Here's the scene: Matt Damon's Odysseus and his starving crew land on Aeaea, where the reclusive witch Circe (played by Samantha Morton) serves up a stew. The sailors' eyes go wide as they slurp and chew away at what looks like stringy, offal-like meat, cut into long strips. Translator Emily Wilson didn't mince words in her review: "All the food looks disgusting."
This is the most talked-about scene in Christopher Nolan's adaptation of "The Odyssey," and the internet reaction has been intense—the general consensus is that this feast scene is easily the most stomach-churning part of the whole film. (Anyone familiar with the epic knows what comes next: Circe turns the men into pigs—or rather, she just reveals what they already were underneath.)
But does this gloppy mess have any historical basis? In Samuel Butler's translation, what Circe actually serves is "cheese, honey, meal, and Pramnian wine"—nothing like the protein-heavy, possibly-intestine, possibly-chunks-of-meat stew shown on screen.
Cathy Kaufman, an assistant professor of food studies at The New School and president emerita of the Culinary Historians of New York, points out that ancient Greeks living on islands probably didn't regularly eat offal stew. Their everyday diet more likely consisted of roasted goat and lamb, plenty of fish, and a dense barley bread.
Greek food historian Mariana Kavroulaki offers another angle: characters in "The Odyssey" mostly skewer and grill their food over open flame rather than stewing it—but this, she argues, is actually an anachronism in the text itself. Skewered grilling in the epic functions more as a poetic symbol of masculinity and hunting ritual. She notes that during the actual time period "The Odyssey" is set in, Greeks really did stew their meat. In other words, the movie's over-the-top gloppy stew might actually be closer to what people really ate back then than the roasted meat described in the source text.
Of course, this scene was never meant to be a historically accurate menu from ancient times. The sailors' ravenous gorging is there to show the audience their greed—the stew's disgustingness mirrors the crudeness of human nature, which is exactly the premise behind Circe's spell. Interestingly, in the film version, what actually breaks the curse isn't force—it's Odysseus refusing the stew and responding to Circe's trickery with empathy, which is what turns his companions back into men.
