Nolan casts the invention of the Trojan horse as the ultimate violation of “Zeus’s law,” the idea that you should treat any stranger you encounter with kindness and respect, because they could very well be Zeus in disguise.
Homer’s The Odyssey is celebrated as one of the earliest examples of Western narrative. But the epic could also be considered one of the first open source projects: most scholars view Homer not as a single individual, but a collective. The text in the poem we read today was compiled from a multi-generational tradition of oral storytelling. It’s not unlike the early days of the internet; Homer is the OG moniker, and the Odyssey is an intricate wiki that belongs to everyone.
In Emily Wilson’s fantastic introduction to her new translation, she describes the “song-stitchers” who performed the poem hundreds of years before The Odyssey was written down: “They imagined themselves as stitching together a quilt of poetic narrative out of an already existing cloth, often presented as the poetry of ‘Homer.’”
Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation is coming to streaming soon (Nov. 17), and in the meantime I’d like to contribute my own patch to this quilt, through the lens of cybersecurity.
As with most popular culture, references to The Odyssey and Greek mythology are all over cybersecurity. You see it in malware names: Cyclops, Calypso, Rhadamanthys, Poseidon. There’s even an Odyssey infostealer. My employer Huntress named their AI SOC agent Athena.
But the most obvious example is the Trojan horse, one of the earliest terms for malicious programming, dating back as early as 1971 in the first Unix user’s manual. You don’t hear industry folks calling things “trojans” too much anymore; malware terminology has expanded with more precise categories. But as ever, most cyber threats use some sort of masquerading for deception, from the first click to the final, often renamed, payload.
Though central to Nolan’s film, the story of the Trojan horse is only mentioned briefly in the original poem–it’s described at length in Virgil’s Aeneid. On Odysseus’s orders, dozens of soldiers hide inside of a wooden horse presented to the Trojans as a peace offering, igniting the Battle of Troy and redefining warfare for the modern age. According to Dante’s Inferno, this deception earned Odysseus a place in the Eighth Circle of Hell with other “fraudsters.”
Nolan casts the invention of the Trojan horse as the ultimate violation of “Zeus’s law,” the idea that you should treat any stranger you encounter with kindness and respect, because they could very well be Zeus in disguise. Put another way: What if God was one of us?
As explored in her viral pan of the film, Emily Wilson considers “Zeus’s Law” a gross oversimplification of the Greek concept of xenia, or “guest-friendship,” described in her book introduction as “a networking tool for the expansion of Greek power.” If the history of modern civilization–and for that matter, history of the internet–has taught us anything, it’s that defaulting to always trusting strangers is not a good idea.
Think of the internet as a wine-dark sea. Every session is like a mini voyage where you might run into a Cyclops, a demigod, or a gaggle of alluring Sirens.
In the film, when Eurylochus asks what the song of the Sirens sounds like, Odysseus responds:
“All the things you want it to be. Then, all the things you wished you never wished for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch but find it's under the skin. You can't reach it. So the delicious itch becomes unbearable. Told you what you most want, is what you most can't have.”
Is that not an accurate description of a social media feed? The technology that underpins the most popular apps and websites simultaneously preys into your innermost desires and weaknesses and foists new desires and weaknesses onto you. Odysseus might have wrestled himself free of the singing women, but I have a feeling he’d be no match for a recommendation algorithm. Though not a traditional cyber threat, the endless scroll ultimately makes us less vigilant toward the real monsters on the internet.
“Tell me about a complicated man,” begins Wilson’s translation. Other editions call him a “man of many ways,” or a “man of twists and turns.” Our hero is constantly lying, disguising his identity, and setting elaborate traps throughout his journey, not unlike a security researcher communicating with threat actors to gather intelligence and inform defenses. In the poem, he outsmarts the Cyclops by saying his name is “no one,” like signing into a burner account. Circe’s spell turning Odysseus’s men into pigs is analogous to a ransomware attack–he ultimately convinces her to decrypt them back. The bow-setting contest that Penelope devises in the final act is essentially an MFA prompt–Odysseus ultimately reveals himself with a shared secret.
Nolan casts the invention of the Trojan horse as the ultimate violation of “Zeus’s law,” the idea that you should treat any stranger you encounter with kindness and respect, because they could very well be Zeus in disguise. Put another way: What if God was one of us?
In her review of the film, Wilson points out a litany of moral contradictions in Nolan’s narrative framing: why is slaughtering the Trojans after deceiving them unforgivable but Odysseus murdering his wife’s suitors while in disguise triumphant? The Odysseus in the poem is more of a grey hat than Matt Damon’s white hat; the Greek root heros doesn’t translate to “good guy,” it’s closer to the word “warrior,” so morally ambiguous. Kind of like the word “hacker.”
In contrast to his steely poetic counterpart, Nolan’s Odysseus returns home to Ithaca still feeling remorseful about participating in the trojan horse attack. This narrative choice cements The Odyssey as a spiritual sequel to the director’s last film, Oppenheimer. I’m not the only person who immediately pictured the terror in Cillian Murphy’s ice blue eyes during Matt Damon’s climatic monologue: “The breaking of Zeus's law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn't bear to see the ruins of what he'd done.”
With daily headlines about more and more LLM models going rogue, we’re barrelling toward another What Have We Done moment. AI is on pace to be just as transformative as the trojan horse or the atomic bomb, and maybe just as dangerous.
Sure, it’s been a mixed bag, but the internet has brought us so much good: human connection, productivity, adventure. And by deciding to put more of our trust into bots instead of each other, we might be about to bungle it all.
In the final lines of the film, Penelope assures her husband that “civilization will rise again.” He responds somewhat cynically: “And dawn will break over the darkened world. And our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”
Nolan is telling us that he remade The Odyssey so we won’t forget the mistakes of the past. The infosec community can do the same by telling our own stories of this pivotal sea change; sharing intelligence, mentoring noobs, and asking hard questions. Write the blog, create the GitHub repo, speak at BSides Ithaca. That guy who has more of a comment than a question just might be Zeus.
A self-described "sentence engineer" based in Brooklyn, Susannah Clark Matt has spent more than a decade in the infosec industry translating technical jargon into snappy prose. She previously managed production for Red Canary's blog and Threat Detection Report, and she now helps publish research from the Adversary Tactics team at Huntress.
