The Odyssey as AI allegory

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The Odyssey as AI allegory Agamemnon’s heirs are in Silicon Valley

“We have given Agamemnon a server farm and a few AI agents and called it progress.” (Universal Pictures)

“We have given Agamemnon a server farm and a few AI agents and called it progress.” (Universal Pictures)

Artificial intelligenceHomerOvidPoliticsTechnofeudalismThe Odyssey

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Yanis Varoufakis

Aug 12 2026 - 12:04am 8 mins

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has returned Homer’s epic to the center of popular culture, a feat that must be welcomed. Many have asked me to review the film. I declined. Being Greek gives me no privileged vantage point from which to comment on a work that belongs to everyone, that has traveled across centuries and languages to settle in the imaginations of strangers. So, for now, I shall pick up on some of Homer’s, and Nolan’s, themes to revisit contemporary developments that keep me up at night.

From our dwindling highbrow publications, to our proliferating social media, everyone is fixated on the clash between the technooptimists and the technophobes. Is efficiency more important than justice? Will AI liberate or enslave us? These debates take us around in circles, reinforcing entrenched faiths rather than shedding new light. To reflect on these matters, we can do worse than revisit the ancients, who knew a thing or two about capturing the essence of things.

At the heart of Homer’s Iliad, beats the story of a long strike. In 18 of its 24 books, Achilles, the Greeks’ finest fighter, has downed his weapons; refusing to leave his tent to join the fray, he’s incensed with his boss, Agamemnon, the King of the Achaeans. His wrath erupted after a visit from Odysseus bearing the King’s decree to confiscate loot from an earlier skirmish with the Trojans. It is Homer’s way of introducing Odysseus to us not so much as the cunning hero, but as messenger — a lackey of an authoritarian King. Only when the Trojans slay Achilles’ best mate, Patroclus, does he set revenge against the Trojans above his miff with Agamemnon, end his strike, rise from his tent, and return to the battlefield.

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At that point, Achilles’ mother, Thetis, beseeches Hephaestus — the only useful Olympian, the god of manufacturing — to craft new armor for her boy. Hephaestus, who owes a debt to Thetis for having cared for him when he was cast out of Olympus, gets to work in his volcanic forge. From that fiery darkness he creates a stunning set of weapons: a shield, a helmet, a breastplate, and greaves. The shield is the centerpiece, elaborately engraved with scenes of earthly life, war, peace, the cosmos, and human labor: a reflection of the human world. This is no mere metalwork; it is divine craftsmanship, imbued with power that no mortal smith could fashion. It is a god’s gift, not a product of human labor or intelligence, as if to remind us that true gifts are priceless.

Cut to Odysseus 10 years later. Achilles is now dead, but has done much to make Troy’s sacking possible, even if Odysseus provided the final push with his horse ruse — another gift that brought ruin to a great city. In his film, Nolan depicts Odysseus on his arduous journey home as a man exercised by regrets, haunted by guilt over the way he treated the defeated Trojans, tortured by an understandable survivor’s guilt; the unshakeable burden of having watched all his comrades perish, one by one, while he alone reaches Ithaca’s shores. But there is one episode that could have saddled Odysseus’ moral burden with further, deserved, guilt which Nolan leaves out; a tale that Ovid appended to the canon to trouble a man already full of ghosts.

Once Troy was obliterated, as imagined by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the Greek victors had to settle an internal dispute between Odysseus, their strategist, and Ajax, their most formidable ground soldier. Namely, who would sail home with Achilles’ divine armor? Unable to mediate, the Greek chieftains convened a tribunal; a contest not of swords but of words in which the prize was far more than a set of weapons.

Ajax’s argument was simple. He had fought more, bled more, killed more. He could handle the heavy arms better. He never hid behind ruses or deceit. Unlike Odysseus, who had feigned madness to avoid enlisting, Ajax had answered the call gladly. Achilles’ armor should be his by dint of sheer, unembellished valor; and the requisite skill at handling it.

Odysseus stunned the chieftains by conceding that Ajax was braver and more useful in the heat of hand-to-hand battle. But then he pivoted away...