The many faces of cunning Ulysses

With Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey,' Matt Damon becomes the new face of Ulysses, a character whose portrayals stretch from the earliest artistic depictions by the ancient Greeks to his most recent cinematic incarnation — Ralph Fiennes in The Return (2024), by Uberto Pasolini — passing through Kirk Douglas’s iconic Ulysses in Ulysses (1954), by Mario Camerini, and Armand Assante’s in The Odyssey (1997), by Andrei Konchalovsky. Giving a single, definitive face and body to the beleaguered king of Ithaca, Ulysses or Odysseus, is not easy.

Homer’s physical descriptions of that shrewd man, “of many wiles,” in the Iliad and the Odyssey are not very precise. We are told he has “broad shoulders,” a wide, strong chest, and that he is of medium height: Priam describes him in Book III of the Iliad in the passage when, from the walls at the Scaean Gates, the king of Troy asks Helen to identify the Greek leaders, like a sports fan wanting to recognize the rival team. Helen compares him among the ranks of the Achaeans to a thick-fleeced ram moving through a flock of sheep. He is not handsome in the way the Trojan prince Paris is — the “godlike” Paris, “the best-looking” man of the whole war. Agamemnon towers a head above him.

But Ulysses has charisma; he commands respect as a warrior and, eloquent and persuasive, when he speaks. Tanned skin (the result of going to sea, fighting outdoors and, of course, living in the Bronze Age), we are told in Book VI of the Odyssey that he had thick hair, like the bloom of the hyacinth. And he projects the eroticism of what is now called a chad, an “alpha male sexually active” type, with a build like a quarterback.

If anyone saw Ulysses clearly, apart from Circe, Calypso, and Penelope — all of whom, goddess, nymph, and mortal respectively, slept with him — it was the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, with her beautiful braids, who found him naked on the beach (he took a leafy branch to cover “his male privates”). He made a good impression on the maiden and she thought he resembled “the gods who rule the broad sky:” love at first sight.

Essentially, you can imagine Ulysses with considerable freedom as long as you give him long hair tangled by sea wind and a helmet (preferably Corinthian), a beard —although Assante initially is clean-shaven and lets it grow later: a rare whiskerless Ulysses before departing for Troy — and cunning. Matt Damon’s version, with a sharply trimmed beard — quite chad if we move from the Homeric frame to the manosphere — seems inspired by the well-known depiction of the hero bound naked to his ship’s mast to hear the Sirens, painted on an Attic vessel (stamnos) dated to 480 B.C. and displayed at the British Museum. A cup (skyphos) from the same period and museum shows Odysseus with curly hair, drawing his bow to slaughter his wife’s suitors, and on another jar he is shown thrusting the stake into Polyphemus’s eye while wearing a short garment that exposes the aforementioned “male privates” (which are not epic; hardly Chad Thundercock).

In the Sirens sequence, Kirk Douglas’s Ulysses, by contrast, closely resembles the famous painting by Herbert James Draper, Ulysses and the Sirens, in which the fabulous creatures are genuine mermaids, Andersen-style sirens, far more attractive than those on the Greek vase, which were canonically depicted as unattractive birds with human heads. The film, the script for which involved Ben Hecht and Irwin Shaw, holds up well despite some blunders such as portraying Polyphemus’s sheep at full scale (which made it impossible to get the passage right in which Ulysses and the other survivors escape clinging to the fleece from the animals’ bellies) and having the cyclops shout when the stake is driven into him “my eyes, my eyes!” in the plural. This Ulysses, produced by Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis and considered by some experts, like Rafael de España, the best adaptation of the Odyssey and “one of the finest films about the ancient world,” offered other major attractions beyond Kirk Douglas, such as Silvana Mangano in a dual role — and what an image — playing both Penelope and Circe, Rossana Podestà as Nausicaa (who would later star in Helen of Troy (1956), by Robert Wise, a film notable for one of the best wooden horses ever seen on screen), and Anthony Quinn as Antinous, the worst of the suitors, who would reestablish himself as a Greek a decade later when dancing the sirtaki in Zorba.

“Kirk Douglas’ is my favorite Ulysses,” writer and Hellenist Carlos García Gual, an academic with an extensive bibliography on the classics that includes titles featuring Ulysses such as Sirens and The Death of the Heroes, and author of an excellent translation of the Odyssey published by Alianza, tells this newspaper. “I think the actor’s adventurer look and roguish face suit the character very well.” Certainly, Damon will have The Martian and Jason Bourne to attest to his survival skills away from home and his fighting prowess, respectively. But Kirk Douglas, who took to the sword-and-sandal genre and later made Spartacus, had portrayed seafarers as adept as Ned Land and Einar, and the resourceful lighthouse keeper Will Denton, not to mention, on land, the brave Rolf in The Heroes of Telemark. García Gual has not yet seen Nolan’s Odyssey, but he likes what he has seen in the trailers and believes the director “has a sense of the epic” and that way of creating landscapes and fantastical worlds, as in Interstellar.

Does he think it’s difficult to bring Ulysses to the screen? “Well, you must reconcile the two central aspects of the character: the adventurer, the ‘polytropos,’ the one who takes many turns, and the storyteller, the man with an extraordinary sensitivity for telling tales. Ulysses is the great teller of stories, far more than Gulliver or Sinbad. And we mustn’t forget he is a charmer who wins women over.”

There is something sinister in him at times: one of his epithets is “destroyer of cities,” and the merciless way he disposes of the suitors — among them Eurynomos, whose brother, a traveling companion of Ulysses, was one of those eaten by the cyclops — and has the palace’s 12 maids hanged for fraternizing with them. “He can be a warrior, but what defines Ulysses is his cleverness rather than the use of force.”

The scholar is very eager to see how Nolan has represented the Sirens. In Douglas’s film they were not seen but heard, their voices ghostly like a Krzysztof Penderecki chorus (“you are in Ithaca”), while Ulysses’s ship —much better than Nolan’s, which looks like a Viking drakkar — passed the desolate rocks, worthy of Böcklin’s island, covered in skeletons like a dreadful guano. They were also smelled (“a strange scent in the air, like dead flowers”).

Since we’re on the subject, what was it like translating the Odyssey? “A real experience. For me, it’s the great adventure book and I tried to be very faithful while avoiding the syrupy and archaizing tones of other translations. The Odyssey does not carry the tragic burden of the Iliad. It’s adventurous, fantastical, and women have a prominent role. How many women there are in the Odyssey!”

García Gual liked Ralph Fiennes’s portrayal of Ulysses quite a bit — sober, restrained, inward-looking, the gaze of someone who has seen cities burn and a body that is athletic yet ravaged, with muscles like strong ship’s ropes, someone who has fought savagely and faced countless dangers. Beyond the link between The English Patient and the ailing Ulysses, there is another with T. E. Lawrence: Fiennes played him in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence after Arabia (1992), and Lawrence, it is known, produced a highly praised, natural-sounding translation of the Odyssey.

The academic is pleasantly surprised by the excitement stirred by Nolan’s adaptation. “It’s funny, because it seems like we’re about to discover the Odyssey — a book that’s always been widely read — but anything that helps spread the word about the classics is a good thing.”

Another good Ulysses cinema has given us is Sean Bean’s in Troy, and it has been joked that it’s one of the rare roles in which the actor does not die. And not because Wolfgang Petersen didn’t disregard Homer and kill off people in the Trojan War who did not actually die there — like Menelaus (which removes the Odyssey scene in which he and Helen receive Telemachus) and Agamemnon (leaving us without the whole Oresteia). Bean is excellent as Ulysses, with a touch of pessimistic skepticism that suits him and lines like “you have your swords. I have my tricks” (to Achilles), “war is young men dying and old men talking,” “fear is useful,” or “sometimes you must serve if you want to lead.” We are left wanting to see him embark on the adventures of the Odyssey, from which Troy borrowed the episode of the wooden horse and the city’s fall — an event not in the Iliad (in the Odyssey Menelaus tells Telemachus, Ulysses’s son, of it when he lands in Sparta seeking information about his father’s whereabouts).

Assante’s Ulysses comes across as somewhat soft, although Konchalovsky’s Pasolini-tinged adaptation is very good and even shows the episode of the serpent devouring Laocoön, which is not easy even in sculpture. The hero’s ship appears to have a sail like that of the Kon-Tiki and the flying Hermes comes across as Peter Pan. The wonderful Greta Scacchi played Penelope and Isabella Rossellini Athena (the role Zendaya plays now). Irene Papas appeared as Ulysses’s mother.

Of course, Ulysses, who has appeared in films since the earliest days of cinema — the short The Isle of Calypso (1905), by Georges Méliès, with the filmmaker himself as the protagonist, or The Return of Ulysses (1908), in which he was played by Paul Mounet, a member of the Comédie-Française — has had other guises besides those mentioned. In 1911 Giuseppe De Liguoro played him with a Nebuchadnezzar-like air in the Italian silent film Homer’s Odyssey, whose floating, upturned-tailed Sirens are a sight to behold and which featured costumes and sets created by La Scala in Milan.

Yugoslav actor Bekim Fehmiu played Ulysses in Odissea (1969), by Franco Rossi, Mario Bava and Piero Schivazappa, with Papas as Penelope, Barbara Bach as Nausicaa, and the voluptuous Scilla Gabel as Helen of Troy. We can also add George Clooney’s turn in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of the Odyssey relocated to Depression-era Mississippi, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Ulysses has also appeared in operas and on stage, played very amusingly by Joglars (the troupe members shared the role), by Rafael “El Brujo” Álvarez, by Alberto Closas in Why Are You Running, Ulysses?, or by Manuel de Blas in Fernando Savater’s Last Landing, among many other productions.

Ulysses’s depiction in comics deserves separate mention. Milo Manara included him in The Odyssey of Giuseppe Bergman (Planeta): an impressive black silhouette taken directly from Greek pottery that hands his helmet to Manara’s modern traveler so he can live his experiences. Notable are the sensual flying Sirens. Lumen has now published, in the midst of “Odysseymania,” a volume with panels from The Odyssey of Giuseppe Bergman and other fascinating illustrations of the Homeric poem by Manara, who also produced an animated film for young people centered on Telemachus’s travels.

In a different style and in striking black and white, Martín Saurí drew, with a script by Pérez Navarro, his formidable version of the Odyssey (Norma, 2012, 25th-anniversary edition), in which Ulysses appears with a triangular beard and a flag-worthy body that no real actor could provide without AI or 300-style special effects. The women of the story, including the Sirens, are equal in stature. Not forgetting the classic comic Age of Bronze: A Thousand Ships, by Eric Shanower (Image, 2001), in which Ulysses is depicted with a very high forehead and pronounced receding hairline.

To finish, an emergency kit for approaching Nolan’s Odyssey: García Gual’s aforementioned translation of the Homeric poem; the comprehensive issue (67) of Desperta Ferro Arqueología e Historia dedicated to the Odyssey; the illustrated book from the same publisher, The Legend of Odysseus by Peter Connolly, which compiles the historicist reconstructions by the great illustrator of the Homeric myth; Stephen Fry’s rereading (Odyssey, 2024); and the delightful Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea by classicist and translator of the Odyssey Emily Wilson, which includes an indispensable chapter on that task (Translating the ‘Odyssey’) and a beautiful, illuminating chapter on Helen of Troy, debating her responsibility for the war and comparing the woman whose face launched a thousand ships (according to Marlowe) to Cinderella. And of course, always keep one of the small metal figurines of Greek warriors sold at the British Museum close at hand: Ulysses in your pocket, so you can look at his face all the time.

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