As we’ve detailed elsewhere, Nolan’s biggest addition to Homer’s text is the inclusion of the Sea People(s) as a vaguely ominous off-screen threat. They are whispered about by Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and Telemachus (Tom Holland), and are a foreboding menace when one stranger along the Aegean asks Odysseus’ right-hand man Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) if they’re “the people from the sea.”

These “people” are not in Homer, but they are in actual Greek and Near East history; a mysterious collection of cultures and tribes who, depending on who you ask, either hastened or downright caused the Bronze Age collapse by sacking city states all along the Mediterranean, from the Hittites in modern-day Turkey to the Mycenaean Greeks. Only Egypt was able to resist and defeat the “people from the sea” (which is also why we know they exist and have that ominous name). Their mystery was written down in Egyptian temples and records. Conversely, all recorded history of the Hittites simply stops. Meanwhile Greek civilization (of a kind) survived, but it was still an apocalyptic occurrence for those who remained, with conditions regressing to a more rustic, primitive culture without written word or history. It was the Greek Dark Ages and it lasted more than 300 years.

Nolan takes this catastrophic historical mystery and bends it to his purposes by tying it directly to xenia, an ancient Greek concept that roughly translates to “guest-friendship” or “ritualized friendship.” In Nolan’s Odyssey, they call it simply “Zeus’ law,” and it is the idea of recognizing shared humanity and kinship in strangers from distant shores. Furthermore, it demands a political and moral imperative to treat guests with honor, respect, and kindness. It is the ancestor of the Christian faith’s “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or the more modernized “Golden Rule.”

In the time of Homer and antiquity, it might have been partly implemented because there was a fear that the stranger you bully or belittle could be a god in disguise, or Odysseus himself returned (a concept that also trickles down into parables about good Samaritans), but it was also an ethical and even pragmatic gesture. Politically, is i not better to build bridges with foreign lands than it is walls or siege towers?

Xenia is a crucial element of Homer’s original epic poem, but Nolan is the first adapter to my knowledge who recognizes the hypocrisy of Odysseus surviving due to the comity and hospitality of good hosts like the Phaeacians, but only after he broke Zeus’ law by offering a gift of peace to the Trojans and then using it to enslave, rape, and murder them in their beds.

The way The Odyssey frames this is, like Oppenheimer ushering in the Atomic Age beneath the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Odysseus has given permission to his fellow Greeks to dismiss Zeus’ law, one of their most sacred rites of civility and fellowship. That includes his fellow Trojan War veterans who are “mistaken” for Sea People while burning a village or later threatening to execute Circe (Samantha Morton) as a witch after she revealed these men’s true animalistic nature. But it’s even more transparent in younger men who never saw the great towers of Troy and were instead raised on stories of their fiery collapse.