John has been watching the trailer for the 2026 film 'The Odyssey', starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, and something does not sit right. The Trojan War is usually dated to the thirteenth or twelfth century BC, a period associated with Mycenaean or Achaean warfare and distinctive equipment, such as boar-tusk and horned helmets. This is the world shown in archaeological reconstructions and classic works such as Peter Connolly's The Ancient Greece of Odysseus.
Yet in film and illustration, the warriors of Homer's epics are almost always dressed in the armour of much later centuries. Corinthian and Chalcidian helmets recur frequently, even though these types do not appear until hundreds of years after the traditional date of the Trojan War. The Odyssey trailer continues this trend, showing both Corinthian and open-faced Chalcidian helmets among Odysseus' men.
So how did this confusion of periods become so entrenched in modern depictions of Homeric warfare? Why do artists and filmmakers consistently reach for the armour of Classical Greece rather than the material culture of the Late Bronze Age? Murray unpacks how this visual tradition developed and why it has proved so hard to shift.
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