AT THE DIVINE THRESHOLD

 

What is the divine? What is a threshold? And what is it about the human condition that compels us, across cultures and epochs, to approach such thresholds and attempt a crossing? A threshold is liminal, belonging completely neither to that which lies before it nor to that which lies beyond. In the case of the Orthodox icon, the direction of travel across that space remains ambiguous. Are we ascending towards the divine, training the eye through colour, form and contemplation to perceive a reality beyond the limitations of the material world, or are we engaged in the more audacious enterprise of bringing the divine down to earth, confining it within wood, linen, gesso, egg tempera and gold so that it can be seen, touched, kissed, carried into battle and installed in the corner of a home? The persistence of the icon across almost two millennia may arise from its refusal to settle the direction of that encounter.

These questions lie at the centre of the Hellenic Museum’s new Divine Thresholds: Icons & the Orthodox Christian World, an exquisitely curated exhibition of icons and sacred objects spanning the geographical and cultural territory of Eastern Christianity. During its development, Museum Director Sarah Craig consulted widely on the Orthodox tradition and the devotional meaning of the icon. Conversations ranged from the Incarnation, iconoclasm and veneration to Russia, Ethiopia, migration and the biographies acquired by icons as they move between churches, homes, countries and collections. That range is reflected in an exhibition whose historical breadth is matched by sensitivity to the religious world from which its objects come.

For an icon in a museum is already an icon displaced. Its viewer stands at a curatorial distance from an object that, within its devotional environment, could be kissed, incensed, carried in procession and addressed in prayer. Recreating these conditions within a gallery would risk converting worship into ethnographic theatre; ignoring them would reduce the icon to connoisseurship. Divine Thresholds negotiates this difficulty intelligently, treating its objects as historical and artistic artefacts while directing attention towards the relationships that made them sacred.

In doing so, the exhibition immediately unsettles the apparently simple question of what an icon actually is. It is neither merely the material object before the viewer nor simply the person represented upon it. Collapse image into prototype and the distinction upon which veneration depends disappears; sever the two entirely and the icon becomes merely an image. By presenting these objects within the history of the practices, beliefs and relationships that gave them meaning, Divine Thresholds locates the icon precisely within that interval between matter, representation and presence.

From there, the exhibition asks how Christianity came to represent sacred presence in the first place. Its juxtaposition of Christian images with earlier Mediterranean forms makes clear that the new religion did not invent its visual vocabulary from nothing. Christ as the Good Shepherd is placed within a tradition recalling the Greek kriophoros, the ram-bearer associated with Hermes, while the Christian orant preserves a much older religious gesture. Especially arresting is the juxtaposition of a relief of the Thracian god Sabazios with icons of Saint George. Here the argument is made through the objects themselves: across the rupture between pagan antiquity and Christianity, horse, rider, adversary and the grammar of triumph persist even as their theological meaning is transformed. By making such continuities visible, Divine Thresholds complicates any neat division between pagan and Christian worlds and suggests that while religious systems may displace one another, the forms through which human beings imagine protection, victory and sacred agency can prove considerably more tenacious.

The selection of icons confronts viewers accustomed to Western naturalism with an immediate difficulty: why do these figures look as they do? Seen together, the exhibition’s elongated bodies, hieratic poses, altered perspectives, stylised faces and fields of gold establish their own logic. Their recurrence across works of different dates and origins makes it difficult to regard them as failures of naturalism; instead, Divine Thresholds allows the viewer to recognise a deliberate vocabulary for placing the sacred beyond ordinary time and space. Gold backgrounds refuse the familiar coordinates of landscape and atmosphere, while pose, proportion and perspective consistently direct attention away from the incidental appearance of the individual. Through the cumulative effect of the works, the exhibition shifts the question from why icons do not look “realistic” to what conception of reality requires them to look precisely this way.

Through its treatment of iconoclasm and the Incarnation, Divine Thresholds uses the materiality of the icons to open a deeper theological problem: how can wood, gesso, pigment and gold legitimately bear an image of the divine? The biblical prohibition against graven images is set beside the Christian claim that the invisible God became visible and tangible in Christ. The Second Council of Nicaea’s distinction between veneration and worship supplies the theological key, yet the argument is made tangible rather than merely doctrinal. Every painted Christ before the viewer is itself evidence of the conclusion reached: if God truly assumed visible human flesh, matter could represent him without becoming the object of worship. The icons consequently function simultaneously as exhibits and arguments, their form asserting the capacity of matter to mediate sacred presence.

The movement into ordinary life is traced through the choice of saints and iconographic types, revealing a world in which images organised time, articulated particular needs and accompanied human uncertainty. Saint George remains recognisable across widely separated traditions while acquiring local resonances; Saint Nicholas gathers associations with sailors, travellers and protection; images of the Mother of God multiply into types and titles around which histories of place, danger, deliverance and miraculous intervention accumulate. Read together, these icons disclose a sacred geography in which the universal and intensely local overlap.

That geography contracts to the household. The exhibition’s attention to domestic devotion prevents the icon from being understood solely as an ecclesiastical object. The “beautiful corner”, lamp burning before an image, triptych carried on a journey and miniature iconostasis locate the sacred within dwelling, departure, return, illness and prayer. Paul of Aleppo’s astonishment at the profusion of icons in seventeenth-century Muscovite homes evokes a world in which sacred and ordinary space continually penetrated one another. The domestic icon establishes a divine threshold within the home itself, a boundary between everyday and sacred crossed repeatedly rather than only within the church.

Set beside one another, these local manifestations raise another problem: how does a sacred image remain recognisably itself while passing between places, periods and cultures? Across Divine Thresholds, Christ, the Theotokos and the saints recur according to shared prototypes, yet seldom identically. Differences of palette, line, material, costume and composition disclose the worlds through which those prototypes have passed. Brought into the same field, they demonstrate a paradox: iconography depends upon repetition, yet survives through the capacity of repetition to accommodate difference.

The Cretan icons provide the first answer. Products of workshops operating within the Venetian sphere, they belong to a Mediterranean world in which Orthodox and Catholic patrons, Byzantine forms and Italian painting encountered one another. Western elements enter the images, modelling alters and compositional devices migrate, yet the Byzantine grammar remains legible. Their hybridity becomes evidence of the processes by which an ostensibly fixed iconographic language negotiated the cultures surrounding it.

The Russian works test the proposition differently. Within the exhibition’s wider geographical field, they demonstrate how a common Byzantine inheritance acquired distinctive lives in centres such as Novgorod, Moscow, Palekh, Smolensk and Vladimir. Differences of palette, line, local saints and devotional emphasis register regional identities without rendering the underlying language unintelligible. Canon appears more supple than uniformity, establishing the terms within which identity can persist without requiring sameness.

With Ethiopia, North Africa and the Levant, the proposition becomes more complicated still. The objects resist any simple account in which Byzantine iconography radiates intact from a self-contained centre towards passive peripheries. Ethiopian material reveals inherited Christian forms transformed within an indigenous tradition, while the Levantine works inhabit a region where Byzantine, Syriac, Arabic-speaking Christian, Crusader and local vocabularies encountered one another through pilgrimage, conquest and trade. Divine Thresholds instead presents the Eastern Christian world of images as a network of encounters in which influence moves, changes direction and is continually translated.

One of the exhibition’s most eloquent objects makes this materially visible: a Cretan icon that travelled to Ethiopia and was subsequently retouched there, Ethiopian elements being added to the existing Mediterranean image. Is it Cretan, Ethiopian, Byzantine or African? Each description identifies one layer of its biography without encompassing the whole. Its surface becomes a proposition in pigment: an icon may remain itself while accumulating other places, hands and ways of seeing. How much difference can a tradition absorb before continuity becomes rupture? Divine Thresholds supplies no convenient point at which one ends and the other begins.

Movement across cultures is one kind of transformation. The exhibition gives rise to a further question: what is the afterlife of an icon when the devotional world for which it was created disappears? Revolutionary Russia provides the most dramatic example. The Bolsheviks persecuted religion and destroyed sacred images, yet something of their authority survived in the monumental portraits, processions and exemplary lives of the new order. Lenin occupied spaces from which saints had been expelled. Theology could be repudiated while habits of seeing endured.

Divine Thresholds poses the same question through migration. Icons carried to Australia as objects of prayer may become heirlooms, cultural markers or, as their devotional significance recedes, objects found in antique and opportunity shops, private collections, museums or even the rubbish. Yet the icon endures, passing from altar to suitcase, household shrine to marketplace and museum, acquiring new meanings as it goes. Divine Thresholds itself participates in this afterlife, asking what survives these transformations of belief, ownership and circumstance.

Where, then, does sacredness reside: in the material object, in the prototype to which it refers, in the practices performed before it, or in the relationship between image and beholder? Divine Thresholds is at its most intelligent in permitting these possibilities to coexist. Across the exhibition, icons change context without necessarily losing identity: they absorb foreign artistic languages, cross continents and survive persecution. Their surfaces accumulate histories even as the figures upon them continue to look back at successive generations of beholders. Everything depends upon the encounters that take place before it. Divine Thresholds leaves us at that point of encounter, where matter becomes image, image becomes presence, and the visible world seems, for an instant, insufficient to contain everything we ask it to mean.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 5 September 2026

WHEN MULTICULTURALISM BECOMES A MATTER OF PUBLIC ORDER

 

The recent cabinet reshuffle in Victoria contained one appointment with particular symbolic resonance: Paul Edbrooke was given responsibility for Police, Emergency Services, Crime Prevention and Multicultural Affairs. There may be perfectly practical reasons for bringing these portfolios together. However, the way a government arranges its ministries also says something about how it understands the relationship between different areas of public life. The new arrangement therefore invites a reasonable question: does placing Multicultural Affairs alongside policing and crime prevention simply reflect administrative convenience, or does it also reveal a broader change in the way cultural diversity is being understood?

The question becomes more significant when considered against the findings of the Victorian Multicultural Review. Completed in 2025 after extensive consultation with multicultural communities, the Review argued for a stronger institutional presence for multicultural policy at the centre of government. Among its recommendations were a dedicated Minister for Multicultural Affairs, retention of the portfolio within the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and mechanisms requiring major government policies to be considered for their effects on multicultural communities. It also recalled an earlier period when Victorian premiers themselves held responsibility for multicultural affairs, giving the portfolio considerable authority across government.

Ministerial portfolios inevitably bring different policy areas into conversation with one another. Roads sit naturally beside road safety, agriculture beside regional development, and the creative industries beside culture. It is therefore worth asking what relationship the government sees between Multicultural Affairs, Police and Crime Prevention. Equally, one might ask why multicultural affairs are not associated more closely with education, culture, community development, or the Premier’s office, particularly given the direction proposed by the Review.

Consultation presents a further question. The Victorian Multicultural Review drew upon extensive engagement with multicultural communities and produced numerous recommendations about the future of multicultural policy. The association of Multicultural Affairs with Police and Crime Prevention does not appear among them. It would therefore be useful to know whether the new arrangement arose from subsequent consultation with communities, or from the government’s own assessment of how the portfolio can best operate. That distinction matters because Australian multiculturalism has developed most successfully when governments and communities have treated one another as partners in shaping policy.

One of multiculturalism’s greatest achievements was precisely its capacity to move cultural difference beyond the realm of social anxiety. During the closing decades of the twentieth century, multicultural policy became part of a larger project of nation building. Australian identity expanded so that people of different languages, religions and backgrounds could participate fully in public life while retaining their cultural inheritance. Interpreting services, community languages, migrant resource centres, ethnic media and recognition of community organisations were therefore more than accommodations for migrants. They became instruments through which democratic participation itself was broadened.

The vocabulary surrounding multiculturalism has since changed. Social cohesion, community safety, hate speech, extremism, foreign interference and resilience now occupy a much more prominent place in official policy. These concerns respond to genuine developments, and governments plainly have a responsibility to protect synagogues, mosques, churches, schools and community centres. The difficulty arises when the vocabulary of risk begins to crowd out the older language of participation, cultural continuity and belonging. Seen in that light, the new ministerial arrangement brings two understandings of diversity into unusually close proximity: diversity as a source of social and cultural strength, and diversity as something increasingly approached through the structures of security, prevention and public order.

For the Greek Australian community, the issue carries particular historical resonance. Greeks were more than beneficiaries of multiculturalism. Through decades of organised advocacy, they actively helped to build it, campaigning for community languages, interpreting services, ethnic broadcasting, equitable access to government services and funding for cultural endeavours. Greek communities, brotherhoods, parishes, schools and newspapers often performed functions resembling an informal welfare system, supporting people whom public institutions had yet to reach effectively.

That history also explains why the language surrounding multiculturalism matters. The first major generation of postwar Greek migrants arrived in an Australia where assimilation remained the prevailing expectation. Greek was frequently regarded as an obstacle for children, migrant institutions were expected eventually to disappear, and successful integration was often understood as progressive approximation to an Anglo-Australian cultural norm. Multiculturalism represented a profound change in that conception of citizenship. It established the possibility that someone could remain culturally Greek while participating fully and unambiguously in Australian civic life.

Yet the abandonment of assimilation as official policy did not necessarily extinguish the older expectation that migrants continually demonstrate the compatibility of their identities with the national norm. Thinkers George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulou have explored this more complicated history, arguing that migrants in Australia have often occupied the position of the “subordinate foreigner” and the “eternal subversive”, required repeatedly to demonstrate their loyalty and their compatibility with the national narrative. Their analysis provides a useful caution in the present context. When multicultural communities are increasingly discussed through the language of cohesion, surveillance, prevention and foreign interference, legitimate political advocacy can more easily become entangled with questions about loyalty, connections with ancestral homelands can acquire an atmosphere of suspicion, and vigorous disagreement with government policy can be interpreted through the language of integration rather than ordinary democratic contestation.

There is an internal consequence as well. Community organisations that depend substantially upon government funding may gradually learn which forms of advocacy attract support and which create discomfort. Over time, the temptation arises to shape public interventions around the language favoured by government, particularly the language of “social cohesion” or “unity”, while difficult or politically inconvenient questions receive less attention. Representation then risks becoming increasingly concerned with maintaining access to government rather than articulating the independent concerns of the people represented.

None of this requires us to romanticise an earlier age of multicultural policy. Victoria faces challenges that previous generations encountered in different forms, or scarcely encountered at all, and governments have a legitimate responsibility to respond to extremism, hate crime and racism. The question is how those responsibilities can be met without allowing security to become the organising principle of multiculturalism itself. This is particularly important at a time when, across Australia and other Western democracies, political forces are again promoting versions of national identity that favour greater cultural uniformity, expressed through calls for assimilation, anxiety about migration, suspicion of transnational identities and the belief that social cohesion requires a stronger common culture. This makes clarity about the purpose of multicultural policy especially important. Political movements hostile to multiculturalism have long sought to portray cultural difference as a source of fragmentation, divided loyalties and social danger, with greater cultural uniformity offered as the remedy. If the language and structures of government themselves begin, however inadvertently, to associate multiculturalism predominantly with security, extremism and crime prevention, that argument becomes easier to make. A confident multicultural policy should provide the answer: cultural plurality and social cohesion are entirely compatible, and common citizenship derives its strength from democratic participation rather than cultural sameness. In this political climate, where Multicultural Affairs sits within government assumes a significance extending well beyond the allocation of ministerial responsibilities: it speaks, however indirectly, to whether diversity continues to be understood primarily as a dimension of democratic citizenship or is increasingly viewed through the prism of security, prevention and public order.

This also places a responsibility on those who represent multicultural communities. The presence of ministers and parliamentarians from diverse backgrounds is itself one of the achievements of multicultural Victoria. Representation acquires its fullest value when those representatives participate openly in debates about the future direction of multicultural policy. It would therefore be useful to hear from elected representatives of diverse backgrounds and from the representative bodies of our community organisations about whether they believe the new arrangement strengthens multicultural affairs, how they understand its rationale, and how they envisage the portfolio retaining a broad role across government.

Labor played a decisive role in establishing multicultural Victoria, alongside politicians and governments from other traditions. That history gives the present government a particular reason to explain how the new arrangement accords with the recent Review’s recommendation that multicultural policy should enjoy stronger influence at the centre of government. Such an explanation would also clarify what practical authority the portfolio will retain across departments whose decisions directly affect multicultural Victorians.

Governments are entitled to organise their ministries in the way they consider most effective, and administrative arrangements will inevitably change with circumstances. Multicultural communities are equally entitled to ask what those arrangements signify for a policy that has contributed profoundly to the character of modern Victoria. At its most ambitious, multiculturalism rested on the proposition that cultural difference could enrich a common democratic life without weakening common citizenship. At a time when that proposition is again being challenged by those who present cultural uniformity as the answer to social division, governments and multicultural communities alike have an interest in stating clearly what multiculturalism is for and why it remains worth defending. The question raised by the present arrangement therefore reaches beyond the distribution of portfolios: it concerns whether cultural difference continues to occupy a legitimate and confident place within the political imagination of Victoria itself.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 29 August 2026

DECOLONISING THE AENEID

 

I have reached the inescapable conclusion that the Aeneid should be cancelled. Frankly, I am astonished it has survived this long. Here we have a poem produced by a member of a colonial power that conquered Greece, dismantled its political independence, appropriated its religion, philosophy, literature and mythology, and then presented the resulting cultural package as the foundation of Roman greatness. If this does not qualify as deeply problematic, then the term has surely lost all meaning.

I draw the reader’s attention gently towards a Rome that i. colonises Greece, ii. extracts Greek cultural capital and iii. rebrands Greek civilisation as a Roman achievement. Then Vergil arrives, ChatGPT's Homer with remarkable enthusiasm, changes a few names, inserts an imperial destiny, dedicates the whole enterprise to Augustus and somehow acquires the reputation of being one of history's greatest original poets. One searches the Aeneid in vain for a bibliography, an acknowledgement of Country, a positionality statement, a trigger warning or even a footnote acknowledging that substantial portions of the narrative derive from Indigenous Hellenic knowledge systems generously shared without any apparent benefit accruing to the source community. Homer receives no recognition whatsoever for his emotional labour or intellectual generosity.

Indeed, the entire poem appears to embody the familiar dynamics of colonial knowledge production. The stories of a conquered people are detached from their original cultural setting, curated by representatives of the imperial centre and redeployed in the service of empire. Greek epic becomes Roman propaganda, while Homer is transformed into an unpaid creative consultant whose contribution somehow slipped through the peer-review process. One is left wondering whether anyone sought the informed consent of the descendants of the aoidoi before proceeding with this ambitious exercise in literary extraction. The silence surrounding these ethical concerns arguably constitutes a form of epistemic violence. Indeed, every uncritical reading of the Aeneid today perpetuates that violence afresh. By inviting students to inhabit the perspective of the coloniser while consuming appropriated Hellenic narratives as though they were naturally Roman, the text continually reproduces structures of imperial privilege. Reading, therefore, is never a neutral act. Every page turned without adequate decolonial framing risks reinscribing the original colonial encounter. The Aeneid thus exemplifies extractive storytelling, whereby privileged authors mine the narrative resources of historically marginalised communities while simultaneously receiving grants, prizes and enduring places on university reading lists.

Even the opening line demands scrutiny. Arma virumque cano. Really? Homer had already covered war and covered heroes. At what point does inspiration become unauthorised content recycling? The distinction feels increasingly difficult to sustain, especially when the recycling produces twelve books instead of two. One hesitates to employ the word "plagiarism," although one suspects an anonymous referee might have been tempted. Contemporary publishers would almost certainly have requested a sensitivity reader from Bronze Age Anatolia.

Defenders invariably insist that Vergil was simply paying homage to Homer. This is a generous interpretation. One rarely hears museum curators describe the contents of the British Museum as an elaborate tribute to the civilisations from which they originated. Admiration, after all, has often proved remarkably compatible with appropriation, particularly when accompanied by overwhelming military superiority and excellent public relations. It is extraordinary how frequently empire expresses its admiration through what would today be recognised as respectful cultural theft.

The representation of Greece itself also raises deeply uncomfortable questions. Greek voices remain present only insofar as they facilitate the emergence of what purports to be Roman identity. Their myths become raw material, their literature becomes scaffolding and their cultural authority is carefully absorbed into a narrative whose ultimate purpose is to legitimise Roman imperial expansion. It is difficult to avoid the impression that Greece has been invited to participate in the conversation primarily as source material, while Rome moderates the panel, writes the conference proceedings and awards itself the keynote address. Greek mythology functions throughout the poem as a resource to be harvested rather than a living tradition to be engaged with on its own epistemic terms. Rome, after all, had already carried away Greek spoils, appropriated Greek sacred spaces, dismissed the conquered as Graeculi, and then proceeded to market Greek civilisation as compelling evidence of Roman greatness. The Aeneid is simply the literary equivalent of loading another statue onto a cart, chiselling "Made in Rome" onto the base and applying for UNESCO recognition. The Hellenic voice is simultaneously centred as an object of study and marginalised as a speaking subject, a contradiction requiring urgent deconstruction by scholars who will naturally speak on its behalf, preferably without consulting any actual Greeks.

The educational implications of these larcenous practices, are obvious. Every copy of the Aeneid should begin with an acknowledgement that the poem was composed upon appropriated cultural foundations. Students ought first to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Homeric tradition before engaging with the Latin text. Appropriate trigger warnings would also seem advisable: “This work contains extensive appropriation of Greek mythology, imperial triumphalism, symbolic acts of cultural extraction and repeated assertions of Roman exceptionalism. Reader discretion is advised. Side effects may include admiration for Augustus, internalised Latin privilege and an uncritical acceptance of hegemonic narratives.” Students should also be reminded that they are guests within the Homeric narrative landscape and invited to reflect critically upon the privileges they bring to reading Latin literature before attempting any translation. They should also complete a short reflective statement acknowledging that the very act of reading the Aeneid may unintentionally perpetuate colonial structures of interpretation and cause intergenerational harm to descendants of the Homeric tradition.

One also wonders whether Vergil possessed the necessary lived experience to narrate Trojan identity. Was there no suitably qualified Trojan available to tell the story? Were the Trojans even considered White? Once again, an imperial author occupies narrative space belonging to a displaced community, speaks on its behalf and receives universal acclaim for doing so. The absence of Trojan self-representation reveals a troubling pattern of narrative ventriloquism in which imperial authors continue to profit from identities they do not themselves inhabit. Such asymmetries deserve closer examination, preferably by a grant-funded interdisciplinary research cluster over the course of three years, culminating in a twelve-volume report recommending the establishment of a Centre for Decolonial Vergilian Studies. We can fund it via the savings gained by discontinuing the teaching of Modern Greek at La Trobe.

Predictably, some classicists will object that this entire critique is hopelessly anachronistic, that ancient societies possessed different assumptions about authorship, cultural exchange and literary imitation. That observation is undoubtedly correct, which makes it all the more awkward when precisely the same historical context is denied to almost every other civilisation. Consistency, surely, remains one of scholarship's highest virtues, provided it is deployed with sufficient selectivity.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that Roman “admiration” for Greece was so profound that they simply shop-lifted everything they encountered. Their gods were Greek. Their philosophy was Greek. Their literature was Greek. Their education was Greek. Their mythology was Greek. Their artistic vocabulary was Greek. Pizza and Macaroni were invented by Greeks. Their greatest national epic was Greek, lightly edited, translated into Latin, branded with an Augustan logo and relaunched as an exemplar of authentic Roman creativity. The Aeneid is thus no epic. Rather, it is the most successful act of intellectual property theft in Western literary history. It therefore follows that every modern edition sold without payment to the descendants of the original cultural stakeholders perpetuates this extractive economy. Penguin Classics should immediately enter negotiations regarding retrospective royalties payable to the Greek people, while the Government of Italy ought to establish a Vergilian Reparations Fund as a tangible act of restorative literary justice. Two thousand years of unpaid intellectual property is, after all, a substantial debt, which could fund further Consumer Price Indexed pay-rises for prelates belonging to the Church of Greece.

Accordingly, I look forward to the forthcoming conference, Decolonising the Aeneid: Towards an Ethical, Inclusive and Decentred Engagement with Augustan Epic. The conference will open with a Welcome to Epic Country, acknowledging the traditional custodians of the Homeric narrative landscape, followed by the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Classical Literature to hear the lived experiences of communities affected by two millennia of uncontextualised Vergilian reception. The opening keynote will examine extractive poetics as a manifestation of imperial privilege, after which delegates will attend workshops on creating culturally safe reading environments for displaced Trojans, decolonising the Latin curriculum, and best-practice guidelines for citing Homer without reproducing colonial hierarchies or perpetuating Augustan normativity.

Delegates will then participate in a facilitated listening circle during which the Aeneid will be invited to reflect upon the harm it has caused over the past two millennia, accept accountability for its narrative choices and begin its journey as an ally text. A restorative justice panel will explore pathways towards healing for descendants of Homeric knowledge holders, while another will debate whether continued teaching of Latin without an accompanying Anti-Imperial Impact Statement constitutes an ongoing act of epistemic violence. A further workshop will examine the unconscious bias embedded within dactylic hexameter and develop strategies for creating more inclusive metrical practices that centre historically silenced voices. A separate session will develop trauma-informed pedagogies for readers who experience affective harm while encountering uncontextualised Latin, while another will consider whether the phrase "Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit," should henceforth be preceded by an appropriate content warning, and another still will debate whether: “Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento” can continue to be taught without normalising settler-colonial governance structures.

The conference will conclude with the ceremonial repatriation of the dactylic hexameter to its rightful cultural custodians, the conferral of Certificates of Allyship in Homeric Studies, the signing of the Rome Declaration on Ethical Epic Consumption, and a collective commitment to ongoing reflexive engagement with participants' own internalised Latin privilege. Proceedings will appear, naturally, in a special issue entitled Reimagining Latin Through Decolonial Praxis, accompanied by an open letter inviting Vergil to undertake a process of restorative listening before any future republication of the Aeneid is contemplated, whereupon all copies of the Aeneid will be transferred from the Classics shelves to the True Crime section. Gentle reader, you have been warned: citing Vergil without simultaneously citing Homer now ranks among the gravest anti-Hellenic microaggressions, surpassed only by being required to obtain a document from your nearest Greek Consulate-General. Until the Greek Ministry of Culture funds Nolan's version, that is.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 22 August 2026

TRANSLATING ODYSSEUS: NOLAN, PASOLINI AND CACOYANNIS

 

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has inevitably invited comparison with Uberto Pasolini's The Return. Although there is no reason to suppose that Nolan borrowed directly from Pasolini, the conceptual similarities between the two films are sufficiently striking to place them within the same modern interpretive tradition. Both depart from Homer's poem in ways that reflect contemporary concerns with trauma, memory and the moral legacy of war, while Michael Cacoyannis's adaptations of Greek tragedy appear at first glance to belong to an altogether different cinematic tradition. The contrast, however, raises a larger question than one of style or fidelity to ancient texts, inviting reflection upon what it actually means to adapt Greek myth for modern audiences. Should ancient narratives be translated into contemporary intellectual and psychological categories, or should filmmakers preserve the unfamiliar worldview from which those myths first emerged? The different answers offered by Nolan, Pasolini and Cacoyannis reveal three distinct philosophies of adaptation and, in doing so, illuminate the enduring tension between antiquity and modernity.

The film-makers’ treatment of the gods immediately reveals this divide. Homer's Odyssey is inconceivable without divine agency. Athena engineers Odysseus' return, Poseidon obstructs it, Zeus arbitrates among competing divine interests, while Circe, Calypso and the dead encountered in Hades belong to a universe in which divine action forms part of reality itself. Myth therefore functions as an explanation of the world rather than as symbolic narrative. Pasolini dismantles this cosmology almost entirely, reducing the epic to an intimate psychological drama centred upon Ithaca and the emotional consequences of war. Nolan preserves much of the poem's mythic architecture, retaining the Cyclops, Circe, Scylla, Charybdis and the descent into Hades, yet increasingly encourages audiences to interpret these encounters psychologically. Athena resembles conscience or memory, while monsters become externalisations of trauma and fear. By relocating the gods from the external world to the interior landscape of consciousness, both directors transform myth from an account of reality into a language of symbolism.

Pasolini and Nolan’s understanding of Odysseus reflects the same transformation. Homer's hero (whose name literally means “the hated one”) certainly suffers. He mourns fallen companions, longs for home and repeatedly confronts despair, yet psychological paralysis never defines him. His defining characteristic remains polytropia, the capacity to adapt continually to changing circumstances through intelligence, deception, endurance and resilience. Odysseus survives partially because the gods are divided as to his fate but mainly because he refuses to surrender to suffering. Pasolini reconstructs him almost entirely as a traumatised veteran. His Odysseus returns home emotionally exhausted, incapable of reconnecting naturally with Penelope or Telemachus and burdened by overwhelming guilt. The destruction of Troy becomes the defining event of his identity. Pasolini himself explained that Odysseus needed to recognise the deaths of Trojans and companions alike as fundamentally his responsibility. Victory offers neither glory nor fulfilment, becoming instead the source of permanent psychological injury. Nolan adopts a remarkably similar framework. His Odysseus remains physically formidable and intellectually resourceful, although these qualities increasingly serve as mechanisms for coping with profound emotional wounds. Survivor's guilt, moral injury and traumatic memory shape his journey as powerfully as monsters or storms, transforming the voyage home from an epic of endurance into a prolonged process of psychological reckoning.

There is much to admire in Nolan's achievement. Unlike Pasolini, he recovers the epic scale largely absent from modern adaptations of Homer. His monsters remain flawed yet genuinely terrifying, Odysseus’ voyage retains its vast geographical sweep and the narrative once again possesses metaphysical ambition. Psychological interpretation operates alongside spectacle rather than replacing it entirely, allowing Nolan simultaneously to satisfy the expectations of contemporary audiences while recovering something of the grandeur associated with classical epic. Even so, both films ultimately transform the Odyssey into an anti-war narrative grounded in contemporary understandings of trauma. Arguably though, where modern cinema instinctively searches for psychological causation, Greek epic searches instead for moral, civic and metaphysical causation. Characters suffer because they inhabit a world governed simultaneously by necessity, divine order and inherited obligation. Cacoyannis preserves that ontology. Nolan and Pasolini replace it with interior consciousness.

There is every reason to believe that this convergence owes less to direct influence than to broader intellectual currents. The psychologically fractured Odysseus has become increasingly prominent throughout twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship. Post-Vietnam readings of Homer, trauma theory, psychoanalytic criticism and recent translations, including Emily Wilson's influential version, have consistently emphasised memory, grief, identity and moral ambiguity over traditional heroism. Nolan and Pasolini therefore participate in an already established interpretive movement rather than creating an entirely new one. Even so, the timing remains striking. The Return appeared only two years before Nolan's The Odyssey and attracted considerable attention precisely because it stripped away the gods while reimagining Odysseus as psychologically broken. Whether through direct influence or intellectual convergence, both films belong unmistakably to the same contemporary conversation about myth, violence and memory. Yet that very convergence also highlights how distant this conversation has become from the intellectual assumptions that shaped Homer's poem.

The deeper issue concerns historical consciousness itself. Homer's Odysseus inhabits what classicists describe as a shame culture, where honour resides in public recognition, reputation, successful action and the fulfilment of one's obligations to family, companions and kingdom. Identity is established through speech, judgement and deed rather than through interior authenticity. The poem's organising principle is therefore not psychological fulfilment but kleos, the enduring renown that secures one's place within collective memory and the moral order of the community. Modern liberal societies conceive identity differently. Emotional truth, self-understanding and interior reconciliation increasingly define moral worth, with the result that Nolan and Pasolini relocate the centre of gravity from public action to private consciousness. In their films, the pursuit of kleos no longer governs Odysseus' return, yielding instead to the search for personal redemption after the devastation of war. The voyage home consequently changes from the restoration of kingship, household and public honour into the recovery of selfhood. Homer asks whether Odysseus can reclaim his place within the social and cosmic order; the modern films ask whether he can live with himself. That shift is neither accidental nor trivial, reflecting instead a civilisation that increasingly understands human beings psychologically rather than politically, communally or metaphysically.

Michael Cacoyannis offers perhaps the clearest alternative to Nolan's and Pasolini's method of adaptation. Rather than reconstructing Greek myth through contemporary psychology, he consistently trusted the philosophical assumptions of Greek tragedy itself. His celebrated trilogy of Electra, The Trojan Women and Iphigenia modernises classical tragedy without replacing its philosophical foundations. Electra preserves the ritual intensity, choral sensibility and inexorable movement towards fate that characterise Greek tragedy. The Trojan Women, produced during the Vietnam War and against the background of the Greek military dictatorship, exposes the horrors of imperial violence by trusting Euripides rather than inserting contemporary political commentary into the narrative. Iphigenia presents sacrifice as a communal and political dilemma embedded within divine obligation rather than reducing it to an individual's psychological conflict. Taken together, these films demonstrate remarkable consistency. Cacoyannis continually trusts Greek tragedy instead of rewriting it, allowing ancient assumptions to illuminate the present rather than reshaping antiquity until it mirrors contemporary concerns.

Nowhere is this clearer than in The Trojan Women. Divine justice remains woven into the tragic universe even when the gods themselves occupy relatively little screen time. Poseidon and Athena frame the action, reminding audiences that the destruction of Troy carries cosmic as well as human consequences. Fate, divine vengeance and human cruelty exist simultaneously within a coherent metaphysical order inherited directly from Greek tragedy.. Suffering possesses moral, religious and communal dimensions extending far beyond individual emotional experience. Odysseus never appears directly, yet his presence dominates the narrative through reputation alone. Euripides remembers him as the architect of the Trojan Horse, the strategist whose intelligence secured victory while inflicting catastrophic suffering upon innocent civilians. He emerges as politically calculating and morally compromised, particularly in his treatment of Hecuba and Polyxena, although he nevertheless remains recognisably Homer's Odysseus. His brilliance, ruthlessness and moral ambiguity coexist without reducing him to psychological pathology. Pasolini travels much further, internalising every moral consequence until victory itself becomes unbearable. Nolan follows a similar trajectory, although his film allows considerably greater space for external action and spectacle. Cacoyannis however, condemns war through tragedy rather than psychology.

The contrast therefore extends beyond characterisation into competing philosophies of adaptation. Pasolini translates Homer into psychology. Nolan translates myth into memory. Cacoyannis translates language, performance and cinematic form while refusing to translate the worldview itself. The essential question therefore becomes whether myth should be translated at all. Paradoxically, Cacoyannis's greater fidelity often produces the more radical cinematic experience precisely because it preserves the strangeness of antiquity. Modern viewers naturally expect characters to explain themselves psychologically. Contemporary storytelling privileges interiority, trauma, motivation and emotional self-analysis. Ancient epics seldom share these priorities. Individuals remain embedded within networks of kinship, divine obligation, civic responsibility and inherited fate. Their suffering cannot always be reduced to psychological injury because it belongs equally to family, city, cosmos and history. Cacoyannis preserves precisely this strangeness. His films resist comforting audiences with familiar explanatory frameworks, requiring them instead to inhabit a civilisation whose ethical assumptions remain profoundly foreign. That encounter possesses immense intellectual power because it refuses to collapse historical difference into contemporary experience.

Herein lies the peculiar paradox confronting every successful adaptation. The more completely it persuades audiences that it has captured Homer, the more easily it comes to stand in Homer's place. For millions, Nolan's Odysseus may become the Odysseus, just as earlier generations inherited Tennyson's or Joyce’s Ulysses or Kazantzakis' traveller. Every age therefore acquires not the ancient world itself but the antiquity it most desires. The survival of the classics depends upon ensuring that no single interpretation, however brilliant, is ever mistaken for the thing itself.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First publoshed in NKEE on Saturday 15 August 2026

DEAN KALIMNIOU

CENSUS 2026: WHEN MULTILINGUALISM HAS TO FIT THE BOX

Every census tells us as much about the assumptions of the state as it does about the people it seeks to enumerate. The questions it asks, the categories it creates and the answers it permits are never neutral. They are acts of classification, and classification is always an exercise of power. As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, the authority to classify is itself a form of symbolic power, because those who determine the categories also determine the social reality that emerges from them. Michel Foucault would go further still, arguing that systems of knowledge do not merely observe reality but actively produce it. In that sense, a census is far more than an exercise in counting. It is an exercise in imagining the nation, deciding which identities become visible, which relationships matter and which forms of life are worthy of official recognition.

This year's Australian census contains a deceptively simple question that reveals the persistence of a remarkably old way of thinking. Respondents are asked whether they speak a language other than English at home. Those who use more than one language are then instructed to nominate the one they use "most often." At first glance, the question appears entirely reasonable. Yet embedded within it is a profound assumption: that multilingualism can ultimately be reduced to a single dominant language, that one language somehow represents the authentic linguistic identity of the household while all others become secondary.

That assumption bears little resemblance to the lived experience of multilingual Australia. In my home, for example, my children are fluent in both Greek and Assyrian. They use both languages interchangeably, moving effortlessly between them, often within the same conversation, depending upon who is speaking, what is being discussed or because one thought finds its natural expression in one language rather than the other. One language carries particular memories, the other particular histories. One contains expressions that simply cannot be translated without losing something essential, while the other preserves a different inheritance altogether. They are complementary rather than competitive and coexist without requiring a hierarchy. The 2026 Australian Census nevertheless insists that I impose one.

More fundamentally, the question misunderstands multilingualism itself. Contemporary sociolinguistics has long abandoned the notion that multilingual speakers inhabit neatly separated linguistic compartments. Multilingual speakers move fluidly between languages according to context, relationship and purpose, drawing upon a shared linguistic repertoire rather than isolated systems. Language is not merely a system of vocabulary and grammar but a repertoire of relationships, negotiated daily across generations, marriages, friendships and neighbourhoods. Yet the census proceeds from an individualistic conception of language, as though it were a possession residing inside the speaker rather than a social practice existing between speakers. Languages survive because communities sustain them, not because individuals possess them in isolation. To ask me which language my children or I speak "most often" is rather like asking which member of our family we relate to most frequently. The answer depends entirely upon the circumstances, and even if it could be quantified it would reveal remarkably little about the relationships themselves.

The consequences of this perspective extend well beyond semantics. Census data informs public policy, shaping decisions about interpreting services, community language education, health care, aged care, broadcasting and funding. Smaller language communities already confronting the pressures of assimilation suddenly appear smaller still because the instrument designed to measure them has first required many of their speakers to suppress part of their linguistic reality. The resulting statistics acquire the authority of objective truth, despite having been produced through categories that have already simplified the phenomenon they purport to describe. In the official record, my children will therefore be counted as speakers of Greek because that is the language I chose to nominate, even though they are equally fluent in Assyrian. Had I made the opposite choice, they would simply have become Assyrian speakers instead. One language would always disappear. Ironically, as the smaller linguistic community, Assyrian arguably has the greater need for every speaker to be counted, yet the Census compels me to privilege one inheritance over the other.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Australia speaks endlessly of multiculturalism as one of its defining achievements. We celebrate Harmony Week, fund multicultural festivals and proudly describe ourselves as one of the world's most linguistically diverse societies. Governments encourage the maintenance of community languages while educational institutions extol the cognitive and cultural benefits of multilingualism. Yet when the nation pauses every five years to count itself, it does so through categories that continue to reflect the logic of an earlier Australia, one still influenced by the assimilationist expectation that each household ultimately possesses one principal language and one primary identity.

Official multiculturalism has become remarkably adept at celebrating diversity symbolically while disciplining it administratively. Diversity is welcomed provided it first becomes intelligible to the bureaucratic gaze. Linguistic plurality must therefore be rendered orderly, singular and statistically manageable before it can enter the official narrative of the nation.

What makes this particularly striking is the historical amnesia that underpins it. The census proceeds from an essentially European conception of the nation state, one that instinctively seeks a primary language and a singular identity. Yet the oldest linguistic traditions of this continent point in precisely the opposite direction. Before colonisation, many Aboriginal societies inhabited richly multilingual worlds, where several languages and dialects were used across kinship, ceremony, trade and Country without requiring speakers to privilege one over another. Contemporary migrant Australia has, through very different historical circumstances, recreated similarly multilingual environments in thousands of homes. It is therefore curious that the principal instrument through which Australia counts itself remains anchored in assumptions that sit more comfortably within nineteenth century European nationalism than within Australia's own linguistic history.

Benedict Anderson famously argued that nations are imagined communities. The census is one of the principal instruments through which that imagining takes place, determining which characteristics deserve measurement and which disappear beneath statistical convenience. When multilingual households are compressed into singular linguistic identities, Australia inevitably imagines itself as considerably less linguistically complex than it actually is.

The solution would hardly have been difficult. Rather than asking respondents to identify the language they use "most often," the census could simply have invited Australians to identify every language regularly spoken at home. Modern statistical analysis is perfectly capable of accommodating multiple responses. Such an approach would have produced a richer understanding of Australia's linguistic ecology, recognising multilingualism as Australians actually live it rather than reducing it to categories dictated by bureaucratic convenience. Equally perplexing, however, is the census' complete lack of interest in the many other languages Australians may know, read, write or speak beyond the home. A person may possess fluency in several languages, use them professionally, academically or socially, and yet those linguistic competencies disappear entirely from the national record because they happen not to be exercised within the domestic sphere. Those languages nevertheless represent years of education, cultural knowledge, professional expertise and engagement with the wider world, yet none of this linguistic capital appears in the statistical record. Why is the linguistic capital embodied in those languages considered unworthy of measurement? Does the state value multilingualism only insofar as it functions as a marker of ethnicity within the home, while remaining curiously indifferent to the linguistic knowledge its citizens possess and deploy in every other sphere of national life?

Perhaps that is the more profound question this census raises. The issue is scarcely whether Australia is multicultural. That proposition has long since ceased to be controversial. The real question concerns who possesses the authority to define the terms upon which multiculturalism is recognised and measured. Census statistics quickly acquire the authority of objective fact, informing government policy, academic research and public understanding alike. If the assumptions embedded within those statistics fail to capture the complexity of Australia's linguistic life, they inevitably distort the picture they claim merely to describe. The greatest danger, therefore, is not that the census fails to count multilingual Australia accurately. It is that Australia comes to believe the diminished reflection of itself that the census has created.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 8 August 2026