Matt Damon credited as playing...
Odysseus
- Eurylochus: What was the song of the sirens like?
- Odysseus: 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. And what you most can't have, is what you already had, and lost. It was the song of all the promises I failed to keep. And it told me I don't really want to go home.
- Odysseus: Come back as a prince, call a banquet. I'll be there.
- Telemachus: What will you do at the banquet?
- Odysseus: Beg. The clearest view of men is from below.
- [in Hades]
- Agamemnon: Odysseus.
- Odysseus: How are you here? We won the war, you headed for home.
- Agamemnon: Odysseus, the most brilliant of all my generals. You would never be snared as I was.
- Odysseus: Were you cast adrift, like us?
- Agamemnon: No. My misfortune was to make it home. Be welcomed by my beautiful wife. Bathed, anointed, made soft. To learn the hardest lesson: that I left a poison in her heart years before. The good part of her heart had gone to another. She and her lover had plotted my murder for years. Odysseus!
- Odysseus: Yes?
- Agamemnon: My son Orestes, did he avenge me?
- Odysseus: My lord, how could I know? I'm still trying to get home.
- Agamemnon: Don't make my mistake. Don't walk in the front door expecting garlands and praise. Come in disguise. Take your time. Assess.
- Odysseus: What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if... one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn't possibly be there anymore. What if... when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night? We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that's ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home. What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain-and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow-what if he knew exactly what he'd done?
- Penelope: What all of you had done.
- Odysseus: One man's idea, one man's trick... to break Zeus's Law for ever. We live in a world of palaces, trades, language, blinded with beauty... until we broke it.
- Penelope: You are the people from the sea.
- Odysseus: Yes, my queen. 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. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.
- Eurylochus: Do we have enough provisions to get home?
- Odysseus: We've taken enough from Troy. A couple of stops on the way home won't kill us.
