The Odyssey, Homer and the Geopolitics of the Present

A silent editorial dispute over one phrase in a mathematics article led to a larger question: who has the right to claim the people of antiquity? When writing about the history of equations with several variables, the columnist called Diophantus an Egyptian mathematician. The editor changed it to “Greek mathematician” without discussion. The published version kept the editor’s wording.

Almost nothing is known about Diophantus’s ethnic identity. Assigning him a modern nationality is anachronistic, even though historians have long assumed that he worked in Alexandria, Egypt. The usual Greek label rests largely on language. His original book no longer exists, but evidence indicates that it was written in a form of Greek. That logic, the columnist says, would be like calling most mathematicians in the world today British because they publish in English.

Calling Diophantus part of a Greek mathematical tradition does not settle the issue either. The meaning of that tradition becomes harder to define under closer examination. Euclid and Archimedes are usually treated as the most distinctly Greek mathematicians, while historians generally see Diophantus’s mathematics as substantially different from theirs.

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Egyptian mathematician

The debate resurfaced around the popular film “The Odyssey.” Even before its release, the identities of its characters and of Homer, the work’s attributed author, became subjects of heated discussion. Some claims in Turkey have again presented Homer as belonging to the country. Ancient writers often associated him with Smyrna, in present-day Turkey. Yet calling him Turkish is just as anachronistic as insisting confidently on a modern Greek identity. Scholars are also broadly skeptical that Homer was a single historical individual.

The Odyssey itself reached the present through a complicated transmission, and no original text survives. That leaves another question for readers to explore: where, exactly, did the work behind the popular film come from? The uncertainty is not a side issue. It shows how easily modern geopolitical categories can be projected backward onto a world that did not organize identity in the same way.

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Greek mathematician