Jana J. Monji

The Odyssey: The Greeks, Cornell and Rape Culture

One of the things that the Christopher Nolan’s film “The Odyssey” avoids is the rape culture present in text of “The Odyssey.” His Odysseus isn’t a complicated man. He’s an earnest, honest man as played by Matt Damon, who was forced to appease the ambitious Agamemnon by joining the fleets against Troy and this poor man fell into infidelity via forgetfulness. What does that have to do with the Cornell 7, Chi Phi (ΧΦ) and rape culture? It’s complicated and so is the tale of Odysseus.

The film does note that Agamemnon sacrificed his eldest daughter (Iphigenia) in order to appease the gods and call up the winds to take them to Troy.  According to myths, this was because some the Greeks killed deer sacred to Artemis.  The Greeks then go to Troy and we see them at the end of their siege and the Trojan Horse. Yet after the clever Odysseus has them build the Trojan Horse (which in this film sets up some ridiculous scenes), and the sack of Troy begins, more troubles are to come. Paris is already dead and Helen has been passed on to one of his brothers. That isn’t love and that may be rape.

In the film the pivotal problem  is represented by the recurring appearance of “Athena” as played by Zendaya. Spoiler alert: This is actually a guilt-induced memory/apparition/hallucination of a priestess who was beheaded during the sack of Troy at the temple.

Yet according to the text of “The Odyssey,” the Greek troubles returning home are supposedly tied to the brutal rape of Cassandra by Ajax the Lesser in Athena’s temple. The sacrilege is not in the rape itself. Rape is part of Greek conquest. The men are killed, often beheaded. The women are enslaved. Slavery does mean sexual subjugation. This is what Susan Brownmiller called “heroic rape.” That is, sexual violence that is romanticized, with a compliant victim. Where the act is a part of the hero’s triumph. The drama and the status of the hero is the focus and the psychological and physical trauma on the rape victim is ignored.

The sacrilege was a rape in the temple where women are supposed to have the protection of sanctuary. It became the Greek problem  because,  according to the text, the Greeks did not punish Ajax. An angry Athena then asked Poseidon and Zeus to punish the Greeks.

This change from rape in the text to murder in the film  made me wonder: Why in 2026, when rape is recognized as a crime against a person (and not property) and recognized as a war crime, does this script change it to a murder?

Cassandra, once a princess of Troy,  is claimed as a concubine by Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus. She appears in the Euripides tragedy, “The Trojan Women” and his “Electra.” In the latter, Cassandra is one of two reasons Agamemnon’s wife gives for murdering her husband. The other is the sacrifice if Iphigenia.  We will see Agamemnon again, in spirt, in the film. We will also see Menelaus, alive, but not in love.

After leaving Troy, and parting ways with Agamemnon and Menelaus, Odysseus and his men stop in Ismarus where, in the text, he and his men kill the village’s men and enslave the women. Contrary to Odysseus’ wishes, the Greeks stay too long and are attacked by locals who have regrouped and recruited neighbors to their cause. We have to wonder did Odysseus invoke “Zeus’ law”  and the Ancient Greek concept of Xenia in Ismarus before the slaughter?

Knowing how Odysseus and his men treated those villagers changes the framework for the following adventures with the Cyclops, Circe and Calypso. We know that Odysseus is not necessarily a trustworthy guest and if he was able to overpower the hosts, he might do so. That isn’t present in the film.

The aggressive actions in Ismarus changes how one perceives Circe when she transforms his men into pigs. Imagine, a woman living alone has a group of Greek soldiers who have already raped and pillaged in Troy and Ismarus come upon her house; does that sound like a safe situation for a woman, particularly one described in the text as beautiful? In the film, Circe is presented as a frumpy, crazy (big) cat lady who can’t even get along with her sister instead of a woman who might be threatened by soldiers with sexual violence.

Perhaps discomfort of Odysseus with Circe and Calpyso is that both are more powerful than Odysseus. He cannot be the king of the castle. He is the subordinate partner in the relationship. If he returns home to his faithful wife, he can be king.  Yet, once he returns home, one must ask: Does he really need to slaughter all of the suitors? What is their transgression? Being bad guests. Not all of them were involved in the assassination attempt on Odysseus’ son, Telemachus.

And after Odysseus has defeated and slaughtered his wife’s suitors, the text reminds us of how casually the lives of female slaves end. This is how Cassandra dies, slaughtered under the orders.  Clytemnestra. In the text, Odysseus orders his son to murder all slave women who had no choice but to have sexual intercourse with those suitors. Here in the text, we can see the parallel with rape and the death of Cassandra. That part is left out of film, “The Odyssey.”

Lastly, let’s think about what Zeus stands for. To fool Helen’s mother, Leda, into allowing him into her intimate circle, he supposedly disguised himself as a swan. Shape-shifting or being deceptively harmless is an acceptable way to gain access to an unwilling woman. Zeus disguised himself as Alcmene’s husband in order to have sex Alcmene, mother of Heracles, and that is rape by deception.  Zeus abducted the Phoenician princess Europa in the guise of a white bull.  What does the behavior of Zeus teach young boys and men?

Similarly, to start Rome, Sabine women were abducted in what has come to be known as the Rape of the Sabine women.

The English word “rape” comes from the Latin verb, rapere,” which means “to seize,” or “to snatch,” or “to carry off.” The term originally referred to the forceful seizure, plundering or abduction of a person as in “to carry women off for marriage or population growth” rather than strictly forced sexual assault. An abstract on Oxford Academic notes:

Only the rape of citizens was taken seriously by law. Sexual assaults on non-citizens were lesser matters. Rape of enslaved persons, a daily reality, was a crime only if committed by someone other than their owner. Rape of citizen males damaged their reputations; rape of citizen females could render them ineligible for marriage. Ancient myth features almost countless stories of rape, usually of human females by divine males. These tales were common subjects in ancient art and literature. Overwhelmingly, the victims are unmarried girls, who may suffer brutal treatment afterward and frequently bear miraculous offspring, some of whom establish cities (e.g., Romulus and Remus). Rape by human men is rarer in myth; rape of a wife causes massive militarized response (e.g., Helen of Troy, Lucretia). War-rape and post-war rape were standard practice around the Mediterranean. come from the word In the gods and men who wish to be like the gods, rape by deception is acceptable. And there are a lot of other instances that rape is acceptable in Greek mythology.

Let’s think about how the Rape of the Sabine women is represented by men. The people of Rome invite their neighbors to a religious festival. Then they seize the young Sabine women and consequently force them to become their wives. A war results, but eventually the two groups merged.  If you study art history, you should be asking: Why is this scene of sexual coercion to celebrated? And what does it teach young men? If you look at the great words of art by men, you’ll see the thread of the beautification, eroticization and romanticization of sexual violence goes beyond Greek and Roman mythology. What does that teach boys and girls, men and women? Who is speaking for the Sabine women?

Greek and Roman mythology delineates a rape culture. Not all mythology is so heavily saturated with depictions of rape. And what happened at Cornell shows that even some people who are not ethnically Greek but are in a so-called Greek system known as fraternities can also embrace rape culture (The sorority Delta Delta Delta is also named in the Jane Doe lawsuit).  This is not to say that just fraternities or just Greeks or all fraternities or all Greeks or all men are invested in a rape culture. But all men and women need to be aware of this and films like “The Odyssey” do us no favor by pretending war was a simple test of men against other men and that rape and pillage wasn’t part of the war culture. The darkness in ‘The Odyssey” is what makes Odysseus a complicated man, not necessarily a hero. Odysseus has lost all the ships and all the men he sailed with to Troy. He has brought back nothing, but, instead, slays all of the young, single men in his home to regain his throne. He has left more families in mourning. As a leader, he is a failure. As a survivor, he is remarkable, but he is the only witness to his tale of sorceresses, sirens and monsters and we have been warned that he is “the lord of lies” in Book 9 (Emily Wilson translation). He is an unreliable narrator and not the stoic, earnest man that Matt Damon portrays under the direction of Christopher Nolan.

If you watch the Greek films on the Trojan War such as “Iphigenia,”  or “Electra,” you’ll see complicated heroes and women who wrestled with the complications of war in a world where rape and sacrificial daughters are not a criminal acts. Life is complicated and rape culture won’t simply vanish by ignoring it, bowdlerzing text, or making heroes uncomplicated.

 

 

Leave a Reply