There’s no way that I can let Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey go by without having seen it or discussed it. For better or worse, it has people talking about this classic ancient story. As of now, The Odyssey hasn’t been released in theaters yet, but you better believe this will be the one movie I make myself go watch ASAP.

Until then, it’s a good time to take a closer look at the main character of the Odyssey and how he shows up in our world today, and how this “hero” is more likely to manipulate with a masterfully crafted tale than to do anything actually heroic.

Odysseus is no Gilgamesh or Heracles, with an imposing god-like figure. Neither is he an honest or chivalrous character like Arthur of the Round Table, nor is he a savior like Jesus of Nazareth.

He is a pathological liar, the first unreliable narrator in literature.

“...crowdpleasing, honeytalking, wordchopping Odysseus.”¹

Though he’s known for his wit, Odysseus’s cleverness should not be confused with actual wisdom. Cleverness here is closer to trickery and fraud than it is to true wisdom.

And as The Odyssey reenters the modern cultural discourse, it’s worth remembering cleverness’s less desirable traits, lest we get hoodwinked by Odysseus’s wiles and wish to be like him.

Or worse yet, get sucked into modern political figures who masterfully craft tales of their life, laced with truth and exaggeration, to build a platform.

Rhetoric as Spectacle of the Elite

A wealthy politician positioning themself as a “man of the people” and using personal mythmaking to draw sympathy is literally one of the oldest tricks in the book, thanks to Odysseus. And we see this happen across the aisle in the United States.

The sitting Vice President, J.D. Vance, knows this all too well, not only through his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy² (not to mention his second memoir, Communion, about his conversion to Catholicism, published on June 16th).

In Hillbilly Elegy, he writes about his upbringing in poverty in the Appalachian regions, and how he was able to leave that behind despite the “system being broken.” Here is Vance telling his version of the story after the fact, shaping his narrative to say that, despite how bad things are and how the government could help, at the end of the day, it’s up to individuals to fix their situation.

Of course, he leaves behind those in Appalachia who don’t look like him and simplifies a culture and its people into a stereotype of laziness, with unfortunate cases of natural disaster.

Outsiders of the region ate the book up, with thousands of copies sold and even more positive ratings on sites like Goodreads.

Hillbilly Elegy did a great job at reaching its true objective: building a platform for Vance and catapulting him into political stardom. It’s amazing how effective his “man of the people” position still holds with so many of his supporters, despite his Yale education, venture-capital backing, and continued support from Peter Thiel, a billionaire with more than his share of controversies and truly weird public appearances.

It goes to show how powerful personal storytelling and mythmaking can be when done well in front of the right audience.

The OG of Using Personal Mythmaking to Fleece an Audience

In the Odyssey, some of the most famous and fantastical parts of the story—like Odysseus tying himself to his ship’s mast to pass the Sirens, his outwitting of the Cyclops Polyphemus, or his time on Circe’s island after she transformed some of his men into pigs—are narrated by Odysseus himself to an audience he is dining with: the Phaeacians.

They are eager to hear more from this long-lost Trojan War hero, who mysteriously washed up on their shores, and his fantastical homecoming journey. In Book 9 of the Odyssey, Odysseus begins his tale when the king of the Phaeacians asks him who he is and what his deal is.

“Wily Odysseus, lord of lies, answered…”³

(Odysseus at the court of Alcinous, by Francesco Hayez 1815)

Odysseus tells the story of his journeys up to his arrival on the Phaeacian shores, including many explanations for why he, as the King of the Ithacans and the leader of a fleet of ships, is the sole survivor.

Including the devastating tale of receiving a gift from the god, Aeolus; a bag of divine wind that smoothly drives Odysseus’s ship. But after many days of steering the ship, Odysseus grows so sleepy that he must lie down. While he’s asleep, they come so close to Ithaca that the crew can see people on the shore. But before they can reach Ithaca, Odysseus’s crew grows resentful of their king and the divine gifts he gets and assumes Aeolus’s bag is filled with treasures that Odysseus is hiding from them.

Of course, the crew opens the bag, expecting to find silver and gold, but instead, the divine wind rushes out, blowing the ship all the way back to Aeolus’s island. Odysseus wakes up, but his men are the ones left holding the bag.

Aeolus, who couldn’t believe they fucked this up so magnificently, angrily demands that Odysseus and his men leave his island.

When Odysseus finished his extraordinary tale, a stunned silence fell over the Phaeacian audience, and they were spellbound by what they had just heard⁴. The Phaeacians happily give Odysseus everything he needs to get home, not to mention other fabulous gifts. Soon, the Phaeacians ready a ship, and the crew departs to drop Odysseus off on Ithaca and sail back.

Once on the ship, Odysseus falls asleep until they reach the shores of Ithaca. In what I assume is a way to be nice, the Phaeacians carry the sleeping Odysseus off the ship and deposit him on the Ithacan shores with all his new gifts, courtesy of the Phaeacian king, and set off back to their home.

But Poseidon, the “Earthshaking” God of the sea, saw the Phaeacians helping Odysseus, the Greek he hated most, and, taking their generosity personally, decided to punish them.

Not only did Poseidon punish the rowers on the ship by turning them and the ship to stone, he also anchored the ship so that the Phaeacians could still see it from their island but always wonder what happened to it. Not that they would have to wonder for long, since soon after, they had to beg for Poseidon’s mercy so that the angry god wouldn’t envelop their island in mountains.

Interestingly, Odysseus is conveniently asleep when both crews meet their demise at the hands of an angry god. Sure, he used his famous wit and excellent rhetoric to get what he wanted from both his crew (command over rowers to do the manual labor of getting this ship to Ithaca) and the Phaeacians (transportation and gifts). But who can blame Odysseus for the fates of the crew and the Phaeacians, right? It’s up to individuals to heed the demands of an angry and omnipotent god, riiiight?⁵

In Appalachia, thousands of years later, if we took Hillbilly Elegy at face value, we could gripe about the overall power structures in the United States, and the seemingly omnipotent power of the ultra-rich, but at the end of the day, it’s up to those individuals to make sure they stay safe and pull themselves out of poverty if they so choose. Perhaps if the people trapped in poverty in Appalachia, or anywhere in the country, did a better job of praying to the Christian God and kept themselves productive, they’d earn more blessings. After all, “idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” at least according to the saying.

Is JD Vance responsible for the fate of all people of Appalachia? Is it fair to blame the poverty that proliferates in the area solely on him? Of course not. The poverty there (and everywhere in the US, for that matter) is a result of decades of complex variables and circumstances. But to act as though his clever rhetoric has no negative impact, or as though he is not responsible for perpetuating harmful stereotypes and misconceptions about the area and its people, is absurd at best and damaging at worst.

In both Odysseus’s day⁶ and the modern age, societies, governments, and power structures are built around powerful, well-connected, and wealthy men: be it kings, lords, or, nowadays, CEOs. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for common people to hold elites accountable to their words or actions.

When the Rhetorical Spectacle Only Goes So Far

When not speaking to a raptured audience or talking down to his crew, Odysseus’s sparkling words lose their luster.

In Book 9 of the Iliad (during the Trojan War), Agamemnon, commander of the combined Greek⁷ armies, in a desperate attempt to get Achilles back to fighting for the Greeks, sends three men, including Odysseus, to persuade him.

Odysseus speaks to Achilles first, repeating all the goods and treasures that Agamemnon will give Achilles to make up for taking Briseis, the enslaved woman who was the catalyst for Agamemnon and Achilles’s spat. Odysseus, of course, adds his own special rhetorical flair in his speech.

Achilles immediately sees through Odysseus (and, through him, Agamemnon) and responds:

“I hate like Hades’ gates the man who hides one thought inside his heart and says another.”⁸

Achilles is referring to Agamemnon, but the line is applicable to Odysseus, too, who’s known for his tricks and lies. Odysseus is, after all, the first unreliable narrator in literature.

All three men that Agamemnon sent failed in their task, but going off of how Achilles acts throughout the exchange with all of them, it’s clear that Odysseus had the least impact.

These men, like Odysseus or JD Vance (as our modern-day example), use rhetoric to build a reputation for themselves as shrewd speakers and men of great wisdom, with insights so sharp we should hang on their every word. Usually, this works out nicely for them. Once a listener is spellbound by the story these men spin, the listener is only too happy to give them whatever the men need: be it a homebound ship laden with precious treasure, or glowing reviews of a carefully crafted life story to build a political platform.

But in an audience of elite peers, their words can fail to sway in some key high-stakes situations, like Odysseus with Achilles or, more recently, in Vance’s failed attempt to negotiate with Iranians.

But even with setbacks like these, the personal mythmaking that surrounds wealthy elite-class people like them will carry onward, with strong support from their still-enraptured audiences.

As we look at personal mythmakers who use their stories to manipulate, we can use a critical lens to peel back the well-crafted layers of their personas and see the real intent beneath.

Are we just listening to a fantastical tale of monsters and seductresses on the journey back home? Or is Odysseus just telling another long-winded lie to be able to twist his listeners’ emotions into action that carries him home?

Are we just listening to a story about an unfortunate area of poor, white, uneducated people mired in anger and one man’s upward momentum that had enough velocity to make him ascend from poverty into political stardom? Or are we listening to a very carefully crafted narrative designed to push forward a political party’s agenda?

The Odyssean Sin: Ancient, Medieval and Modern

Odysseus has not always been looked at as a hero to be emulated. Even the Ancient Romans kept Odysseus at an arm’s length⁹.

The distaste towards Odysseus, whom the Latin speakers of Italy called Ulysses, persisted from the Ancient Roman Empire well into the Middle Ages, when we find Dante Alighieri, known for his landmark poem The Divine Comedy, placing Ulysses deep in the Inferno among the worst sinners of the Christian afterlife.

Ulysses, in Dante’s poem, is engulfed in a cocoon of flames with his Trojan War buddy, Diomedes, in the eighth circle of Hell. They’re not in Hell because of the atrocities that they, and the rest of the Greek warriors, committed as they sacked the city of Troy, but because of the strategies they used to finally end the ten-year war; most famous of these, of course, is Odysseus’s Trojan Horse used to trick the Trojans into unsuspectingly bringing Greeks into their city.

But when Ulysses begins to speak in the Inferno, he doesn’t focus on his most infamous strategy, or the many arguments he’s won with his silver tongue; instead, he speaks of his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, at the doom of everyone around him.

Ulysses convinced the few remaining men of Ithaca¹⁰ to join his crew for his new journey so he could go out, have more experiences, and gain all knowledge of the world.

Even though he was away from his wife, Penelope, and his son for twenty years, Ulysses couldn’t wait to set back out again, leaving them behind:

“...not sweetness of a son, not reverence for an aging father, not the debt of love I owed Penelope to make her happy, could quench deep in myself the burning wish to know the world and have experience of all man’s vices, of all human worth.”

As the journey turned from days to months, the spirit of the old Ithacan men of Ulysses’ crew started to wane. As a shrewd speaker and politician, of course, Ulysses knew just what to say to spur them on, appealing to their uniquely human desire to learn more about the world around them, and even sprinkled in an ancient version of Manifest Destiny.

Ulysses retells the speech he gave to his men starting in Inferno 26:112:

“Through a hundred thousand dangers we have steered, brothers,’ I said, ‘to reach these western gates. … so let us not forswear our fates but embrace experience, tracing the sun’s rout to the unpeopled region that awaits. Think of your birthright. Living like a brute is not the destiny of men like you, but knowledge and virtue ever our pursuit.’”¹¹

To Ulysses and his men, their “fates” are not things they speak about rhetorically or poetically; the “fates” are connected with divinity and the Gods themselves. Not even Zeus has power over the Fates, three goddesses who measure out the length of human life and cut it.

Ulysses is telling his men that traveling westward to an “unpeopled land” is their gods-given destiny (a manifest destiny, if you will). He uses their religious beliefs to rally them to continue rowing past the Pillars of Heracles (the modern-day Strait of Gibraltar), beyond the known world at the time, and into the Atlantic Ocean, where humans were not meant to go.

The cost of his hubris wasn’t on Ulysses’s mind as his ship came in sight of Mount Purgatory, a place in Dante’s version of the Christian afterlife where the repentant dead cleanse themselves of their sins before ascending into Heaven.

This was no place for mortals like Ulysses and his men, and of course, their ship sank before they could reach the mountain.

Odysseus (or in his Latin name, Ulysses) is hardly the only influential figure to have followers do something for him that goes against their own interests. In the US, politicians from both parties have rallied support from common people only to head to Washington to do the bidding of their corporate sponsors, even if it means hurting the very same people that voted them into office. That has only intensified with the current Presidential administration.

In the Inferno, we see how Ulysses was a master at using speech to weaponize a beautiful human desire: exploring surroundings and gaining knowledge, to push his men outside where humans are meant to be, ready to storm the beach of Mount Purgatory. Mere humans are not able to be on Mount Purgatory, but Ulysses pushes them further and further towards the mountain, all the while urging his men to row farther and farther from their humanity.

I doubt JD Vance had the Inferno’s Ulysses on his mind as he gave a fiery speech at the Turning Point USA’s “America Fest,”¹² but he sure took some pages from Ulysses’s book regardless of whether he meant to or not.

Vance’s speech, which started by honoring TPUSA’s slain founder, Charlie Kirk, quickly transformed into a political sermon, invoking God throughout the speech almost a dozen times, saying things like,

“Across that history, our country’s major debates have always centered on how we could best, as a people, please God.”

(Vance speaking at a TPUSA event.)

Vance continues his speech, rallying the audience as though he were rallying Christian soldiers for a crusade against the Left who, Vance warns, wants to strip them of their religious beliefs and Christian identity, “They replaced God’s beautiful design for the family that men and women could rely on and return to one another with the idea that men could turn into women so long as they brought the right bunch of pills from Big Pharma.”

Telling the Christian audience that the Left wants to make men confused about their gender identity and reject Christian manliness, Vance invokes the assassinated Kirk to spur the audience to fight, saying,

“That is exactly why we have to fight them [the Left]. Because the fruits of true Christianity are men like Charlie Kirk. The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons. And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asks them to do. Because so many of us recognize that it is better to die a patriot than live a coward.

Vance is telling his audience that it’s their god-given duty to fight anyone from the opposing political party. “It’s better to die as a patriot than live as a coward,” echoes Ulysses in Hell, recounting how he told his men, “Think of your birthright. Living like a brute is not the destiny of men like you…”

It doesn’t hurt that Vance invokes the name of the recently killed Kirk to drive the sense of duty further, essentially saying, “See? Charlie did it! You want him to die in vain, do you?”

Just in case there is anyone in his audience that is unsure of if they have to be “slayers of dragons,” Vance ends his speech with more campaign promises (even though his administration is already in office) while also reminding his audience again that what they’re doing is God-approved.

“…I promise you victory. I promise you closed borders and safe communities. I promise you good jobs and a dignified life. Only God can promise you salvation in heaven, but together we can fulfill the promise of the greatest nation in the history of the Earth.”

Like Ulysses invoking the image of the Fates to drive home to his men how it’s their duty to follow him (even if it means their own destruction), so too does Vance invoke divinity in his closing statement.

Searching for meaning in Faith and divinity is part of what it means to be human for many people, and unfortunately, there are powerful people with great rhetorical skills who know this as well, and use it to their advantage.

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Avoiding the fate of Odysseus and his audiences: The Odyssey as a cautionary tale for modern audiences

From Odysseus in Bronze Age myth to the current US presidential administration, there’s a similarity: no one wins, not really.

Obviously, the audiences are the biggest losers; Odysseus’s audience of the Phaeacians and his own crew pay the ultimate price—death— for following Odysseus after one of his tales.

And today? We see Vance’s audience suffer (even if many remain ardent supporters) as more farms are hurt under this administration, social services are cut, and gas and grocery prices rise ever higher.

For both Odysseus and Vance, their wealth and elite status in society will protect them from any real accountability. No matter what they do, neither faces loss of life or status. However, just because they may not pay the ultimate price for their words, as their audiences do, that doesn’t mean they won’t get what’s coming.

“There are slick rhetoricians, of course, but they don’t win in the end. They foul themselves up.” - Hecuba in Euripides’s tragedy.¹³

Maybe Dante had it right when he created the circle of Hell that houses all the sinners of Fraud, including false counselors like Odysseus. But I think it would be more useful to look at consequences a little closer to us here in the Earthly realm rather than the afterlife.

Odysseus, after finally returning home after 20 years in the Odyssey, as atonement for killing all of his wife’s suitors (aka the young men of Ithaca), must immediately set out again and go so far inland to find people that have never heard of the sea. He’s still the king of Ithaca, and his house still has wealth, but he is no longer there to enjoy the title or wealth, forced to set out and have his story essentially end there until Dante comes along almost a thousand years later and puts Odysseus in a much worse place.

As far as JD Vance goes, well, his fate remains to be seen. However, if he is anything like his predecessor, Kamala Harris, then he won’t be able to remove the yoke of association with his running mate, the current US president, Donald Trump, from his neck. Joe Biden was an unpopular president, and did no favors for the Harris campaign, but there’s no president with approval ratings quite as abysmal as Trump's.

But with his venture capital backing and soaring wealth, Vance will most likely live the rest of his days comfortably, even if he will not be able to soar any higher in his political station (unless, of course, the 80-year-old Trump dies in office). Though, like Odysseus, I think writers in the future will not look kindly on Vance, and as future history books get written, perhaps his fraudulent rhetoric will be how he is remembered.

When it comes to what will happen to Vance, his audience of supporters, and the rest of us in the US, only time will tell.

For now, JD Vance is set to release another memoir, Communion, on June 16th, all about his conversion to Catholicism, and it’s worth remembering how he has used both personal mythmaking and the natural human desire for Faith in the past to create a platform and spur his audience to do what he wishes. With Vance as a possible 2028 presidential option, it’s more important than ever to see the meaning behind his narratives.

And as Christopher Nolan’s rendition of The Odyssey comes to theatres in July, bringing the ancient poem and the cunning, “honeytalking” Lord of Lies back into the cultural zeitgeist, it’s worth taking a critical look at the legacy this mythological “hero” has left behind in the last couple of millennia and not just get too swept up in the fantastical tale of gods and sea monsters.

This summer, as we become the audience for both Vance and Odysseus’s tales once again, let’s not be like Odysseus’s men in the Odyssey, left holding the bag, worse off than we were before.

Cheers to being a discerning audience,

Monica