Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey (2026). Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey had a reported budget of $250 million.  So, it needed to put a lot of bums on seats if its director was going to be trusted with similarly ambitious projects in the future. (If you add in a reported marketing budget of $125 and the cut taken by the cinemas, then the film needed to take between $650 and $725 million just to break even).    Indeed, 15-rated (R-rated) movies have never had this big a budget before because the commercial risks are so high.  The film has made a profit of around $100 million at time of writing.  And it is getting many stellar reviews from professional film critics and paying audiences alike.

We can draw two conclusions from all this.  First, the film was clearly made with an eye on the broadest possible global audience, not a relatively small crowd of Homer-savvy readers, students or classical scholars. Second, much of that broad audience likes what they have seen. They are recommending it to others and they are returning to cinemas to watch it again.

And there is much more at stake here than Chris Nolan’s own future plans or his reputation. The success of the Odyssey movie demonstrates the viability of a certain style of commercial film-making which is now rare.   With its IMAXian scale and spectacle, its non-CGI realism and its preference for shooting internationally and on-location (with local crews, craftspeople and extras), The Odyssey is 2026’s answer to landmark blockbuster epics which pre-date the digital age.   One thinks of Camerini’s Ulysses (1954), Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959),  Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia  (1962), Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Less obviously, Nolan’s epic owes something to pre-digital war films such as Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998).There are good old-fashioned horror-film tropes in this film too.

What the film delivers, and it does so reasonably well in my view, is the sort of collective and shared cultural experience which is increasingly hard to come by in our age of home streaming, digital devices, half-empty pubs and eye-watering ticket prices (for sport, music, festivals and theatre).  Of course, a trip to the cinema is also too expensive for many people these days and that is in itself a scandal for a form of entertainment which was always supposed to be for the masses, and not for the few.   But it is clear that an awful lot of people have somehow found the time and money see The Odyssey. As a result, both the film and the ancient narrative on which it is based are being experienced as stories which nearly everyone can know, interpret and discuss.  It is easy to lose sight of the significance of this amidst all the arguments about the director’s choices, the film’s overall quality and depth or its fidelity to its source text.

In the ancient Greek-speaking world, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey also had this status of being stories which were loved and known by all.  These two poems were often performed before large audiences at religious festivals, for example.  And as soon as these stories were fixed in writing, poets and playwrights started to create new works which offered different ‘takes’ on, and various sequels or prequels to, what we find in the Homeric poems themselves.

An average Greek citizen who’d heard rhapsodes performing The Odyssey at (say) a festival in honour of Athena in the fifth century before the birth of Christ might be a bit surprised to learn that Nolan’s version contains no scenes of the gods bickering on Mount Olympus and that it completely misses out Odysseus’ time spent on the island of the Phaeacians. But because he had also seen parts of the ‘Trojan cycle’ epics reimagined in lyric poems, and in tragic plays or satyr dramas, he would also understand that changes of medium and genre entail changes in content.  Our putative ancient citizen would  also be pleased to discover that the film has been true to the original poem’s capacity to hold a crowd and to establish itself, both as a piece of shared culture and as a universal reference point.  God knows, and the Greeks knew, that we need some shared stories, experienced collectively, if we are to prevent our communities from disintegrating completely.

This is not to deny that Nolan’s project has its problems.  Some poor ethical and political decisions were clearly made during the film’s production process.  And the final product is undoubtedly flawed from the perspective of many classicists (including myself) and other readers who know Homer’s Odyssey inside out.  It is also the latest in a series of Nolan films which centre on male preoccupations while leaving its female characters underdeveloped and somewhat sidelined.  This is particularly regrettable given that Homer’s original poem lends a great deal of agency and complexity to the story’s extensive cast of women and goddesses.  The film also contains some telling omissions and areas of emphasis in relation to the depiction of violence and peace in Homer’s original.  I explore these in a separate post.  

However, when it comes to commercial cinema, we should always remember that such shortcomings often say as much about failings or blind spots within the culture and values of its target audiences as they do about the individual film director who is aiming to entertain them.

It is also worth remembering that even Homer had his critics. In Plato’s Republic, for example, the philosopher Socrates argues that Homer’s poems represent the gods and heroes falsely, and in a way that promotes impiety and bad behaviour.  That didn’t stop people from reading, performing and enjoying Homer then and Nolan’s film is ultimately to be praised for fostering more and wider enjoyment of the Iliad  and Odyssey now.

Center L to R: Jimmy Gonzales is Cepheus, Matt Damon is Odysseus and Himesh Patel is Eurylochus in THE ODYSSEY, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.

Many classicists have pointed out that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey lends Matt Damon’s Odysseus a level of war guilt and post-traumatic stress which is just not there in Homer.  In this regard, Nolan has given us a very twenty-first century inflection of this Greek hero.  This is largely true.   But it isn’t completely right to say that there are no hints of this supposedly modernizing characterization in the original text at all.  A brief episode in Book 8 of the poem has the disguised hero weeping as he hears a bard sing about the ruse of the wooden horse (which Odysseus himself conceived and led) and of the dreadfully violent sack of Troy which this ruse precipitates. Homer describes the hero’s distress as follows:

Odysseus was melting into tears;

his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman

weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around

her husband, fallen fighting for his home

and children.  She is watching as he gasps

and dies.  She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing

upon his corpse. The men are right behind.

They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead

her to slavery, hard labour, and a life

of pain. Her face is marked with her despair.

In that same desperate way, Odysseus was crying.   (Odyssey 8.521-531, trans. Wilson).

As Elton Barker (a classics professor) puts it, ‘Homer shows Odysseus weeping as if he were one of his own victims.’  In Nolan’s film, we do not have this specific episode, but it clearly informs the entire film’s construal of Odysseus.  At one point, when Damon’s Odysseus has returned to Ithaca in the disguise of a beggarly veteran of the Trojan war, he remarks to his wife Penelope that he cannot hear bardic songs of the war without weeping.

So, while some may have issues with the extent to which Nolan has expanded upon Book 8’s hints of trauma and guilt, it is only fair to acknowledge that this ‘take’ on Odysseus does have some basis in the film’s ancient source text.  This speaks to a more general principle of interpretation which has stuck with me since I was taught it back in the Bronze Age (aka the early 1990s): always question your own and others’ assumptions about differences between ancient texts and values and modern ones.  Sometimes things are less clear-cut: we find aspects of the ancient in the modern and vice versa.

Other important considerations when discussing a modern retelling of an ancient text include the genre and target audience of that retelling.  And what are the material, cultural and economic conditions which shape that retelling?  In another post, I explore these issues a little and I conclude that the failings and blind spots of a mass-cultural product like Nolan’s Odyssey say more about the priorities and values of our own wider culture than they do about any individual director’s vision.

For the rest of this post, I want to explore one particular problem with our value system which is revealed by the film’s treatment of its source.  This is a problem to do with a certain type of violence and a particular vision of peace.   And, as far as I know, it hasn’t yet been discussed in the way it needs to be.

Let’s start with the violence.  I have already mentioned a dominant view of the film, namely that it turns Homer’s Odysseus into a modern soldier who is racked with guilt and trauma in response to the wartime ultra-violence which he has authored, enabled, witnessed and participated in.  This is Odysseus as Robert Oppenheimer – the inventor of the atom bomb and the subject of Nolan’s previous film – or as the traumatized and guilt-laden military veteran whom we may have met in person or whom we know from films, books and documentaries about conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  An attentive viewer of the film will even discover that the goddess Athena (played by Zendaya) who constantly watches over him is actually appearing in the guise of a defenceless young Trojan woman whom Odysseus has seen decapitated as the Greeks sack the city.  Elton Barker articulates the ambiguities, implications and impact of this aspect of the film very well:

‘With just this one death, Nolan brings out the horror of the sack, its genocidal impulse. This is how war ends. And it haunts Odysseus. This girl is his Athena. Whether Athena takes on the face of the slaughtered Trojan, or whether Odysseus projects her face on to the god’s to “see” Athena, or whether Athena herself is simply part of Odysseus’s imagination — as though Athena represents his reason or conscience, an allegorical reading which is already present in antiquity — it’s impossible to say. But it’s deeply moving and one I hadn’t expected.’

Odysseus (Matt Damon) and Athena (Zendaya) in The Odyssey (2026)

However, the now-archetypal narrative of haunting, guilt and trauma wherein the military scientist or soldier is also himself a kind of victim threatens to overwhelm and displace a correlated but different story which also exists within the modern experience of war.  This is the darker, more hidden tale of soldiers who, despite their elite training and apparent codes of honour and discipline, act as calculating, psychopathic perpetrators of atrocities and war crimes against unarmed civilians or against disarmed enemy combatants who have been wounded and/or captured.  These things happen in every war and they have been proven or alleged to have occurred during recent and ongoing conflicts globally.

Just a couple of examples which are close to home: evidence from whistleblowers with respect to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan alleges that members of UK special forces may have been responsible for as many as 80 unlawful executions.  And the 2020 Brereton inquiry found evidence of 39 murders of civilians and prisoners by (or at the instruction of) members of Australia’s special forces which were subsequently covered up.  This inquiry reported that junior soldiers were sometimes required by their superiors to murder prisoners to get their first kill, a practice known as ‘blooding’.

We like to think of atrocities and war crimes such as these as aberrations.  Yes, they happen, but ‘our’ soldiers commit them less than the ‘other side’.  Central to this thinking are the narrative and associated values of heroic and honourable service, of discipline, bravery and self-sacrifice.  Guilt and trauma can also be part of this narrative: soldiers have to do, see and suffer horrible things; mistakes get made in the ‘fog of war’; combatants suffer inadequate support or treatment when they return to peaceful society.  But the war criminals don’t belong in the same narrative.  They are the few ‘rotten apples’ who need to be removed from it.  We do not face up to the real story of war which always contains appalling episodes of atrocity as well as those of great heroism and bravery.

Homer’s Odyssey arguably does face up to this real story.   Book 22 of the poem tells of an Odysseus who is largely unmerciful and indiscriminate with the vengeful violence he metes out to his enemies on Ithaca.   With his bow and arrows safely acquired, he doffs his beggar’s disguise and shoots Antinous through the neck just as he is about to drink from his goblet of wine.  Homer’s ancient audience surely wasn’t meant to feel much pity here. Antinous is the ringleader of the suitors who have both preyed upon Odysseus’ palace and pressured his wife Penelope towards remarriage in his long absence.  He has also plotted (unsuccessfully) to kill Odysseus’ son Telemachus in an ambush.  Once the suitors hear that Odysseus intends to kill them all if he can, the bravest among them draw their swords in an effort to fight back.   A battle ensues.

The suitors are aided and abetted by Melanthius, an Ithacan goatherd who had sided with them against his master; he gains access to the weapons and armour which Odysseus and his son Telemachus had removed from the hall in preparation for this confrontation.  But Telemachus has also managed to retrieve weapons and armour.  He and Odysseus are joined on their side by two loyal slaves, the herdsmen Eumaeus and Philoetius.  These two prove to be deadly with a spear.  The goddess Athena also lends a hand by diverting the course of incoming spears from the suitors.

Attic red-figure skyphos, Odysseus slays the suitors of his wife Penelope, c 440BCE. ARV 1300 1

Odysseus and his three-man kill team end the lives of all 108 suitors between them.  The old slave woman Eurycleia later recounts to Penelope that their bodies ‘lay on top of one another, sprawled across the solid floor’ (23.46-47).  Odysseus himself is left covered in the suitors’ blood and gore.

During and after this ferocious massacre there are three instances of what most readers would regard as war crimes, atrocities or unjustified killings by the lights of modern values. I’ll deal with these in ascending order of horridness.

First, we have one of the nicer, less hubristic suitors – a priest named Leodes.  He begs for mercy from Odysseus via a ritual act known as supplication. He says that he tried to stop the others from abusing the women of the palace.  Odysseus hears him out but then replies that Leodes must have prayed many times for Odysseus to not come home.  He decapitates the priest on the spot.

Secondly, we have the disloyal herdsman Melanthius.  Alongside his acts of disloyalty, he had mocked and physically abused the disguised and beggarly Odysseus.  While the fighting is in full swing, Odysseus explicitly orders Eumaeus and Philoetius to apprehend Melanthius and gives them precise details for how he is to be tortured. They catch him and truss him up so that his hands and feet are bound painfully behind his back.  They then hoist his body into the roof rafters.  Once the battle is over, Telemachus and the two slaves take him outside and proceed to chop off his nose, ears and genitals. ‘Still full of rage’, we are told, they then hack off his hands and feet (22.477).

Finally, and most shockingly, we have twelve young slave women of the palace who have slept with the suitors and done their bidding.  Odysseus instructs his son to ensure that these girls first remove the bodies of the suitors from the hall and then wash the blood and gore from the chairs and tables. Once they have completed these grim tasks, Telemachus is to put them to death with his sword.

The girls are brought into the hall.  They are huddled together as they cry and weep.  After they have been forced to remove the suitors’ bodies and they have washed down the furniture, Telemachus and the two herdsmen lead them outdoors into a narrow passageway between an outbuilding and the palace’s courtyard wall.   But instead of butchering the girls with his sword as instructed, Telemachus rigs up a ship’s cable between the outbuilding and a pillar and  then hangs them from it.  He declares that he wants to deprive them of a ‘clean death’ with a blade because ‘they poured down shame on me and my mother, when they lay beside the suitors’ (22.462-4).  Homer’s description of the girls as they die is unbearably vivid and full of pathos:

As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly

home to their nests, but someone sets a trap –

they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;

just so the girls, their heads all in a row,

were strung up with the noose around their necks

to make their death an agony. They gasped,

feet twitching for a while, but not for long.  (Odyssey 22.466-472. Trans. Wilson)

The narrator’s description here invites us to notice a tension between his viewpoint and that of ‘team Odysseus’.  On the one hand, we have a furious impulse to visit vengeance on the suitors and those of household who have been disloyal – even those young slave women who presumably had little choice in the matter.  On the other hand, we have a very clear and disturbing image of what such acts of revenge entail.  These young women are likened to innocent and delicate creatures who have been ensnared.  They are dying in agony.

Now, to an extent, Nolan’s film acknowledges the atrocities of war and it does so in a number of ways which I won’t labour here. Part of the point of its modernized ‘guilt and trauma’ narrative is to stage such an acknowledgement.  Nolan also recognizes something else important which is suggested in Homer’s text, namely that the killing of the suitors is an excessive punishment and that their relatives within the wider Ithacan community will seek redress for it.  Nolan highlights and resolves this issue by having Odysseus go into self-imposed exile with his wife while Telemachus inherits the kingship from him.  In Homer, things play out very differently indeed, as we will soon see.

But if you have seen the film, you will already know that Nolan somewhat sanitizes the killing of the suitors.  Some of them kneel in submission during the final battle scene and appear to be spared.  And while there is a hint that the treacherous young slave woman Melantho will come to a bad end, there is nothing remotely comparable to the three episodes of atrocity in Homer’s original which I have just highlighted.

What are we to make of this sanitized treatment of the original?  Well, I think it is unfair to expect Nolan to include these horrendous acts of torture, mutilation and execution of prisoners and non-combatants in a very expensive multiplex blockbuster.  To be sure, the film is 15-rated (R-rated).  But mainstream globalized culture of the twenty-first century cannot really cope with a heroic protagonist and his son defeating the baddies but committing horrific war crimes in the process.  That is especially true when those atrocities are perpetrated against a priest and defenceless slaves within his own household.   Even if Nolan had wanted to include these episodes, there was no way that Universal Pictures were going to let him.

However, this difference between what is in the Homeric source and what it is possible to represent of, and say about, warfare and heroism in a commercial mass-market film needs to be interrogated further.

For a start, I think it shows us that all the talk about The Odyssey being the archetypal story which we always return to is overly simplistic.  For the truth is that our retellings never fully return to the shape, tone and texture of the archetype.  Thus, in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, atrocity and excessive, violent vengeance are integral to the heroic warrior’s impulse and actions.  For sure, that propensity for ultra-violence and atrocity is sometimes framed as problematic by other characters or by the shape of the narrative itself.  And the gods occasionally deflect or put a stop to such excesses.  But at other times they positively encourage and facilitate them.  For example, the Homeric Athena helps Odysseus to kill the suitors and Zeus acts to ensure that his acts of retribution and atrocity have no bad consequences for the hero or his family.

This means that Homeric atrocities and excessive acts of violent reprisal are neither sidelined nor separated out in the manner of modern framings of war and its aftermath.   In Homer we find very little of the modern drive to depict, narrate and consume warfare and soldiery in terms of what we think they ought to be like, rather than in terms of the messier, darker and more troubling realities which always emerge via inquiries and prosecutions. Because it is an adaptation of Homer which has to operate within our realm of mainstream modern understandings, Nolan’s film discloses what that realm chooses to cover up or gloss over.  But it only does so when we go back to Homer and consider these ancient poems’ rather different view of war and what comes after it.

Nolan’s film is equally revealing about modern understandings of peace.  In Homer’s poem, Odysseus does not get home via the raft which he builds on Calypso’s island. (A direct journey from that island to Ithaca is strongly implied by the film, although some clever editing from Nolan leaves room for Homer-savvy viewers to insert the missing narrative for themselves).  Instead, he loses the raft in a Poseidon-sent storm and washes up on the island of Phaeacia (sometimes called Scheria).  He spends three days receiving hospitality from the Phaeacians and in return he tells them the engaging story of his adventures and encounters and how he lost all his men and ships in the process.  Across four books of the twenty-four-book poem, both the Phaeacians and we the audience get to hear about the Cicones, the Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops, Circe, the land of the Dead, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the Cattle of Sun debacle, and Calypso.

But there are a further three-and-a-bit books where we learn about the Phaeacians and their unique society.  It is a society which constitutes a bridge between the human world and the realm of the gods.  For while the island they inhabit is remote and far from the world of other humans, we learn that the Phaeacians are descended from Poseidon and remain close to the divine.  Their king, Alcinous, even reveals that the gods attend their feasts openly, without using human disguises (7.200-206). There is something of a ‘golden age’ utopia about how and where the Phaeacians live. For example, their orchard, vineyard and olive groves produce fruit all year round (7.113-127).  And their queen and Alcinous’ wife, Arete, holds considerable political power and influence (7.68-77). This is not a straightforward patriarchy where a male king calls all the shots.

Most importantly, Phaeacians are a peace-loving people rather than a race of warriors.  We are told that their ancestors moved to remote Scheria from the land of Hyperia to escape constant raids by their overbearing neighbours, the Cyclopes.  The isolation of Scheria seems to protect them from warfare and invasions.  As Nausicaa, the young princess who first encounters the naked, shipwrecked Greek hero, explains to him, the Phaeacians ‘do not care for archery; their passion is for sails and oars and ship’ (6.270).  Indeed, the Phaeacians are extraordinarily skilled sailors and that skill is augmented by supernatural seafaring powers: their sentient ships have no pilots or rudders and navigate by reading the thoughts of the crew; Phaeacian vessels never suffer damage or shipwreck; they also have unmatched speed.

Friedrich Preller the Elder (1804–1878), Odysseus and Nausicaa (c 1864),

To their own cost, it is the Phaeacians’ capability as sailors, along with their generosity as hosts, which ensure that Odysseus gets back to Ithaca. Even before he knows the hero’s identity, Alcinous orders his subjects to equip a ship to take him home.  And while Odysseus’ time on their island is not entirely free of tension, jeopardy and conflict, the overall impression of Phaeacian life and society which Homer leaves us with is that it is very peaceful and harmonious. This is a land of abundance, and of time spent in feasting, dancing and sports.

Nolan completely cuts out Odysseus’ visit to this peaceable, utopian society.  And it made sense for him to do so given his focus on Odysseus’ experience as a warrior and leader, and the need to be selective when condensing a twelve-thousand-line poem into a three-hour action movie. The omission of Phaeacia also fits with a film whose opening title card reads ‘in a time of apparent magic’.  The sceptical, ambiguating approach towards religion and the divine which this phrase heralds, is key to understanding the film’s rationalizing response to the ancient poem. But the excision of the peaceful Phaeacians also means that the film is a militarizing response.  In contrast to the ancient poem, it contains no vision of a society which lives peacefully and which has no desire for armed conflict or conquest.

I think this says a lot about where we mainstream cinemagoers are at, politically and culturally speaking.  Fighting is fun; peace and harmony are a yawn.  And while the film genres of science fiction and fantasy certainly do sometimes depict utopian societies without pain or conflict, these visions are usually undercut by more sinister goings-on or prices paid: everyone’s minds are being controlled or they’re pacified with drugs; perhaps everything is lovely until you reach a certain age and you get bumped off for the greater good; maybe the peaceful utopia can only exist for a chosen few or on the back of terrible conflict which is taking place elsewhere.

Somehow, I think we have lost the idea that human communities which are free of war and conflict might be both possible and interesting to imagine or explore in their own right.

The ending of Nolan’s film is also coy about peace, or rather, about peace-making, when we compare it to the ending of the Homeric original.  In Homer, a civil war breaks out on Ithaca as the community divides between Odysseus and his supporters on one side and the relatives of the suitors who want revenge for their slaughter on the other.  The first man to die in this war is Eupeithes, the father of Antinous.  Zeus and Athena quickly agree that further bloodshed is not acceptable.  Odysseus is to become king again and the relatives of the suitors are to forget what he has done to their brothers and sons.   Peace and friendship must return to Ithaca.  With some difficulty, Athena persuades Odysseus to cease his bloody pursuit of the Ithacans who have taken up arms against him.  Had she not intervened, we are told, Odysseus and his son would have killed them all.  The poem ends with the goddess brokering an enduring peace agreement between the two warring sides.

As we have already seen, Nolan’s film avoids this complicated ending altogether.  Damon’s Odysseus does the work of Homer’s aggrieved relatives by punishing himself with exile before a civil war can break out.  The community accepts Telemachus as his heir and we are left with the hope (voiced by Anne Hathaway’s Penelope) that ‘civilization will rise again’.  This is a nice and neat ending in terms of the film’s construal of the Trojan war and its aftermath for Odysseus as forms of moral corruption and whole-societal collapse. But once again, the change from Homer’s ending is rather telling.  For it reveals what we don’t want to think about or face up to when we watch our stories of war and revenge.  The truth – as found in Homer – is that violent conflicts motivated by cycles of grievance and vengeance rarely end of their own accord.  More usually, a third-party authority has to act as an honest broker or else use the threat of superior force to bring about ceasefires and peace agreements which will last.  Sometimes, as is the case with Athena’s role at the end of the Odyssey, the third party is needed to prevent one side from completely annihilating the other side.

What can we conclude from this discussion of the ways in which Nolan’s film sidelines or changes certain aspects of the depiction of violence and peace in Homer’s original? Well, first and foremost, I’d suggest that we need to expect less of Christopher Nolan and other directors and more of ourselves if we want mainstream cinema to offer a more authentic and challenging treatment of violence and peace in its storytelling.  Secondly, I hope to have shown something of the value of returning to Homer’s poems. They offer us a means of isolating the ways in which modern storytelling about war, violence, peace and peace-making often delivers what is comfortable for us to watch and hear and rarely delivers what is harder to face but much more true.

As my excellent St Andrews colleague Professor Alice König points out in her published research and through various elements of her Visualizing War and Peace project, ‘war stories are world-shaping’. That is to say: the way that war is narrated may reflect reality to a certain extent. But those narratives also shape reality by creating certain expectations and values in us to do with armed conflict and its aftermath. The same goes for the stories we tell about peace: how possible it is to broker or maintain; how we lose it or get it back.  And just as these stories about war and peace influence how we think, feel and behave, so it is that those thoughts, feelings and beliefs in turn shape the decisions of our future storytellers.  That is why discussion of Chris Nolan’s Odyssey should not just about the director’s choices or what’s in Homer. It must also be about what we think and believe and what might be wrong with that.

My forty years in higher education, first as a student and then as an academic, leave me in full agreement with this analysis.  And there’s more: perfectionism doesn’t just make us unhappy; it can also make us less productive.  What work we do produce is often worse than it would have been if we hadn’t made the stakes so high in the first place.  By contrast, ‘the good enough’ approach has many advantages.

I can’t get no satisficing: the perils of perfectionism

Herbert A. Simon (looking happy because he ‘satisfices’)

Back in the 1950s, a psychologist called Herbert A. Simon coined the term ‘satisficing’ for the ‘good enough’ approach because it combines the ideas conveyed by ‘satisfy’ and ‘suffice’.  Satisficing is a decision-making strategy that aims for an adequate solution rather than the absolute perfect or optimal one.  Thus the commander of a fire crew tackling a house fire with people trapped inside doesn’t waste valuable time thinking through all the options or gathering huge amounts of additional information until she arrives at the best possible rescue strategy.  She adopts the first plan to come to her which is good enough for a successful and safe extraction of the trapped residents.

Thankfully, academics and students rarely have to take such life-or-death decisions.  But they do have to grapple with heavy time pressures and multi-tasking.  Most of the tasks are much more open-ended and time-flexible than getting people out of a burning building.  But those two conditions are very problematic for the perfectionist. A lecturer could spend the equivalent of two weeks or more preparing one lecture if she wanted to and if she started early enough. There are always more things to read and to incorporate, more improvements to be made to the handout or the PowerPoint, pithier and clearer ways to say something (etc.).  It’s the same with the time you could take to mark one essay or to write a book.  But the trouble is that we have to  juggle the lecture preparation, the marking, the book-writing, the peer-reviewing and much more besides at roughly same time.  If we spend too long perfecting one piece of work, we’ll have too little time for comfortable completion of all the other tasks which are currently on our plate.  Likewise, students have to balance coursework deadlines with ongoing classroom preparation, reading, revision for exams, extracurricular commitments, work experience (if they can find it), and (often) a job to make ends meet. (Increasingly, the ends cannot be made to meet: work is no longer paying in the face of rising costs or the job is impossible to get).  Sometimes there are caring responsibilities and/or personal health issues which take up time too.

Many other walks of life and areas of experience have equivalent or worse challenges. Funding pressures and the distractions of the attention economy make it hard to manage ever-growing workloads.  (Many people  of course, have no job in which to experience such pressures or distractions.  That includes academics who have recently been made redundant due to casualization and/or a kaput funding model and/or poor management decisions).  In my own sector, perfectionism on the part of staff and students is also driven by a dire economic situation, poor finances and the transformation of our learners into high-paying customers.  The staff strive to be outstanding in order to make themselves too valuable to sack and to create the opportunity to increase income via promotion in the face of wage stagnation and a cost-of-living crisis. The students strive to be outstanding in their studies and other activities in order to give themselves the best chance of getting the career they want in a shrinking and stupidly competitive job market .  They also (understandably) want a job which at least partially justifies the debt they are running up via crippling student loans.

For the students, the time pressures and multi-tasking are an important element of their training for work.  It is a ‘graduate-level attribute’ to be able to solve complex problems, juggle multiple work-streams, complete tasks independently and to meet deadlines.    (Let’s leave the consequences of AI for another discussion).  What we don’t say to students as much as we should, however, is that the ‘good enough’ approach is in itself a vital ‘graduate-level’ tool for achieving all this without suffering undue stress.  It’s probably the only way for them to stay happy while also holding down their jobs.   This is especially true now that workloads in most careers are so ridiculously high.  The inevitable friction and fraught nature of modern working environments aren’t easily navigated if one tries to achieve the best possible outcome every time and for everything.

The rise and rise of ‘excellentism’

But it isn’t just that universities don’t do enough to encourage ‘satisficing’  on the part of their staff and students.  Thanks to various audit frameworks and a wider societal discourse which over-values competitive striving to be ‘the best’, I think we are actively discouraged from adopting a ‘good enough’ attitude to work and life generally.

Think about the way in which the language of ‘excellence’ pervades the education and research sectors.  My kids did their primary and secondary schooling under the auspices of Scotland’s ‘Curriculum for Excellence’.  My colleagues and I have our research and its impact assessed by the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF).  Our teaching is audited via the ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF).  The UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council website anxiously tells us that it funds ‘world-class research in all the UK’s regions and nations, distributing funds without detriment to excellence’. This defensiveness makes sense given the ubiquity of the inelegant phrase ‘research and innovation excellence’ in the current strategy document of UKRI, the public body which comprises the UK’s seven research councils.

Given this wider landscape of what I will call ‘excellentism’, not to mention a highly competitive market for acquiring students, it’s unsurprising that individual universities love to talk about their own excellence.  My university has the prestigious ‘1413 Excellence in Teaching Awards’, for example. Not that I’m knocking my institution for recognizing colleagues for their hard work and good teaching.  Long may that continue.  But does it have to be dressed up in the language of excellence?

‘Excellence’  denotes ‘the possession chiefly of good qualities in an eminent or unusual degree; surpassing merit, skill, virtue, worth, etc.; dignity, eminence’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.  It has a Latin etymology:  excellentia means ‘superiority’ or ‘distinction’. The verb excellere means ‘to be preeminent’ or (surprise, surprise) ‘to excel’.  Talking in these terms just encourages everyone to try to be outstanding at everything all the time. It’s a recipe for misery and, actually, a lot of procrastination, poor planning, rushed work and missed deadlines.

I understand that we must use some excellentist language in order to grade and recognize students’ superb work or to rate academics’ brilliant research fairly.  So long as they are clearly defined by further criteria, terms like ‘outstanding’ and ‘excellent’ do help students and staff to understand what their work needs to look like if it is going to get a first-class mark in the case of the students,  or a ‘4-star’ in the case of academics’ research. (4-star is the highest mark a piece of research or research impact can get in the REF. Don’t ask me what the star is needed for; the lowest mark aside from ‘unclassified’ is 1-star.  I suppose mere numbers from 1 to 4 sound rather uninspiring!).  But by labelling evaluation and award processes with reference to the highest and hardest standards attainable within them we imply that work which is still very good or indeed ‘good enough’ is not worth very much at all. This doesn’t make sense for the real world.  I’d rather work with (or for) a colleague whose overall work is good enough than with (or for) a colleague who is ‘excellent’ at one or two things but not good enough at all the other stuff that is required of them.

‘Ever to Excel’?  On toilet signs and Homer

‘Try to be outstanding at everything all the time’ could be a translation of aien aristeuein (αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν),  my university’s ancient Greek motto. It literally means ‘always to be the best’.  Like other institutions which use the motto worldwide, our corporate communications people prefer to render it as ‘Ever to Excel’.  This retains the economy of the Greek and reproduces its catchy alliteration. It is also brief enough to fit onto all manner of university-branded material.  It has even appeared on  our toilet signage (see below).  As a 57-year-old man with an enlarged prostate, I like the (perhaps unintended) motivational message this conveys to the entrant.

Where does our Greek motto come from?  It is actually from Homer’s Iliad.  That means it was probably first written down about 2,700 years ago.  But the University of St Andrews has only been using it since 1773.  And while ancient Greek precepts have a venerable history and continuing presence in several Scottish universities, I am pretty sure that St Andrews is the only UK university to have an ancient Greek one as its official motto.  Latin ones are the norm.

There are two specific places in Homer’s Iliad where aien aristeuein crops up: book 6 and book 11. I only have space and time to talk about the first of them.

The book 6 example occurs in a speech delivered by Glaucus, a Lycian hero and ally of the Trojans. He is addressing his words to the formidable Greek hero Diomedes whom he has just encountered on the battlefield. Diomedes has not seen Glaucus before among the enemy and  demands to know who he is.  Glaucus’ reply is lengthy because he has to demonstrate to Diomedes that he is from a noble line of heroes which stretches back over many generations. In other words, he will be no pushover should Diomedes start to fight him.  Having told the sad story of his grandfather Bellerophon, Glaucus ends by mentioning what his father, Hippolochus, said to him before he set off for Troy (Homer Iliad 6.207-211, trans, Peter Green):

‘He sent me to Troy, and repeatedly urged upon me
always to be the best, preeminent over others,
nor ever to shame the line of my ancestors,
by far the finest in Ephyrē and in all broad Lycia.
This is the bloodstock, the lineage I’m proud to claim as mine.’

Diomedes’ response to all this is not what first readers of the poem might expect. It turns out that Oineus, his grandfather, had entertained Bellerophon for twenty days in his palace. The two men became best pals and  ‘gave each other the fine gifts of guest-friendship’ (6.218). Diomedes declares that this historic friendship between their two families trumps current hostilities and that they should avoid fighting each other at all costs for the rest of the war.  But he also proposes that the two men swap their armour so that all will know that ‘we declare ourselves to be guest-friends from ancestral times’ (231). Homer then comments that Zeus must have stolen Glaucus’ wits when he agreed to this exchange because the armour he swapped with Diomedes ‘was gold for bronze, one hundred oxen’s worth for nine’ (236).

Diomedes (on the left) exchanging weapons with Glaucus, a captain of the Lycian army. Attic red-figure pelike vase by the Hasselmann Painter, ca. 420 BC. From Gela, Nocera Colletion. Stored in the Museo Regionale Archaeologico in Gela.

Scholars debate what is going on here and I can’t go into all that now.  I do wonder, though, whether Glaucus’ error of judgement signals some critique of the excellentist ideology and pressure which his father places on his son.  (Indeed, this excellentism suffuses the entire poem and causes much conflict and pain; in book 11, we learn that Achilles’ father also told him aien aristeuein as he set off for Troy).  Glaucus is trying so hard to match one of the best of the Greek heroes and to not shame his ancestral lineage that he does something which ends up with him being memorialized in epic song as a very un-excellent dumb ass!

On the other hand, we could argue that Glaucus knows precisely what he is doing when he agrees to the exchange.  Truly heroic excellence of character consists in reaffirming historic bonds of peace and friendship, regardless of the material losses one might incur from such an act.  If you think Diomedes has come out on top here, you don’t understand what being one of ‘the best’ really means. Of course, that would mean that the Homeric narrator himself has missed the point.  But the history of fiction offers many examples of narrators who are clearly getting the wrong end of the stick about the story they are telling.

Either way, both here and elsewhere, the Iliad explores the complexities and costs of heroic ‘excellentism’ in ways which aren’t well captured by the excerption of one of its phrases as a motto.

Given the problems of excellentism, should we get rid of ‘Ever to Excel’ as our university’s motto?  I don’t think so.  For a start, it would rob me of those enjoyable moments when my students discover for the first time that this motto is from the Iliad and that its sentiment has a very complex and interesting framing in the poem.  And in discussing the motto a little with some former colleagues and students from St Andrews, I’ve come to see that it is much loved. In fact, it seems to mean different things to different members of the university community. One person has told me that they always appreciated the motto because it could be interpreted as a message from the university which sends a ‘wish for the best’ to its students.  They contrasted this with ‘floreat domus’, the motto of some Oxbridge colleges. The Latin here means ‘may the house (i.e. the college) flourish’.  This was felt to prioritize the finances and health of the institution over and above anything else, including the flourishing of the students who pass through it.

I suppose that all mottos are problematic in one way or another.  But I hope this piece has at least helped you to reflect on whether ‘best’ is in fact always best.

This is why I haven’t posted a blog for a long time.

As I begin to contemplate returning to work in September, I thought I’d use the blog as a way of starting to write academic prose again.  But it doesn’t feel appropriate for the first thing I write after Katherine’s death to be just another blog post about ancient and modern political culture (etc.).

In the hope of writing something more fitting, I yesterday turned to ancient Greek and Roman texts which, in one way or another, deal with the themes of loss, mourning and grief.

First, I read some of Cicero’s letters to Atticus, which deal with the loss of his daughter Tullia, in 45 BCE.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt more sympathy for Cicero: he has to repeatedly defend his decision to deal with his grief by staying busy with his writing in the country, and out of the public eye.  The extent to which Cicero is clearly expected to control his grief and display his fortitude in public discloses the toxicity of male, elite Roman public culture at this time.  To be sure, Cicero is engaging in expedient self-fashioning in these letters. And his point that he doesn’t have any current public status or worth to console him seems plain weird to this modern reader – even if it is occasioned by Atticus’ ham-fisted attempts at consolation and ‘bucking-up’. But there’s a substrate of genuine pain seeping between the lines of Cicero’s letters about his daughter and her never-to-be-built public shrine.

Then I re-read Euripides’ tragedy Alcestis.  This is the text I want to focus on for the rest of this post.

Alcestis is about a wonderful, smart wife and mother (Alcestis) dying an untimely death and the consequences of that for her husband (Admetus) and children.  But if you Google this play, you’ll see that it’s one of those ancient dramas whose premise, plot and patriarchal assumptions render it very ‘unrelatable’ to many a modern reader.  And in any case – *spoiler alert* –  Alcestis gets brought back from the dead by the hero Heracles.

If only …

On the other hand, the scenes of the play which depict Alcestis’ final day and her last few exchanges with her husband and children do speak to the pathos and pain of losing a loved one in any era. Just one example: when Alcestis returns from his wife’s funeral to his palace, he dreads the emptiness it will disclose to him:

Whatever shall I do?

The emptiness indoors will drive me outside,

when I see my wife’s bed

and the chairs on which she used to sit unoccupied.

The ‘not-being-in-that-chair’ or the ‘not-being-on-that-side-of-the-bed’ which one contantly notices in the days and months after the loss of a loved one, and which can trigger deep emotions of sorrow and emptiness: this is very well observed.

Admetus’ initial pain and sense of loss must have resonated even more, and certainly more widely, with an original ancient audience for whom the untimely death of wives and mums was a much more common occurrence than it is for we lucky moderns who have access to the miracles of modern medicine and healthcare.  (That said, our current experience of a pandemic plague has surely led to more such deaths. And I’ve been surprised at how many friends and colleagues have revealed to me that they lost a wife, mum, dad, brother, or sister far too early in relation to late 20^th century and early 21^st century norms around life expectancy).

Another thing to bear in mind with Alcestis, and as several scholars have noted: it’s partly a play about the way in which expectations and norms around grief and mourning can clash with customary practices of hospitality.  Heracles arrives en route to another of his ‘labours’ at Admetus’ palace just after Alcestis’ funeral.  Admetus is wearing clothes of mourning, but he pretends that they have just had the funeral of another person, not his wife or a close relative, so that the hero can feel able to accept the king’s offer of bed and board.  Admetus later explains this pretence to the play’s bemused Chorus:

It would have been one more misfortune,

on top of those we already have,

for my household to gain a reputation

for turning away guest-friends.

And whenever I pay a visit to thirsty Argos,

I myself find him [i.e. Heracles] the best of hosts.

These strong norms around reciprocal hospitality and ‘guest-friendship’ are a product of an ancient society where long-distance travellers could be in a real bind if they found themselves turned away by a household.  Despite these norms, it’s clear that Heracles wouldn’t have stayed the night if he’d known that it was Alcestis who’d died.  And yet, Admetus feels that it’s better for his future standing, reputation and his own ‘being-in-the-social-world’ to put Heracles’ needs above his own raw grief.  And that prioritizing of hospitality pays off handsomely: Heracles gets Alcestis back from Hades when he learns the truth and wants to do something to make things right.

This all seems a world away from modern norms and expectations.  Thank goodness I don’t feel obligated to play host at the moment, unless I really want to.

But this aspect of the play isn’t wholly irrelevant to my current experience either.  I really don’t like to appear rude in any circumstances. And I’m normally quite gregarious and hostly.  And yet my own and my family’s grief have meant that sometimes we want to see people and sometimes we don’t.  Sometimes we want to share our memories of Katherine and sometimes we just want to be on our own with them. Very often, as the novelist Julian Barnes put it in a BBC interview about his own experience of losing his wife, ‘you just don’t know what you want’.  That makes it hard to make plans around offering or accepting hospitality.

On the other hand, the great kindness, concern, and generosity shown to me and my family from all quarters in response to our loss surely demand reciprocity and recognition of some kind, at some point. People who are grieving can’t opt out of the necessary reciprocal work which constitutes their community and social networks forever. Indeed, it wouldn’t be in their own best long-term interests to do so.  Alcestis explores the importance of such reciprocal obligations at the same time as it acknowledges the difficulty of negotiating your way through them them in times of mourning.

As for its specific depictions of, and observations about, the death and loss of a loved one, the Alcestis is at times a very weird read for someone in my position. Some parts of the text seem deeply insensitive and alien. In the aftermath of his wife’s funeral, for example, Admetus argues that she’s actually better off than he is:

I regard my wife’s lot as happier than my own,

despite appearances. She will never again be touched by pain,

and she has left behind all the tribulations of life in glory,

whereas I, who should not be alive and have escaped my fate,

will live a miserable life.  I see this now.

Now, the idea that the dead are at peace and no longer suffering is a familiar theme of consolation in both ancient and modern cultures.  It’s especially apposite when the person who died was ill and/or in some pain before they died.   Both here and elsewhere in the play, there’s a further point adumbrated which most of us can ‘get’: when people of good character and deeds die, the memory and ‘glory’ of who they were, how great they were, and what good things they did, lives on through the memorializing words and work of the living.

But the claim that Alcestis’ ‘lot’ (at the point that she is thought to have died forever) is better than Admetus’ is one which serves to remind me that the ‘thought world’  of ancient Greek texts and culture is often very different to that of ours (or to mine, at least).  Even as an exaggerated ‘in the moment’ expression of one’s grief, it seems beyond the pale to me for Admetus to suggest that he’s worse off than his dead wife.! This would remain true even without the specific plot point that his wife Alcestis has agreed to die in place of Admetus –  an arrangement made possible by Apollo which Admetus now bitterly regrets going along with.  The advantages of cheating his fated death turn out to be illusory.

The idea that the dead are better off than the living loved ones they leave behind coheres with another thought which Admetus comes out with elsewhere in the play, and which grieving characters and Choruses often express in Greek tragedies: namely that it would have been better never to have even met and married the husband or wife who you’ve just lost in the first place.  Mothers and fathers in Greek tragedy sometimes wish they’d never given birth to the child they are now mourning the death of.  And it’s a thought which goes back to Homer’s Iliad: when she learns that husband Hector has been killed by Achilles, Andromache explictly says that she wishes that she’d never even been born.

These thoughts are perhaps understandable as articulations of the extreme pain of grief: it’s so unbearable that you wish for another possible world in which the conditions of the possibility of the relationship you’ve now lost were never even met in the first place.  And it would be wrong of me to claim that this kind of thinking is alien to modern experience just because it’s alien to me.  After all it’s right there in one of the most famous modern popular songs of all time: ‘I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all’, sings the late, great Freddie Mercury on Queen’s classic hit, Bohemian Rhapsody.  But my version of this ‘wishing things were otherwise’ is crucially (if boringly) different.  Never at any point do I, or did I,  wish I’d never met and married my wife. What I wish is that she hadn’t fallen ill and died.

So, it seems so shocking to me, right now, to hear a Greek epic or tragic character or chorus wish that they had never married the dead spouse or had the dead son or daughter.  How could one want to erase one’s timeline with the person one loved and whom one now misses so much?  Surely the present pain is an indicator of what was precious about that timeline, and what it has provided in the way of past happiness and future happiness (via children, memories, achievements etc.)?

But one does have to reflect that in ancient Greek culture, and especially for ancient Greek women, the loss of their relative could be much more radically life-changing for the grieving survivor than it is for we moderns in liberal and relatively affluent situations. If you are dependent on a spouse or a grown-up child for your own economic well-being, personal safety, and social inclusion, then it becomes more understandable that their death might make you wish you could erase your current timeline altogether.

Dominic Cummings leaves Downing Street on 13th November 2020. Image: Sky News.

Boris Johnson seems to have been very reliant on Dom’s advice, ideas and vision.  But it’s hard to know the true nature and extent of his influence over the PM and the rest of government.  It suits critics and opposition parties to exaggerate the power wielded by unelected advisers, especially when they ‘become the story’ in the way that Dominic did. The Barnard Castle debacle does suggest his indispensability at that stage of the Covid crisis.  But Cummings’ controversial presence at the heart of government was undoubtedly useful as ‘political cover’ at times.  He drew a lot of fire away from the PM and his ministers.

Classical Athenian politicians also had egg-headed advisers.  And it looks as if the ancients were no less fascinated (and distracted) by their influence than we are with our own government’s special advisers and spin doctors.  Historical sources often mention them in the context of a ‘game-changing’ decision or policy which they brought about.  So, in the next few posts, I am going to bring you my 5 top-level nerdy political advisers to Athenian democratic politicians, complete with notes of caution about whether we should believe all that we read about them. They are arranged chronologically: it’s not really a ‘top 5’ ranking to be honest. And a list focused more generally on ancient ‘wise advisers’ would have different names on it.  So please don’t  @ me with ‘wot no Solon?’ etc.

1. Mnesiphilus (pronounced ‘Mness ee fill us’: if you’re on a Christmas Zoom party with your mates, it’s time to ease up on the Prosecco if you can’t say this name one syllable at a time).

A painting of the Battle of Salamis by artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1804–1874). Date: 1862. Oil on canvas, approx. 5 × 9m. Munich, Maximilianeum Collection.

Just before the battle of Salamis (480 BCE), this chap advised the great Athenian political leader and general Themistocles to assert his influence with the allies in order to prevent their planned retreat to the Isthmus. Or so says Herodotus (8.57). Having laid out the tactical reasons why Salamis is a good place to stay to engage the Persian fleet, Mnesiphilus spells out the situation with Cummingsian bluntness: ‘this is a stupid plan, which will spell the destruction of Greece.’ He tells Themistocles that he has to ‘find a way to reverse the decision – to persuade Eurybiades to change his mind and stay here’. Eurybiades was the Spartan commander of the fleet of the Greek confederation.  Themistocles immediately takes Mnesiphilus’ advice without even replying to him. Thanks to a combination of his own rhetorical skill – he threatens to withdraw the Athenian fleet from the confederation if the withdrawal plan continues –  and Eurybiades’ fear of having to face the enemy without the Athenians – the Greeks all stay at Salamis and win their famous victory.

Later writers represented Mnesiphilus as a teacher of practical wisdom in the tradition of Solon and as an adviser and friend of Themistocles (Plutarch Themistocles 2.6; Moralia 795c). 12 pot sherds with his name on them show that in 487/6 BCE Mnesiphilus was nominated to be ostracised [link] from the city.  Whether this means he was politically active or was just regarded with suspicion because of his connections with Themistocles is impossible to say.

We’d be right to question the historical veracity of Mnesiphilus’ epoch-making intervention over Salamis. In Herodotus, this is his only appearance and mention.  And it may be that this story comes from a ‘fake news’ source hostile to Themistocles: if Mnesiphilus was known to be one of Themistocles’ close advisers, this story was a good way of detracting from Themistocles’ alleged self-generated cleverness and cunning. Furthermore, Mnesiphilus’ language (‘stupid planning’: aboulia) taps into one of the big narrative themes of classical Greek history writing: the importance of good decision-making and practical planning (euboulia) in political and military affairs and the difficulty of achieving them.

On the other hand, you could argue that this story actually makes Themistocles look good. Unlike certain Homeric forebears (Agamemnon, Hector…) and the autocratic Persian king Xerxes in Herodotus’ own narrative, Themistocles actually listens to good expert counsel and saves Greece as a result.

But it’s perhaps less important to worry about whether this episode really happened or not than it is to reflect on what signals it might have sent to its first Athenian readers at the other end of the fifth century BCE.  One of the positive aspects of Athens’ direct democracy when it worked well was that its citizens had good mechanisms for listening to, and acting upon, the advice of other citizens with authentic relevant experience, expertise and practical wisdom. But one of its negative aspects was the ease with which that sort of advice could be drowned out by rhetorically beguiling and stirring arguments in favour of a much more stupid and ill-informed course of action.

Our feelings about the likes of Dominic Cummings shouldn’t lead us to think that all unelected experts and advisers are a bad thing for democratic governance and good planning.

Nerd number 2 will be a clever bloke who advised Pericles called Damon!  Bet you can’t wait…

But in some cases, those leaders of places which have done, or are doing, badly also seem to have convinced themselves that their country would fare better than others.  The psychological tendency to ‘hope for the best’ rather than ‘plan for the worst’ is very human and understandable.  As individuals, as a community or as a nation, we can be overconfident about our prospects despite plenty of evidence that real trouble lies ahead.  Cognitive scientists call this ‘optimism bias’.  Their experiments and observations document a tendency to underestimate the costs and durations of projects, to ‘focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck’ and to ‘focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know’ (Kahneman, 2011, p. 259).* Optimism bias often leads to the underestimation of risks when decision-taking.  Occasionally, such errors of calculation can nevertheless result in beneficial innovations and successes. But they can also cause projects and policies to fail disastrously, take too long or cost too much.

The ancient Greeks understood the psychological and ideological value of positive thinking about future risks and opportunities.  But they also knew the importance being realistic.  The ancient Greek word for ‘hope’ is elpis but it is often best rendered as ‘expectation’: one can have elpis of good outcomes but also elpis of bad ones. In the famous myth of Pandora as told by Hesiod, she opened a jar left in her care containing sickness, death and many other unspecified evils which were then released into the world. Though she was quick to close the container, only one thing was left behind inside: elpis. The symbolism and meaning of this are not clear. Scholars continue to debate the problem.  But on any interpretation, the myth illustrates the Greeks’ sense that the managing of expectations was a really significant part of what it meant to be human.

As for ‘optimism bias’, well, in their own way, the ancient Greeks already knew about this tendency too, and they used the format of mass entertainment to discuss it.  In Euripides’ tragedy The Suppliant Women, a play performed before and audience of thousands of citizens of Athens’ democracy, there is a debate between Theseus, the mythical king of Athens, and a Theban herald who has come to tell him that the tyrant of Thebes, Creon, will not give back the unburied bodies of the Argives’ dead, following a battle between Argos and Thebes. (Theseus has intervened on behalf of Argos’ grieving mothers and their king).  The herald warns Theseus against proposing war against Thebes to the people of Athens (476–91, trans. James Morwood):

Take thought, and do not, in your rage at my
words on the grounds that you have a free city,
make a puffed-up answer, when you have less to be confident about.
For we should not trust in the hope (elpis) which has engaged many cities
in conflict, urging their passions to excess.
For whenever war comes to be voted on by the people,
no-one any longer reckons on his own death
but assumes that this disaster will come to someone else.
If death were before the eyes when the vote is cast,
Greece would never be suffering destruction in its madness for war.

The herald’s vivid point is that citizens of Greek cities would not so readily vote for a war if they had death before their eyes and did not entertain the over-confident expectation that someone else, and not they themselves, would die in that war. This very closely matches some of the alleged symptoms of what we now call ‘groupthink’: for example, its tendency to create illusions of invulnerability which in turn encourage excessive risk-taking. But it especially brings out that aspect of optimism bias wherein decision-makers neglect the operations of chance and ‘unknowns’ in their calculations of risk.

In Suppliant Women, Theseus does lead his Athenians into battle with the Thebans and he successfully retrieves the unburied bodies whilst refraining from sacking Thebes once that objective is secured.  But the play’s early scenes also explore the gung-ho optimism which influenced Argos’ king to agree to an attack on Thebes, despite the warnings of oracles and prophets.  And it’s fascinating that the audience of this play – full of Athenian men who themselves regularly debated and voted on whether or not to go to war  – are confronted with the role that ‘optimism bias’ might be playing in their own life-and-death deliberations.

Tragedy here seems to be offering food for thought for a society which often promoted a ‘hope for the best’ meme as a key component in its civic ideology military courage and manliness.  Here is the orator and politician Demosthenes describing the Athenian troops who fought in battles to support the Thebans and Corinthians in the 390s BCE (On the Crown 97, trans. adapted from Stephen Usher’s):

They were willing to expose themselves to the dangers for the sake of their good name and honour; and their decision was right and noble! […]  It is the duty of the brave men to engage in every noble enterprise that comes their way, with good hope (agathē elpis) as their shield, and to bear with noble heart whatever outcome the god imposes.

One of my hopes is that our own playwrights and screenwriters are soon able to take a leaf out of Euripides’ book when they come to tell the story of this pandemic.   They need to explore and expose the biases, wrong assumptions and dangerous habits of thought which have led to unnecessary deaths and suffering.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course, but tragic storytelling helps us to appreciate how error-prone we are and where the points of failure have occurred.  Without that appreciation, we’ll find it hard to do any better next time.**

*Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London and New York: Penguin.

** You can read more on Euripides’ (and Thucydides’) exploration of what cognitive and behavioural scientists call ‘biases’ and ‘heuristics’ in my open access article here.

I have written before about the way in which lawcourt trials from ancient democratic Athens resonate with some very recent examples of  hubris on the part of certain powerful, wealthy and famous public figures.  But this latest example is in a league of its own.  And one thing’s for sure: although Dominic Cummings got a First in Ancient and Modern History from Oxford, and Boris Johnson has a 2.1 in Classics from the same university, neither of them seems to have learned a key lesson which the texts of Athenian forensic oratory repeatedly convey to anyone who is in the business of ensuring that rules created to ensure public security and safety in times of crisis are successfully adhered to.

Let’s look at Lysias’ speech 14 as just one example. This is a prosecution speech written for a client in a case brought by a team of Athenian citizens against Alcibiades the younger (son of the famous Alcibiades), probably in 395 BC.  Alcibiades stood accused of dereliction of military duty, a very serious offence in an ancient city-state which had no professional standing army. In classical Greece, free adult citizens were required to answer the call to fight in defence of their city, because they were the only ones who enjoyed the full rights and privileges which came with their citizen status.  If you refused to serve, you could be prosecuted (this was called astrateia). And once you were in a battle, you knew you could be prosecuted for lipotaxion (‘leaving the ranks’) if you decided to retreat without being ordered to do so.

Now, Alcibiades hadn’t deserted the front line in the heat of battle.  Rather, the formal charge was that he was called up to serve as a hoplite (heavy-armed infantry) but had dodged that official draft by blithely joining the cavalry instead, and without observing a strict requirement that all prospective cavalry officers first pass through a public scrutiny procedure.  Now, there are a few things that you need to know here: cavalrymen came from the wealthiest class of Athenian citizens; the cavalry class were often under suspicion of having colluded in the short-lived but bloody oligarchic coup of 404/3 BC; and ‘hoplite phalanx’ warfare was seen as much more cool and ‘down with the people’ than fighting on horseback. ‘Cavalry class’ citizens would sometimes make it clear in court cases that they had on occasion served with the lower-class heavy hoplite infantry, because that kind of fighting was seen as much more dangerous, altruistic and courageous than charging around on a horse with your posh mates. (This was a bit of an exaggeration: cavalrymen did get killed too, and their actions were sometimes crucial to military success).

But if it sounds to us as if Alcibiades had done something that was not that bad – to have bent the rules a little rather than engaging in outright draft-dodging – think again, and read this extract from Lysias’ prosecution speech:

You should bear in mind that if everybody is allowed to do whatever he likes, there will be no point in having laws, or meeting as an Asssembly, or electing generals.  I am surprised, gentlemen of the jury, that anybody thinks it right to convict someone assigned to the front line who retreats to the second line under enemy attack, but to pardon a person assigned to the hoplites who is found in the cavalry.  In my opinion, gentlemen, you are judging cases not simply on account of individual defendants but so as to encourage improvement among those whose discipline is poor.  If you punish those who are unknown, none of the others will behave better, because nobody will hear about the offences you have condemned; but if you punish the most prominent among the criminals, everybody will know, and as a result, the citizens will heed this example and become better. (Trans. Stephen Todd)

This is the first part of the lesson which Dom and Boris seem not to have got, and it comes up again and again in different Athenian trial speeches: rules are rules and noone can be seen to be exempt – especially if they are known to everyone in the country. If well-known, prominent rule-breakers are not punished, then everyone will see this.  Others who are disposed towards similar rule-breaking behaviour will think that the city’s threats of legal sanction are not credible.  But if well-known rule-breakers are punished, then the threat of legal enforcement is credible.  That, in turn, encourages discipline in the relevant area of activity.

But Lysias’ speaker hasn’t finished.  He goes on to talk about the hoplites who did obey the call to go into the draft in question, and addresses the mass jury as if some of them were part of it:

Bear in mind, gentlemen of the jury, that some of the soldiers were sick, and others lacked the necessities of life. The former would gladly have remained and been treated in their communities, the latter would gladly have returned home to look after their affairs, others would gladly have fought as light-armed troops, and others would gladly have faced danger among the cavalry.  Nevertheless, you did not dare to abandon the ranks or choose what you pleased. Instead, you feared the laws of the city much more than the danger of facing the enemy. Now you must remember this and cast your vote and make clear to everybody that those Athenians who are unwilling to fight the enemy will suffer very severely at your hands.

Here we can see some of the same reasoning which underpins the public anger being felt right now in the UK against Cummings and Johnson: in our case, lots of citizens had good reasons to break the ‘lockdown’ and thereby improve their own and their families’ physical, emotional and material wellbeing. But they stood their ground for the sake of the wider safety of the community and for the collective good of the country.  And they obeyed rules designed to encourage such behaviour and assist in its enforcement.

But the point here – and it is also made in other public speeches from Athens’ democratic lawcourts – is not just that Alcibiades has shown contempt and disregard for the sacrifice and public spiritedness displayed the men who did not shirk hoplite service.  More importantly, the relevant democratic authority – here embodied by a citizen jury  – must publicly punish anyone who has been found to have needlessly flouted a rule which enshrines a collective commitment to make sacrifices for the public good in a crisis.  Because when legal sanctions against such selfish behaviour lose their credibility, there is  a risk that individuals will no longer trust that their fellow-citizens really do have a firm commitment to make sacrifices for the greater good of the community.  And once that trust crumbles, people may well start reasoning that the sacrifice is pointless.

Johnson seems not to realize that in our attenuated and increasingly out-of-date version of democracy, he is the relevant authority with the power to shore up our commitment to the greater good. And he can only exercise that power by punishing Cummings very publicly.  By defending his senior adviser’s rule-breaking, Boris has effectively decided to undermine his own government’s strategy and messaging.

Luckily for all of us,  you don’t need to study Classics or have read some Lysias to understand this rather basic lesson.  I’m pretty sure that most of the UK dēmos gets it, and that they will stay more disciplined than their elected and unelected overlords for as long as is necessary.

Johnson is the only main party leader who has not done an in-depth long-format interview with the BBC’s veteran political journalist Andrew Neil.  It seems that the BBC went ahead with this series of interviews because it understood that Johnson would indeed sit down with Neil for a televised grilling, just as the other leaders have now done.  But the BBC never managed to get Johnson to agree a time and date for the interview.  And with less than two days to go before the polls open, Johnson is saying that he will not do the interview before the General Election.  In response, Andrew Neil did an extraordinary piece to camera.  Neil highlighted the atypicality and political significance of Johnson’s refusal to sit down with him:

‘Leaders’ interviews have been a key part of the BBC’s prime-time election coverage for decades. We do them, on your behalf, to scrutinise and hold to account those who would govern us. That is democracy.’

Neil goes on to point out that Johnson can’t be legally compelled to submit to this kind of  scrutiny.  And it is perhaps a weakness of modern British democracy that government ministers can, if they wish, avoid awkward questioning and truly forensic scrutiny to a remarkable degree. Between election campaigns, we do at least now have the select committee system.  Since 2010 these committees have been given more teeth (in order to restore some balance to the  relationship between the executive and the House of Commons).  And of course, all ministers are required to answer for their actions and policies when Parliament is sitting.

But it is only really via the media scrutiny which accompanies elections that a politician’s overall character, career history and track-record can be called to account. These days, however, it is possible to hide from such scrutiny or else to distract the scrutineers with ‘dead cat’ strategies and ‘fake news’ about opponents.  An individual politician’s track record of dishonesty and incompetence is easily masked by the wider canvas of party-political struggle.  Admittedly, Johnson nearly found himself prosecuted on the charge of ‘misconduct in a public office’ earlier this year. (This was over his side-of-a-bus £350 million claim during the 2016 referendum).  I might have missed something but, as far as I can see, no elected official has been successfully prosecuted for this very old and vague common law offence on the grounds that they knowingly made false statements or broke pledges to their voters.

In Classical Athenian democracy, it wasn’t so easy to hide from scrutiny and accounting.   Every public official had to submit to an examination of his conduct in office at the end of his term.  This was called a euthunē: literally, it means ‘the action of setting straight’.

If the official had been responsible for managing public money he had to present his accounts to a board of ten logistai  (‘accountants’).  But in all cases, he had to gain approval for the way in which he’d used his powers to a board of ten euthunoi (‘straighreners’) appointed by the Council.  Any citizen could use this process to raise objections to the official’s conduct in office. It was up to the euthunoi whether the complaint was dismissed or passed on to the democracy’s courts.  In the fifth century BCE, it was not uncommon for fines to be issued when accounts were found wanting or complaints were upheld. In the fourth century BCE, the euthunē process was joined by another procedure called the eisangelia. This literally means ‘a laying of public information’ and, in cases when it was a public indictment used against public officials, it is often compared to the process of ‘impeachment’ in the United States of America.  An eisangelia could be brought against officials while they were still in office or even against prominent politicians who moved proposals in the Athenian assembly – remember that any citizen could author such proposals in Athens. You didn’t have to have been elected or appointed to do so.

Stele with a relief showing Democracy crowning Demos (the people of Athens), ca. 337 B.C. Athens, Agora Museum, I 6524.

In Athens, even powerful elected leaders (stratēgoi) such as Themistocles and Pericles only had a single-year term of office at a time (although, like our bloody Prime Ministers, they could go on getting re-elected!).  Alongside the less-used-than-you’d-think process of ‘ostracism’, this short term of office also created some level of accountability.

None of which is to say that Athenian democracy was free of lying and corruption on the part of its officials, elected leaders and self-appointed demagogues.  But its evolving procedures of ensuring close scrutiny and accountability are testament to the Athenians’ sensible understanding that ‘the people’ (the dēmos) can only maintain their ‘grip’ (kratia) on power if their officials and leaders are subject to credible and regular tests of their honesty and competence.  If politicians can now evade such tests from both our traditional and social media, then we might need to beef up our legal-constitutional mechanisms for ‘straightening’ the dodgy ones like Mr Johnson.

I do sometimes wonder whether Johnson is all too aware that we don’t have anything in place quite like the Athenians’ processes of euthunē and eisangelia.  Catching him in a revealing moment on the campaign trail and making sure it goes viral isn’t going to cut it, after all.

UCU members on strike over pay and pensions marched towards the Universities UK headquarters on 4 December. Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images

University academics’ contracts are very vague – they do not stipulate maximum weekly working hours or say much about what work is ‘compulsory’, as opposed to ‘voluntary’.  On one reading of UCU’s guidelines, I should not even be writing blog posts.  ASOS means I am not to perform ‘additional voluntary duties, such as out of hours cover, or covering for colleagues (unless such cover is contractually required)’.  This and my next blog post might well be ‘an additional voluntary duty’: nobody in my university’s  management is going to tell me I’m in breach of contract if I don’t publish a blog post during the period of ASOS.  On the other hand, this blog is part of my general responsibility to do public engagement and outreach work (including the achievement of ‘impact’ as defined by the UK Research Excellence Framework – REF). That responsibility is also factored into my School’s current workload model.  Because I am doing a lot of work for one of our REF impact case studies, I get some other kinds of labour taken off me: a sure sign that the impact activity work is ‘core’ rather than ‘voluntary’.   Mind you, the REF case study is more to do with ancient drama than rhetoric or politics.  So, I’ve mentioned my work on ancient drama at the end of this post so that I can more securely class it as non-voluntary work.  If you follow up and read those links about drama, it will help to define my labour as purely ‘to contract’.  Thanks in advance.

Another problem with blogging while taking ASOS: it is hard to know what my maximum ‘to contract’  weekly hours should be.  Should I define my ‘to contract’ working hours as 36.25 per week? This is the figure for full-time employment quoted in my University’s policy documents, and yet it is a figure which it is hard for academics not to exceed by quite some way on a regular basis when they are working normally. Or should I go for 48 hours per week? This is the maximum number of hours per week stipulated in the Working Time Regulations 1998, and it is the ‘upper limit’ figure mentioned in UCU advice to their academic and academic-rated members about taking ASOS.

I am currently going for the 36.25 hours: that’s 7 hours and 15 minutes a day, from Monday to Friday.  This is on the grounds that roughly ‘one-third of a Mary Beard’ sounds about right for a UCU member who is not ‘a mug’ and yet is taking part in ASOS.  On either definition of ‘contracted hours’, though,  writing for this blog uses up some of those hours in such a way that arguably even more ‘compulsory’ and essential work I have on my plate will be delayed even further than it already is.  Oh well:  causing delay and disruption is the point of ASOS, actually.

I think there’s a strong moral argument for using up some of my 36.25 hours to talk about Boris Johnson, Andrew Neil and Athenian democracy in my next blog post, even if does stretch the ASOS guidelines in my case.  Extraordinary times do call for extraordinary measures.  And my goodness, we really are witnessing some unusual episodes of the historical drama that is British democracy.

Three cast members of our ‘Greek Drama in the Community’ Project’ experiment with masks in the opening Chorus. Photograph: Ralph Anderson

Talking of drama, and while you’re here, I post below those aforementioned links to various projects, papers and resources which I’ve authored or had a hand in.  If you find them useful, and (especially) if they change your understanding or the way you do things (e.g. in your work as an educator or a theatre practitioner or a learner) do drop me a line by email to tell me how.  I’d also be interested to hear about what sort of resources or information you’d like to see on this blog or via links from it.  My things are: Homer, Greek Tragedy and Comedy (and modern re-imaginings of them), Athenian democracy, Greek oratory and rhetoric.  I also like to work with contemporary play-makers, performers and theatre educators.

• For a chapter-length introduction to the socio-political aspects of Greek and Roman Tragedy, see here [Jon Hesk ‘The Socio-political Dimension of Ancient Tragedy’, 2007, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre. McDonald, M. & Walton, J. M. (eds.). Cambridge University Press, p. 72-91.]
• For a couple of ‘open access’ recorded lectures (voice and powerpoint) which introduce you to Aristophanes’ Birds see here.
• For my lecture on ‘Morality, Politics and Religion in Euripidean Tragedy’ see this video and accompanying materials.
• For my lecture and materials on ‘Politics and Gender Conflict in Greek Drama’, see here.
• For some pdf resources for school teachers on Aristophanic Comedy see here: [the weird numbering of these resources is a reflection of the fact that there are more to come… eventually]
• Videos, brochure and blog posts concerning ‘Greek Drama in the Community’, an exciting ‘devised play’ project which myself and Ralph Anderson did with a local youth theatre group and their inspirational teacher Stephen Jones.
• My blog post/programme note on Zinnie Harris’ This Restless House: an amazing reworking of Aeschylus’ Oresteia  which was performed in Scotland in 2016 and 2017.

But Johnson’s fondness for citing (and often distorting) Greco-Roman myth and history is a distraction.  It’s his appetite for divisive and inflammatory rhetorical slogans at a time of profound crisis which should be the current focus of our concern.

Have Johnson and his Thucydidophiliac spin doctor learned anything from the ancient Greeks about the power of words?  Can we blame the influence of the Greeks for the calculated sloganeering? ‘Get Brexit Done’ and ‘Surrender Act’ are clearly sequels to the highly duplicitous ‘Take Back Control’ of 2016.    The same goes for appeals to ‘what real people want’ with its pernicious implication that hundreds of MPs, the Supreme Court, and millions of voters are inauthentic citizens and traitors. Is this strategy to divide and incite us all on the one hand, while claiming to be a ‘One-nation Conservative’ on the other, something we can lay at the door of famous ancient writers and rhetoricians?

Well, classical Greek writers and orators absolutely understood that words have consequences.  For example, the fifth-century intellectual and teacher of rhetoric Gorgias wrote this:

‘Speech is a great potentate, who by means of the tiniest and most invisible body achieves the most godlike results. For it is able to dispel fear, to assuage grief, to inculcate joy, and to evoke pity’.

He goes on to illustrate this observation with reference to various kinds of public speech: performed poetry, religious songs, magical incantations, persuasive speech, and ‘compelling contests of words in which one speech captures the fancy of the crowd and having been composed artfully persuades everyone, though it is spoken falsely’.   He then argues that the ‘power of speech’ affects the soul in the same way that different drugs act upon the body:

‘some [i.e drugs] put an end to sickness, some to life.  So some speeches induce grief, some joy, some fear, some instil courage in the audience, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a  kind of pernicious persuasion.’

This is all in the service of a designedly entertaining display of Gorgias’ rhetorical firepower, taking the form of a speech defending the actions of Helen of Troy.  The bigger point he’s making is that whatever caused Helen to go with Paris to Troy, she’s not to blame.  And that would be true even if she was merely persuaded by Paris’ words.

Now, Gorgias is having some fun with his audience here, and it was very much in the interests of so-called sophists like him to represent their expertise in the brand new technology of rhetoric as all-conquering.   But the basic assumption that carefully ordered prose, song, poetry or chants can alter our emotions and (hence) actions is at the heart of ancient Greek culture. It goes right back to Homer.  Another sophist and speech-writer called Antiphon was said to have started his career by selling his services as a highly effective grief counsellor before he realized what lay at the root of his skills: the art of verbal persuasion.

We might think that there’s a world of difference between the sort of seductive speechifying which Gorgias taught and the Johnson-Cummings approach.  The latter is about the relentless repetition of brief phrases which resonate with existing passions or else are carefully designed to whip up negative feelings towards those deemed to be obstructing Brexit: ‘Take Back Control’; ‘Get Brexit Done’; ‘Surrender Act’; ‘Collaboration’; ‘Betrayal’.   But these are incantations designed to drug our souls, precisely in the manner which Gorgias describes. They are seductively simple soundbites; slogans which simplify and grossly misrepresent the truth of our predicament. Their primary aim is to secure popular support for a no-deal or any-deal Brexit on 31^st October and to funnel votes for the Conservative Party at a date soon thereafter.  But they are bewitching some into issuing threats of violence against public figures.  The threats of murder and rape are on the increase.  An MP’s office has been attacked.

Words have consequences.

No less an orator than Demosthenes understood the power of rhetorical incantations.  In his many speeches aimed at changing Athenians’ attitude towards the threat of Philip of Macedon, he repeated the same language about the dangers of inaction and internal treachery. He used the same words again and again even as his wider arguments developed in response to Philip’s manoeuvres.

Bust of the Greek orator Demosthenes. Marble, Roman artwork, inspired from a bronze statue by Polyeuctos (ca. 280 BC). Found in Italy

Boris Johnson is no Demosthenes.  But he and his adviser need to see that their slogans are stirring dangerous emotions and actions which take us way beyond the realms of harmless and legitimate electoral-political discourse.

To donate to, or get involved in, the Jo Cox Foundation, go here.

* For the lack of fit between Johnson’s aspirations and the world of the Greeks whom he professes to admire, you can read this entertaining recent blog-post from Prof. Richard Seaford.    On Johnson’s mediocre grasp of classical antiquity, you can read this trenchant take-down from Prof. Edith Hall.  There also also a lot of insightful cross-platform commentary (e.g this) on Mr Johnson’s many flaws from Prof. Mary Beard.  On Dominic Cummings and Thucydides, see this by Prof. Neville Morley.