China will inherit Homer, and not because the Communist party has decided to take him. The evidence arrived last week in Beijing, where a doctoral candidate in political theory named Yiyang Zhuge sat down with Christopher Nolan to talk about The Odyssey. She reads Greek and has translated Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese. She learned her Greek in the United States.

Zhuge told Nolan that the concept of atonement does not exist in Greek culture, in the Greek language, or in Homer’s Odyssey. It is in the film. Then she asked him: “Did you Christianize the Odyssey?” Nolan said he had focused on xenia, the ancient obligation between host and guest. As for atonement, he said it was “what we bring as viewers to the story,” and that he had not intended to Christianize the poem.

Nolan’s answer was less a reading of Homer than a diagnosis of his audience. We increasingly read the classics on the condition that they first become like us.

Zhuge was reading Homer from outside a Western argument about guilt. She could see what Nolan’s audience had brought to the poem because she did not need Homer to settle that argument. China inherits Homer when readers there encounter him without first making him answer the West’s latest quarrels.

She had said as much a year before she met him. Zhuge told the Jack Miller Center, an American foundation that funds the teaching of Western political thought, that ordinary Chinese readers do not see themselves as heirs to the Western tradition. This leaves them “free from the........

© The Spectator