News from Italy
From the Odyssey to the Walls of Troy: The Eternal Test of Manhood (1)
by Ayfer Selamoğlu
The much-talked-about film of the year has been released worldwide: “The Odyssey…”
And these days, there is another word we hear almost everywhere: “Troy…”
Troy was the first chapter of history’s first -and still greatest- epic story. It was the story of the Trojan War.
The second tells the story of one of the war’s greatest heroes, Odysseus, and his departure from Troy and journey home to Ithaca.
The war lasted ten years, and the journey home took another ten.
In Christopher Nolan’s film, the war-weary Odysseus is not merely battling raging seas and mythological monsters.
He is actually navigating the oldest and most dangerous waters of humanity: the labyrinth of desire, power, deception, and blind arrogance.
The term “honey trap,” introduced into the lexicon by the intelligence world, is by no means a method of espionage invented yesterday.
Helen and Paris by Jacques-Louis David
It is an art of psychological paralysis that has existed since the dawn of humanity, one capable, on a micro level, of tearing an ordinary life and a family apart, and on a macro level, of shattering an entire empire or country.
This age-old debate, reignited by Nolan’s film, takes us back to history’s loudest destruction and then to the noblest Resistance that followed.
Troy: The Executioner’s Scaffold of a Momentary Lust
The most spectacular scene of the “honey trap” in the collective memory of humanity was undoubtedly set on the windswept shores of the Mediterranean, in Troy.
The story we have listened to for centuries as a great tale of love is, in fact, one of history’s greatest examples of irresponsibility, selfishness, and destruction.
Prince Paris sacrificed the future of the country, the people, and the family he was supposed to protect to his desire for Helen, Queen of Sparta.
This mind, which sacrificed its position and those it loved for the sake of lust, built its own executioner’s scaffold with its own hands.
The result was a bloody siege lasting ten full years and a glorious civilisation reduced to ashes. Paris destroyed his country, his family, and ultimately himself.
Just as, centuries later, Marcus Antonius, Rome’s most proud general, fell into the delicate net of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, and lost both a vast empire and his own life…
It was not the steel of the Achaeans that destroyed Troy, but the great failure of the male will in the face of desire.
Odysseus and Calypso (1872), Frank Buchser
The Wise Mind of Odysseus: The Island of Calypso
In Nolan’s cinematic vision, King Odysseus of Ithaca (Matt Damon) stands as an antidote to this moral collapse.
Odysseus is the exact opposite of Paris, as if seen in a mirror.
While the arrogance of power sweeps one away he does not truly deserve, the other carries the burden of statecraft and institutional responsibility.
On his journey home, after his ship is wrecked in a storm, Odysseus is swept onto the island of Ogygia.
The beautiful and immortal nymph Calypso, who lives on the island, rescues Odysseus and falls in love with him.
Calypso acts like a perfect “honey trap.”
She keeps Odysseus on her paradise-like island and offers him the most boundless promise a man could imagine: eternal youth, timeless beauty, and immortality.
It is a magnetic trap of pleasure.
Yet Odysseus displays the wise resolve that changes the course of history.
Rather than becoming the immortal captive of a false paradise, he chooses the mortal path of truth, loyalty, and institutional responsibility.
He rejects Calypso’s promises without hesitation.
Because Odysseus knows that remaining on that island of pleasure means abandoning his own identity, his family, his responsibilities, and ultimately his humanity.
In this epic, the man succeeds in finding his way out of the labyrinth of desire through reason and loyalty.
Many men attempt to excuse this weakness by saying, “This is simply how our biology works; the male instinct cannot be restrained.”
Yet the truth is too clear to hide behind such a cheap excuse: Urges do not take everyone hostage; they enslave only those who lack willpower, strength, self-discipline, and responsibility.
No matter the scale on which it is constructed, the honey trap always targets the same psychological vulnerability: a man’s capacity to become so foolish in the face of desire that he is willing to sacrifice his family, his future, and his responsibilities.
History is filled with the stories of feeble wills that believed they had conquered the world, only to be defeated by their own desires and lose everything.
The truly wise person, however, understands that the greatest conquest is not the tangible victories achieved in the outside world, but the conquest of one’s own desires and passions.
Men who cannot tame the beast within themselves, and who lack a sense of responsibility, attempting to govern a household, a company, or a country, will remain one of the most dangerous tragedies in history.