In The Odyssey, ‘Zeus’s Law’ Is Both Truth and Invention

Spoilers below.

The first time the words “Zeus’s Law” are uttered in Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited adaptation of The Odyssey, they come courtesy of Penelope (Anne Hathaway), queen of Ithaca and wife to the Trojan War hero Odysseus (Matt Damon). In a hushed, harsh whisper, Penelope evokes the term as a warning to her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland): “Break Zeus’s law and see what they do to you if you give them that excuse.”

In the context of the scene, “they” are her numerous suitors, who’ve swarmed Odysseus’s palace during the king’s absence from Ithaca, where they hope to fill the power vacuum left in his wake. It’s been nearly 20 years since Odysseus joined the army of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) and set sail for Troy. Each of these suitors—Robert Pattinson’s sneering Antinous most prominent among them—is eager to claim Penelope as his wife. Telemachus seeks to sit the throne as Odysseus’s heir, but the suitors would rather kill him than see that happen. And should Telemachus turn on his guests, he would break “Zeus’s law.”

Nolan’s use of Zeus’s law is a fascinating invention, not unlike the creative license he displays elsewhere throughout the adaptation. The director has repeatedly made it clear that he wants his take on Homer’s epic to feel “accessible” and modern, not necessarily in its appearance or language (though there is plenty of that, too) but certainly in its themes. Nolan wants the audience to feel as though this story is ancient, yes, but also “stunningly relevant.” In other words, he wants the story to feel like ours.

As he told The New York Times in late June:

“The greatness of the poem is such that you approach these things as if they’re foreign and ancient, then as you explore them, they suddenly become stunningly relevant. Zeus’s law, it’s the Golden Rule—treat as you would be treated—and with a theological underpinning in their world, that you might be a god in disguise.

“For that world it’s very clearly basic survival. You leave the house for more than a couple days, you are by definition throwing yourself at the mercy of strangers. It’s the only way society can function. That became very important to the film, and as soon as you start drilling down on it, you realize nothing’s changed. That’s everything in terms of holding civilization together, or even defining civilization.”

As someone who has read (and loved) The Odyssey, I was initially confused by the unfamiliar use of Zeus’s law in the film (even if it was easy to grasp how Nolan intended the “law” to be understood). The term did not appear in my translation of The Odyssey, and it seemed at least slightly distinct from the Ancient Greek concept of hospitality known as “xenia.” Nolan’s specific mention of the “Golden Rule” also intrigued me. I wanted to better grasp the nuances of each term: How might “Zeus’s law” differ from “xenia,” or from the ethics of reciprocity present in many religions and traditions, or from Jesus’s specific commandment laid out in the Bible: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you”? So I decided to reach out to a couple of experts, classics professors with extensive insight into Homer’s world.

Via email, I asked them both if Zeus’s law was a real term used in Ancient Greece.

“In short, no—there was no conception of a ‘Zeus’s law’ in the sense that Nolan seems to present it, i.e. as a version of Jesus’s ‘Golden Rule,’” explains Jim Crozier, a professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of classics, archaeology, and religion at the University of Missouri.

Suzanne Lye, a professor in the department of classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, agrees. “‘Zeus’s law’ isn’t a thing,” she says. “In Ancient Greece, especially in the Archaic Period when the poems were written down, there were human laws and expectations for behavior related to certain areas. These were based on divine will and different gods oversaw them, but there was no singular set of codified laws from the gods or even one master law that applied across the Greek world.”

Still, neither Crozier nor Lye seem critical, in principle, of a film director’s decision to employ the term “Zeus’s law,” or to take creative liberties with how it might be applied.

Crozier explains that, though Ancient Greek religion lacked “the kind of orthodoxy we see in any of the Abrahamic religions,” it did have works such as the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as Hesiod’s Works and Days and the Theogony. According to Crozier, Homer’s poems helped establish “the pattern for what constituted proper behavior within human society for the Greeks, especially for aristocratic males living in the Archaic [Period] and on into the Classical Era.” Hesiod “laid out the origins of the universe itself and all of the Greek gods” in the Theogony, and in the Works and Days established Zeus “as the god who oversees the behavior of kings, oaths, and xenia—the obligations of ‘guest friendship.’”

Zeus was the god who oversaw xenia, Crozier continues: “So if this is what Nolan means by Zeus’s law, then they are one and the same. However, xenia was more basic in its ethical outlook than the Golden Rule.”

So, what was xenia? Essentially, xenia laid out the rules of hospitality and “guest friendship” for the era. Hosts were expected to treat guests well, and guests were expected to honor their hosts. “So, hosts would not steal from, take advantage of, or otherwise harm a guest and the guest would reciprocate,” Crozier says. “In the days before hotels and interstates, humans being able to assist and trust one another when they were traveling, which was generally not a safe activity in antiquity, was extremely important.” This is why, in Nolan’s film, Penelope and Telemachus could not evict the suitors—their guests—from their home without the risk of evoking wrath.

Still, Lye reiterates that xenia is not the same as the Golden Rule. “For [xenia] specifically, it was more of an ‘if you don’t act in certain ritual ways around being a host and guest, then you might offend Zeus Xenios and either you, your family, or your community will be in big trouble,’” Lye says. (Zeus Xenios, Lye added, is “the aspect of Zeus that cares about xenia/hospitality and host-guest relationships.”)

Throughout Nolan’s The Odyssey, the protagonists and their allies make frequent mention of Zeus’s law within the context of hosting: Penelope warns her son not to break Zeus’s law as a host to her suitors; in the cave of the Cyclops, Odysseus orders his men to tend to the fire and welcome their host upon his return home, as befits Zeus’s law; in Odysseus’s palace, his faithful servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) laments how Zeus’s law has been torn to pieces in his master’s absence; Circe (Samantha Morton) violates Zeus’s law when she turns her guests, Odysseus’s men, into pigs (though she argues she only does so to reveal their truest forms).

Each of these individual examples arises amid rumors of another looming threat—a threat borne by so-called “people from the sea,” who do not respect Zeus’s law and thus pose a threat to civilization itself. Penelope and Telemachus both fret over these people from the sea landing on Ithaca’s shores while the palace remains without a king. But by the end of the film, Odysseus makes it clear that he and his men are, in fact, the people from the sea, as their actions at Troy were the ultimate breaking of Zeus’s law.

Odysseus himself came up with the idea for the Trojan Horse, presented to the Trojans as a gift for the goddess Athena (Zendaya). By secretly passing through the city gates inside the belly of the horse, only to lay siege to Troy from the inside, Odysseus’s men and Agamemnon’s army violated an ancient code. “One man’s trick: to break Zeus’s law forever,” Odysseus bitterly recounts to his wife once he has finally returned home.

Lye explains that it’s not surprising that Nolan would take a concept like xenia and tie it to more “monotheistic religious concepts” such as the Golden Rule.

As she puts it, “I totally understand why he might do this: inventing something called ‘Zeus’s law’ helps make divine impact legible to modern audiences. But it’s definitely not accurate to how Ancient Greeks or Romans conceived of Zeus or how the gods operated in their lives or the world. Ancient Greek concepts like xenia were definitely not related to or reflective of our Golden Rule idea in their intent, even if they might seem similar on the surface.”

Still, there is some overlap among the concepts, especially when it comes to “humans treating one another justly,” Crozier says. He explains: “Hesiod’s big innovation in the Works and Days was to say that Dike, or justice, is something that Zeus establishes among humans particularly. Animals don’t have this concept, but we do. In this way, Zeus becomes the god that is intimately concerned with humans treating one another justly. Is that the same as the ‘Golden Rule’? I would say it is not—I think Nolan is clearly channeling that Christian concept into the film as an innovation of his own.”

In The Odyssey, Nolan makes an ethical argument that is frequently reiterated throughout his other films, and notably his latest, Oppenheimer. Odysseus’s guilt is crushing, as was also the case for Oppenheimer’s titular physicist upon the creation of the atomic bomb. Both are considered men of genius who realize what the results of their brilliance have wrought: In the pursuit of victory, they have severed some essential tie between humans, a code of mutual care, and in the process opened the floodgates to darkness. Odysseus puts it simply to Penelope: “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire.”

In the film’s final sequence, Odysseus and Penelope leave Telemachus behind as king of Ithaca and retreat into exile, an outcome treated as an emotional but hopeful prospect rather than an act of punishment. Together, husband and wife set sail for the west, as Tiresias (James Remar) instructed Odysseus to do during the latter’s visit to Hades earlier in The Odyssey. In the west, they intend to honor the men lost to the Trojan War. But more than that, they intend to grieve “the breaking of Zeus’s law spreading like plague” throughout the world. Odysseus, hero of the war, recognizes that his era of civilization will only be remembered through songs. And yet they will still await a new era, in which, as Odysseus says, “a new dawn will break over the darkened world, when our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”

Nolan doesn’t try to hide the ethical lesson his take on The Odyssey seeks to impart. By weaving multiple moral concepts—the Golden Rule, xenia, etc.—together under the title of “Zeus’s law,” he is perhaps best able to explore that ethical lesson in a manner audiences can’t look away from. As he told the Times, “The Odyssey, as with Oppenheimer, the reason these are great stories is they have these resonances, these knotty problems, ethical dilemmas…I have strong feelings about how the story moves me in ethical terms. I’m hoping that people have that feeling the way I did.”