Homer, Helmets, and Hollywood

Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation of the Odyssey has generated a lot of discussion, as it has since the very first image of Matt Damon as Odysseus was released almost exactly a year ago (which we also discussed on the blog). More recently, promotional images of armour from the films have reignited the debate about historical accuracy. Given how Agamemnon's armour looks like a recycled version of Batman's costume from Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight series, hilariously dubbed 'Batamemnon' by the audience, this is hardly a surprise. However, this blog is not about how this helmet is unhistorical, even fantastical – you all have eyes, after all. Instead, this blog is about how reactions to this helmet by historical content creators on the internet is actually misrepresenting the Homeric world.

If you have seen or read any reactions to these promotional images, chances are the creators are calling for Odysseus to be clad in a boar's-tusk helmet. There are plenty of other issues that critics have raised, such as the Greeks wearing trousers, but discussions about the helmet are the most common, as far as I have seen. The problem with these discussions, however, is that they misrepresent how prevalent the boar's-tusk helmet is in the Homeric epics and use its appearance to justify a general Bronze Age aesthetic for the their imagined version of the film.

For starters, the helmet appears only once. It is elaborately described in Book 10 of the Iliad, and is given to Odysseus by Meriones in anticipation of a night raid which Odysseus and Diomedes are about to go on. The helmet is never again mentioned in either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Why is this important? Well, we must first consider, within the poetic world, whether Odysseus continued to wear this helmet in the subsequent battles of the Trojan War, he kept the helmet but did not wear it, or even if he returned it to Meriones. Now, since the poems do not describe the helmet again, this point is open to interpretation. It is totally fine if you want to image Odysseus, after this event, continuing to wear the helmet, and vice versa.

The appearance of the helmet within the Iliad also raises questions about the real world and how the helmet came to be included in the poem. The boar's-tusk helmet, given the prevalence of this artefact type in Mycenaean archaeology, is often adduced as evidence for the Iliad representing the Bronze Age – meaning the inclusion of the boar's-tusk helmet is a survival from when the poem was performed in the Bronze Age. However, this is not the only possibility, nor is it the most likely, according to academic opinions.

The elaborate description of the helmet within the Iliad actually marks the helmet as distinct within the poetic world, and not a survival from a time when such helmets were widely used. As van Wees writes, “one would have expected the helmet … to occur more often and without much description if it had been preserved in tradition from a time when such helmets were the norm” (2002, p. 19). According to this argument, the audience would not have been familiar with the helmet, needing the poet to describe it in detail. This, in turn, raises the question of how the poet was able to include such an elaborate description if the helmet was not widely used, if it was used at all – the level of detail certainly implies the poet had a physical specimen to hand. It is possible that boar's-tusk helmets continued to be used into the Early Iron Age, after the Mycenaean palatial system collapsed, as evidenced by the appearance of such a helmet in an eleventh-century-BC tomb on Crete (Kotsonas, 2018). There is also the possibility that Greeks in the Early Iron Age and later were aware of such a helmet from depictions in Bronze Age tombs, which became sites of ritual significance (see, e.g., Antonaccio, 1994). Furthermore, the book of the Iliad within which the helmet appears is actually linguistically young (see Danek, 2012), and the lines that describe the helmet are “in no respect exceptionally archaic” (Hainsworth, 1993, p. 180). This suggests that the boar's-tusk helmet may have been a late addition to the Homeric poems, possibly as late as ca. 600 BC! As such, the inclusion of the helmet does not necessarily indicate that the material culture of the Homeric world maps neatly onto that of Mycenaean Greece, as many commentators and critics online would suggest.

Of course, this is not to say that you cannot imagine the Homeric world as being one and the same as Mycenaean Greece. After all, the Homeric world is a fantastical collection of historical elements from the Bronze Age through to Archaic Greece (ca. 1400–700 BC). However, what I hope this post shows is that, despite what the majority of the discussions online suggest, the Homeric world should not automatically be considered synonymous with Myceanean Greece.

If you want to learn more about how the Homeric world relates to the real world, I wholeheartedly recommend Michael B. Cosmopoulos' book The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry (Cambridge, 2025), which serves as an introduction to the huge amount of academic work that has been done on this topic. If you want an introduction to his work before committing to the book, I actually spoke with Michael B. Cosmopoulos on the Ancient History Podcast.

References:

C. Antonaccio, ‘Contesting the Past: Hero Cult, Tomb Cult, and Epic in Early Greece’, American Journal of Archaeology 98 (1994), pp. 389–410.

G. Danek, ‘The Doloneia Revisited’, in Ø. Andersen and D.T.T. Haug (eds.) Relative Chronology in Early Greek Epic Poetry (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 106–121.

B. Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume III: Books 9–12 (Cambridge, 1993).

A. Kotsonas, ‘Homer, the Archaeology of Crete and the ‘Tomb of Meriones’ at Knossos’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018), pp. 1–35.

H. van Wees, ‘Homer and Early Greece’, Colby Quarterly 38 (2002), pp. 94–117.