman emperor, was the first to leave a distinctive stamp on the material, inverting the narrative sequence of The Iliad and The Odyssey for his jingoistic Aeneid. Centuries later, James Joyce transformed Odysseus, King of Ithaca — the “man of twists and turns” — into peripatetic Dubliner Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1922). More recently, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) gives voice to Penelope, Odysseus’s famously loyal and patient wife, while Pat Barker’s acclaimed The Silence of the Girls (2018) retells part of The Iliad through the eyes of the captive queen Briseis.
Artists, too, have continually reimagined Homer. From Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to J.M.W. Turner and Cy Twombly, they have returned to antiquity and myth not simply to illustrate the epics but to reshape them for their own time.
When Tiepolo frescoed the Room of Homer at Villa Valmarana ai Nani near Vicenza in 1757 with a story cycle from The Iliad, he was working in the illustrative tradition of Titian and Rubens. Like Titian’s mythological poesie, the frescoes are a form of painted poetry, analogous to Homer’s verse. Later painters pulled on Homeric threads, re-weaving his iconic characters into patterns shaped by their own artistic concerns. In Turner’s pivotal Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829), proto-Impressionist brushstrokes capture the moment Odysseus sets sail after blinding the Cyclops, dissolving the triumph into a fugue of golden water and cloud-smeared sky. Turner’s Polyphemus is a ghost, a shadow, but he receives his own strange and tender portrait in French Symbolist Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops (1914).
Giorgio de Chirico’s Iliad and Odyssey paintings, which bookend his long career, strip Homeric myth to its essentials in search of what he called its “Metaphysical” meaning. His early Enigma of the Oracle (1910), for example, re-stages Arnold Böcklin’s Odysseus and Calypso (1882) to isolate the figure of Odysseus. He stands on a rooftop terrace, gazing out at a distant city, his back turned to the viewer, his only companion a neoclassical sculpture planted behind a curtain. It is a mysterious, profoundly lonely image. So too is de Chirico’s late The Return of Ulysses (1968), which sets Odysseus alone, rowing across the frothy, sea-like pond in the middle of an ordinary living room. Romare Bearden’s A Black Odyssey (1977), a series of 20 collages, conjures scenes from Homer’s epic to tell a larger story about the African diaspora.
Few artists have sustained a deeper engagement with Homer than Twombly. A distinctive figure in postwar American art, Twombly was at once gestural and cerebral. Following his move to Italy in 1957, he became virtually obsessed with antiquity. He filled his home with classical statuary (memorably photographed by Horst P. Horst for Vogue in 1966) and his work with references to myth and ancient literature — Sappho, Ovid, Virgil, Homer. “The past is a springboard for me,” Twombly explained. “Ancient things are new things. Everything lives in the moment; that’s the only time it can live, but its influence can go on forever.”
Homer’s Iliad inspired Twombly’s masterpiece Fifty Days at Iliam, completed between 1977 and 1978 and now on permanent display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In a characteristically Twombly gesture, “Iliam” is a deliberate misspelling of “Ilium,” the ancient name for Troy. According to the artist, the inserted “A” symbolizes Achilles, the warrior hero of The Iliad, and his rage-fueled penetration of Troy.
Throughout The Iliad, Achilles’s defining attribute is rage. In Robert Fagles’s popular translation, the poem begins, “Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles ...” Twombly gives that wrath a color: red. The color of fury. The color of blood. In the first of the ten large-scale canvases, red pools at the heart of Achilles’s shield, itself rendered as a rough circle of black scribbles. Two panels later, Vengeance of Achilles distorts the shield into something vaguely gun-shaped, with that blazing red smeared at the tip of the barrel. In Achaeans in Battle, the “gun” becomes, unavoidably, a phallus. Red dominates The Fire That Consumes All Before It — Twombly’s distillation of Homer’s description of Achilles “like inhuman fire raging on through the mountain gorges ... the wind swirling the huge fireball left and right – chaos of fire – Achilles storming on ...”
That’s Fagles’s translation. The one Twombly relied on was Alexander Pope’s, published in 1715 — a freewheeling effort that scholar Emily Greenwood describes as “itself a highly self-conscious response to the tradition of interpreting, translating and reimagining Homer.” In the monograph Cy Twombly: Fifty Days at Iliam, Greenwood likens Twombly’s cycle to the “structural translations” of contemporary poets Christopher Logue and Alice Oswald: works of “engagement, homage, and creative reinvention” that pare back detail “to reveal a striking impression of the energy of the poem and the lineaments of its plot.”
Oswald’s Memorial (2011), for example, strips The Iliad down to a litany of the war dead and the circumstances of their deaths. “The first to die was PROTESILAUS / A focused man who hurried to darkness …” The formal overlap with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) is surely not coincidental. Nor is it likely to be accidental that Fifty Days at Iliam emerged in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, just as the dripping crimson canvases of Twombly’s Bacchus series took shape amid the violent escalation of the Iraq War. There is real madness in these paintings; it makes you wonder how Richard Serra could have once compared Twombly to Fragonard.
Logue’s War Music was left hauntingly incomplete when he died in 2011 — the same year Twombly passed away. Logue is pointedly anachronistic. “Whumping” helicopters coexist with Hector’s “bronze mask … smiling down” on Patroclus in the moments before he rams home his spear, while the gods announce themselves in enormous type — “APOLLO” stretching across a two-page spread. Wars end; war does not. It recurs and recurs and recurs. Twombly, like Logue, like every great interpreter of Homer, returned to the epic in search not of the ancient world, but of what lies beyond time. That’s been the invitation all along, straight from the blind bard himself, if he ever existed. As Wilson writes in her translation of The Odyssey, “Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. / Find the beginning.”