Blog post: Helen of Troy, Homeric Greece, and the debate over casting and cultural identity
Culture · History · Identity
Who Was Helen of Troy, Really?
On Lupita Nyong'o, Homeric Greece, and why we keep fighting ancient myths with modern anxieties
When it was announced that Lupita Nyong'o might portray Helen of Troy, the internet did what the internet does: it polarised immediately. On one side, outrage, another "race-swap" of a European icon. On the other, celebration, a long overdue dismantling of the myth that antiquity was monolithically "white." Both reactions, in their loudest forms, reveal something more interesting than the casting itself: how desperately we want the ancient world to confirm our modern identities.
This essay is an attempt to resist that temptation, to look, as honestly as I can, at what Homeric Greece actually was, what the casting debate actually involves, and why the answers are considerably more complicated, and more fascinating, than either side tends to admit.
I write as a white South African, a person who grew up in a society built on racial classification, and who therefore has a particular sensitivity to how invented categories can harden into "obvious" facts. That background doesn't give me authority. But it does sharpen a certain vigilance.
The world Homer was remembering
Homer, or the tradition we call Homer, was likely composing or transcribing oral poetry around the 8th century BCE, but drawing on memories of a world several centuries older: the late Bronze Age, roughly 1600–1100 BCE, centered on the palace civilization we call Mycenaean Greece.
That world was not an island. It was a crossroads.
The eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age was one of the most intensely interconnected regions in human history. Mycenaean traders and sailors moved through a network that linked Greece to Egypt, to Phoenicia, to Anatolia, to the Levant, to Mesopotamia, and to North Africa. The palace archives at Pylos and Knossos record the movement of people, goods, and ideas across this entire theatre. Egyptian records describe Aegean merchants. Ugaritic texts from the Syrian coast mention Greek traders by name.
This matters because when we ask "what did Helen look like?" we are asking about a mythic figure embedded in a civilization that was, by its very nature, a product of exchange. The Greek alphabet itself was borrowed from the Phoenicians. Greek mathematics absorbed Egyptian and Babylonian knowledge. The philosophical tradition that would later be called the crown of "Western civilization" grew in soil irrigated by the entire eastern Mediterranean world.
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff." Carl Sagan's poetic insight about human kinship applies equally to human civilizations, they are not sealed units; they are temporary patterns in a permanent flow of exchange.
The ancients themselves did not sort identity by anything resembling modern racial categories. They thought in terms of language, city-state, tribe, religion, and kinship. The distinction that mattered most to a Homeric Greek was not skin colour but the binary of Hellene versus barbaros "barbarian" meaning, literally, one whose speech sounded like "bar-bar," unintelligible. A dark-skinned Egyptian who spoke Greek and honoured Zeus was, in meaningful cultural terms, more "Greek" than a pale Macedonian highlander who did neither.
The concept of a unified "white race" with all its attendant mythology of purity and superiority, would have been incomprehensible to the people of Homeric Greece. It is a modern invention, assembled largely in the 17th and 18th centuries to provide ideological scaffolding for Atlantic colonialism.
The dark ages and the invention of the west
Here is where history gets uncomfortable, not for one side, but for everyone.
After the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE, the interconnected Mediterranean world fractured. The Mycenaean palace civilizations fell. Writing disappeared from Greece for centuries. Trade networks contracted. The period we call the Greek Dark Ages (roughly 1100–800 BCE) was one of cultural retreat and reinvention.
What eventually emerged, classical Athens, Sparta, the philosophical schools, the democratic experiments, was extraordinary. But it was built on amnesia as much as memory. The Greeks of the classical period had largely forgotten their own Bronze Age origins in that Mediterranean web.
Later, when Rome absorbed Greek culture and Christianity reorganized Europe, another layer of selective memory was added. And later still, when Renaissance scholars "rediscovered" classical antiquity, they were constructing a narrative, the story of Western civilization flowing from Athens through Rome to Christian Europe, that was always partly mythological. It required forgetting the African and Asian roots of much Greek knowledge. It required treating Greece as a uniquely European achievement rather than a Mediterranean one.
The whitewashing of history is real, well-documented, and ongoing. It includes the systematic downplaying of African kingdoms such as Mali, Songhai, and Kush; the minimization of India's contributions to mathematics, medicine, and philosophy; the erasure of Islamic scholarship's role in preserving and extending Greek knowledge during Europe's own dark period; and the treatment of pre-Columbian American civilizations as primitive rather than as sophisticated urban cultures.
None of this is conspiracy. It is the documented record of how colonial powers organized knowledge to justify hierarchy.
The casting debate: three honest arguments
With that history in mind, what do we make of casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen?
There are genuinely three distinct arguments in play, and collapsing them together, as the internet habitually does, produces more heat than light.
The artistic argument is the simplest and, in some ways, the strongest. Filmmakers are not historians. They are storytellers working with myth. Helen of Troy has been reinterpreted for nearly three thousand years, in Euripides, in Marlowe, in Goethe, in countless films. The role of Helen in a 21st-century production is not a documentary reconstruction but a symbolic one. She represents beauty, desire, the catastrophic power of human want. Those things are not ethnically encoded. A skilled actress who can carry that symbolic weight is doing the job. The argument that Helen must be white because ancient Greeks were white is circular: it depends on a premise (ancient Greeks were white in the modern racial sense) that the historical record does not support.
The historical continuity argument is more nuanced, and deserves more respect than it usually receives online. Some people genuinely feel that the repeated recasting of historically European figures, while other cultural traditions are, rightly, protected from equivalent reimagining, creates an asymmetry. This concern is not automatically racist. It can be held in good faith. The question of whether cultural heritage deserves some form of representational continuity is a real philosophical question, not simply a cover for bigotry.
However, and this is important, the historical premises on which this argument usually rests are shaky. If your concern is that Greek heritage is "European heritage" and therefore should be represented by white actors, you are already working with a definition of European identity that is anachronistic and, as we have seen, historically selective. The argument imports modern racial categories back into a world that did not use them.
The culture-war argument is the loudest and least intellectually honest. Much of the anger directed at this casting is not really about Greek history at all. It is about a much broader set of anxieties: about changing demographics, about diversity initiatives in entertainment, about the sense that familiar cultural landmarks are being systematically altered. You mentioned Elliot Page, and that connection is revealing. When critics bundle the casting of a Black actress as Helen with the casting of a transgender actor in another role, they are not making a historical argument. They are expressing a generalized discomfort with cultural change, and using ancient Greece as a proxy battlefield.
That discomfort is psychologically real and worth taking seriously. It is not, however, a historical argument, and it should not be allowed to masquerade as one.
We are all, very nearly, the same
Underneath all of this is a biological reality that our social categories systematically obscure.
Human skin colour is a polygenic trait, controlled by multiple genes, that evolved relatively recently in our species' history as an adaptation to different levels of ultraviolet radiation. Dark skin protects against UV damage near the equator. Lighter skin allows greater vitamin D synthesis at higher latitudes. The entire spectrum of human pigmentation, and it is a genuine spectrum, with no sharp boundaries, reflects roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years of geographic adaptation, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
There are no clean lines. The categories "black" and "white" so socially powerful, so legally consequential, do not correspond to any clean genetic boundary. Geneticists estimate there are thousands of gradations in human pigmentation, none of which constitute separate biological categories. We are one species, with a thin and continuous coat of variation laid over an enormous shared heritage.
Every human being alive today is descended from ancestors who lived in Africa. The people who walked out of Africa roughly 70,000 years ago and eventually populated Europe were themselves dark-skinned. The light skin associated with "whiteness" is a recent, localized adaptation. The ancient Greeks, those Bronze Age traders in their interconnected Mediterranean world, were likely olive-complexioned people who would not recognize themselves in either a modern "white" or "Black" category.
This is not a political statement. It is genetics.
What the debate is really about
The Helen casting controversy, at its heart, is not about Greek history. It is about who gets to claim the past, and therefore who gets to define themselves as heirs to greatness.
That is a profoundly human anxiety. Every culture tells stories about its origins. Every community reaches back to some golden age for legitimacy and identity. The problem arises when those stories require the erasure or diminishment of others' histories, when "Western civilization" is constructed by editing out the Egyptian mathematics, the Phoenician alphabet, the Babylonian astronomy, and the Islamic scholarship that went into it.
The appropriate response to that distortion is not, however, a counter-distortion, not the invention of an ancient world that was already perfectly diverse in a modern progressive sense. The ancient Mediterranean was not a modern multicultural utopia. It was a world with its own hierarchies, its own forms of exclusion, its own violence's. But it was also genuinely, demonstrably, a world of mixture, exchange, and encounter, far more so than the mythology of a pure "Western" civilization allows.
The most honest thing we can say about Helen of Troy is that she is a myth, and myths belong to everyone. They have always been retold, reinterpreted, inhabited by new voices. That is not the erasure of history. That is what myths are for.
The most honest thing we can say about ancient Greece is that it was extraordinary precisely because it was a crossroads, because it absorbed and synthesized knowledge from across the ancient world, and because it was curious rather than defensive about what lay beyond its shores.
If we want to honour that inheritance, perhaps the best way is to remain curious ourselves.
This essay draws on scholarship in Bronze Age Mediterranean archaeology, ancient genetics, and the history of race theory. The author makes no claim to professional authority in any of these fields — only to a genuine attempt at intellectual honesty, and an awareness that the most dangerous ideas are often the ones that feel most like common sense.
Thanks for reading.
This is a fascinating topic, and I think your instinct to approach it “down the middle” is the right one. There are shallow reactions online driven by grievance, insecurity, or culture-war reflexes — but there are also legitimate concerns people raise about historical representation, continuity, and symbolism. A good essay shouldn’t flatten either side.
A few important corrections and framing notes first, because they’ll strengthen your argument:
- The word you were reaching for is probably ethnonationalism or perhaps eugenics. The Nazis built their ideology around racial purity, mythologized ancestry, and exclusionary nationalism.
- Ancient Greece was not a modern multicultural utopia in the way people sometimes romantically imagine today. But it also was not an isolated, homogeneous “white civilization” in the modern racial sense.
- Modern concepts of “white,” “black,” and even “Europe” do not map neatly onto Homeric Greece.
- At the same time, people are not automatically racist for caring about historical continuity or questioning modern casting choices. Context matters.
The strongest version of your piece will acknowledge all of that.
Here’s how I’d frame the core historical reality:
Homeric Greece was a crossroads world
The Greece associated with Homer (roughly around the late Bronze Age memory-world and early Iron Age oral tradition) sat in the middle of a deeply interconnected Mediterranean.
Trade and contact linked:
- Mycenaean Greece
- Egypt
- Phoenicia
- Anatolia
- the Levant
- North Africa
- Mesopotamia
The Mediterranean was less a set of isolated nations than a moving web of sailors, traders, mercenaries, migrants, and storytellers.
That aligns very much with ideas popularized by Carl Sagan:
that civilizations grow through exchange, mixture, curiosity, and contact — not purity.
Ancient Greece absorbed mathematics from Egypt and Babylon, alphabetic systems from the Phoenicians, astronomical ideas from older civilizations, and philosophical influences from across the eastern Mediterranean. Greece became extraordinary partly because it was connected.
But here’s where nuance matters:
That does not automatically mean any modern ethnicity can be inserted into any ancient role without historical debate. It means the ancient world was more fluid and interconnected than modern racial narratives often assume.
And importantly:
the ancients themselves did not categorize identity primarily through modern racial categories. They thought more in terms of:
- language
- city-state
- tribe
- religion
- kinship
- empire
- “Greek vs barbarian”
The modern idea of a unified “white race” would have meant almost nothing to Homeric Greeks.
On the specific debate around Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy:
There are really three competing arguments.
1. The artistic argument
Filmmakers are not historians.
Directors reinterpret myths constantly. Shakespeare is recast across cultures. Greek myths themselves have been retold for nearly 3,000 years.
In that view:
- Helen is symbolic
- mythic
- archetypal
not a DNA sample.
This side argues that emotional truth and performance matter more than ethnographic precision.
2. The historical continuity argument
Others argue that repeated race-swapping of historically European figures creates a perception that European history is uniquely flexible while other histories are treated as sacred.
That concern is not inherently extremist.
Some people genuinely feel:
- European ancestry and identity are increasingly treated as culturally disposable
- while other ethnic identities are protected and emphasized.
That feeling exists independently of racism, and dismissing everyone who raises it as a bigot is intellectually lazy.
However…
This argument often becomes distorted online by people who do hold ethnonationalist views or who imagine ancient Europe as racially pure. Historically, that purity narrative is very difficult to defend.
Europe has always been shaped by migration and mixture:
- Indo-European migrations
- Roman expansion
- Arab influence in Iberia
- Viking movement
- Ottoman interaction
- Jewish diasporas
- African presence in parts of Europe dating back centuries
Civilizations are porous.
3. The culture-war argument
This is probably the loudest online.
Some critics are reacting less to Greek history and more to broader frustrations about:
- modern identity politics
- corporate diversity initiatives
- changing gender norms
- representation debates
You mentioned Elliot Page — and I think you’re perceptive to notice emotional overlap.
People often bundle unrelated cultural anxieties together:
- race
- gender
- sexuality
- representation
- nostalgia
- loss of familiarity
The casting debate becomes symbolic of a larger fear:
“Is the world I grew up with disappearing?”
That fear is psychologically real even when the historical assumptions behind it are shaky.
Now to the harder question:
Is there such a thing as “whitewashing” history?
Yes — absolutely.
Colonial powers frequently rewrote history in ways that centered Europe as the sole engine of civilization.
Examples include:
- downplaying African kingdoms and scholarship
- minimizing India’s scientific and mathematical contributions
- treating Greece as emerging in isolation rather than through Mediterranean exchange
- portraying Europe as uniquely rational or civilized
The Crusades, colonialism, and later racial theories all helped construct a story where “Western civilization” became associated with whiteness and superiority.
But there’s also a danger in overcorrecting history into a modern political narrative.
Ancient Greece should not become:
- a modern white nationalist fantasy
- or a modern progressive fantasy.
It was its own world.
Messy.
Complex.
Layered.
Human.
Your evolution point is strong — and scientifically grounded.
Modern genetics has shown:
- humans are extraordinarily similar genetically
- skin color is a tiny adaptive variation linked largely to geography and UV exposure
- racial categories are socially constructed approximations, not deep biological divisions
The number “20,000 skin tone variations” is often cited in discussions of pigmentation gradation and polygenic inheritance, though the exact number is more illustrative than fixed science.
What matters is the larger truth:
humanity exists on a continuum.
No sharp line separates “black,” “white,” “brown,” or “olive.”
Those are cultural categories imposed onto gradual biological variation.
From an evolutionary perspective:
all humans share recent common ancestry in Africa.
That doesn’t erase culture or ancestry —
but it does humble rigid racial mythology.
Very much in the spirit of Sagan:
we are local expressions of a shared cosmic story.
I also think your position as a white South African gives this topic unusual depth.
Because South Africa forces confrontation with:
- colonial history
- racial classification
- identity
- belonging
- inherited narratives
People raised in former colonial societies often inherit simplified stories from all sides.
A thoughtful essay from your perspective could avoid the easy traps:
- guilt performance
- nationalist defensiveness
- social-media outrage
and instead ask:
Why are we so desperate to turn ancient people into modern tribes?
That’s the real philosophical question underneath all this.
And perhaps the most important historical truth is this:
Ancient civilizations survived because they exchanged ideas.
Civilizations decline when fear replaces curiosity.
That doesn’t mean history should be rewritten carelessly.
But it also means mythology should not become a border wall for modern racial identity.
There’s a very strong essay in this if you keep the tone exploratory rather than prosecutorial.
My input to Claude
Response from Claude:
There's your blog post — I tried to give it the weight and tone the topic deserves, written as a genuine essay rather than a listicle.
A few notes on the choices I made:
Where I pushed back on the "pro-diversity casting" side: The ancient world was not a modern multicultural utopia. That framing, however well-intentioned, is its own form of anachronism. The piece tries to be honest about that.
Where I pushed back on the "preserve Greek heritage" side: The historical premises are largely shaky. The "whiteness" of ancient Greece is a retroactive projection, not a documented fact. The piece makes that case with evidence rather than dismissal.
The Elliot Page connection you noticed is genuinely insightful — it's worth naming explicitly, as I did, because conflating those two debates is exactly how the culture-war argument operates: it bundles unrelated anxieties together and then claims historical authority for all of them.
On the skin-tone science: I was careful here — the "20,000 variations" figure is illustrative rather than a fixed scientific number, so I rendered the underlying truth (continuous spectrum, no clean biological categories, recent geographic adaptation) without leaning on a potentially shakeable statistic.
On Sagan: His spirit is in there — civilisations grow through curiosity and exchange, not purity. It felt most honest to weave that as a theme rather than attribute every observation to him directly.
