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Warning! Contains spoilers about an epic poem over 2000 years old. And about a marginally more recent film adaptation.

I want to start by talking about my favourite scene in The Odyssey. It’s a conversation between Odysseus’ wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. The film itself opens at a point when Odysseus has been gone twenty years, and nobody knows if he’s still alive — Ithaca has been without a king for that long, and a bevy of suitors have been camped out there, hoping to win Penelope’s hand as well as the throne. And while they’re there, they have helped themselves to the kingdom’s supplies.

The situation vexes Telemachus; extending every courtesy to guests is a good thing, but the guests haven’t been acting in good faith here, and he want to show them the door. One way to do that is to take the throne and remove their reason to stay, but he is not old enough or strong enough. And leaving town to seek news of his father means exposing himself to additional dangers on the road. Those are his stakes.

But his conversation with his mother reveals that her stakes are much higher: Penelope asks why the kingdom could not just do with a queen. She has, after all, been managing the kingdom’s affairs for two decades now, but without the formal anointment. What qualifies Telemachus, or the losers asking for her hand, other than plumbing. When Telemachus says she wants the throne, she screams, “I want Odysseus!”

Here is a woman who truly loves her husband and has tried to keep the home fires burning while waiting for him to return. She understands why he didn’t have a choice but to go — Agamemnon is not a forgiving man. But she is also justifiably bitter about the fact that men waging war over one woman have scant regard for the women they have left behind.

And for that matter, do they have any better regard for the woman they waged war over? Helen is a beautiful woman who is now forever linked to the war fought in her name. Nolan films our first glimpse of her beautifully. At first, you see her only in profile, as Menelaus refers to her face as having launched a thousand ships, and then adds sardonically, “Or perhaps just five hundred now,” and turns her face so that you see it scarred on the other side. Did it happen in Troy during the war? Or back home when Menelaus, his pride now restored, decided to vent his anger?

He is not the only one whose behaviour is a problem. What of Clytemnestra, who had to watch her child be sacrificed by Agamemnon?

Or Circe, whose speech implies quite strongly that her earlier encounters with soldiers visiting her island have involved sexual abuse, and has therefore chosen a life of solitude, with just her, er, animals for company?

At least Calypso gets Odysseus for company for a spell, and while he’s still munching on those lotus petals, he is hers. But she knows that underneath it all, here’s a man who will leave when he is healed. Odysseus might be in de facto exile, but so is she, for the crime of supporting her father Atlas (he of carrying-the-world-upon-his-shoulders fame) in the war against the Olympians (Zeus & Co.).

The story of Odysseus might be about the trials he had to undergo before he could go back home after the Trojan War. But for the thousand Helens in Homer’s epic, does the war ever end?