Were There Many Nonwhites in Bronze Age Greece?
Many people clearly assume that Christopher Nolan's random casting of Ithacans is what The Science shows. Is it?
A curious feature of Christopher Nolan’s hit movie The Odyssey is that Bronze Age Greece in 1200 BC is portrayed as having about the same racial demographics as an upscale Los Angeles private school in 2026 where Nolan would send his kids: mostly white and the rest a random mixture of East Asians, South Asians, Sub-Saharans, and even one Latino.
Demographically, the cast of The Odyssey is much like that seen in a high school musical production of My Fair Lady. (It even has a girl playing a boy.) Likewise, the casting of The Odyssey seems slightly amateurish.
It’s not at all uncommon in adventure epics to portray characters from far away, such as T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, Gurkha soldier Billy Fish in The Man Who Would Be King, and Azeem in the Kevin Costner Robin Hood. But these kind of movies traditionally took pains to offer an explanation for why, say, Morgan Freeman is in medieval Sherwood Forest. The backstories of how they got there are part of the adventure.
But The Odyssey is very different in that it doesn’t deign to offer any explanations for its distracting casting. Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen of Troy isn’t, say, a princess of the Aethiopes who was forced into an arranged marriage with Spartan king Menelaus. No, she’s just Helen of Troy, no explanation given.
Similarly, the Korean crewman who jumps overboard after hearing the Sirens’ song doesn’t have a fascinating tale of how he walked 10,000 miles from Korea. No, he’s presumably just another member of the deep-rooted Korean-Ithacan community. Or something.
That of course raises questions, such as:
Why is Himesh Patel shouting “We are Greeks from Ithaca”?
How did Latinx casting activist John Leguizamo, who claims to be Puerto Rican but appears to be upper class Colombian, get to the Old World from the New World 2700 years before Columbus?
But these days, it’s widely considered as impolite to question Christopher Nolan’s casting decisions as it would be to inquire why the introverted Chinese boy with the 800 math SAT score got the role in the school musical as Liza Doolittle’s cockney dad:
But there are other reasons as well.
A lot of people these days seem to actually believe that it’s a white supremacist myth that classical Greeks, much less Bronze Age Greeks, were white. They really do believe that many famous Greeks from before Alexander the Great’s vast Hellenistic Empire were black, Indian, Chinese, or whatever.
They just had to be.
Where, you might wonder, did these nonwhite ancient Greeks all go?
But why do you want to know? Are you a racist?
A few people may know better. But many of them find it unthinkable to point it out. The very concept that whites have any homelands to which they are indigenous seems dangerously racist.
So, here’s a big question: What does the ancient DNA say?
Paywall here.
