Triumpher and Greek Heavy Metal’s Reclamation of Homer
Reviewed by Jeremy Swist, Michigan State University, swistjer@msu.edu
Throughout its over half-century history, heavy metal music has frequently drawn inspiration from film. Black Sabbath had given birth to heavy metal itself by translating the occult themes of 60s horror movies into bluesy rock music, while 80s zombie and slasher flicks influenced the evolution of the death metal subgenre. The renaissance of sword-and-sandal Hollywood epics at the turn of the millennium—e.g. Gladiator, Troy, Alexander, and 300—likewise sparked an exponential uptick in metal bands of various subgenres producing songs and albums about ancient Greece and Rome. The spike following Zak Snyder’s 300 in 2007 is especially telling.
A proper analysis of this form of reception, however, should focus not only on what elements of myth/history in a heavy metal song are mediated by Hollywood, but also on how the musicians themselves make myth/history in their own image and adapt it to the aesthetics of the metal genre. This of course includes bands from the countries that lay the strongest claim to legacies of, for instance, classical Greece.
A vivid example of the “300 effect” on heavy metal is the music video for the song “Ode to Leonidas” by Greek power metal band Firewind (from their 2017 album Immortals, released on the popular metal label Century Media Records). The power metal subgenre is more or less defined by uplifting melodies and rhythms, with lyrical themes of fantasy, adventure, and often mythology and history as well. The fact that the music video debuted a whole decade after 300’s premier testifies to the staying power of the film (for better or, more often, worse), and the video on YouTube has since received over 1.2 million views.
On the surface, the music video itself is a low-budget ripoff of 300’s scenery and costuming, interspersed with shots of the band itself performing on the (computer-generated) battlefield of Thermopylae. Despite the superficial cheesiness that comes with the territory of European power metal, it became apparent in our analysis of the video that Firewind weren’t just inspired by the Hollywood film. All the actors playing the Spartans, including Leonidas himself, are Greek—something that cannot be said for the cast of 300, comprised mainly of Brits like Lena Headey and Gerard Butler, Germans like Michael Fassbender, and Australians like David Wenham. Not only the Greek actors in the music video, but also the band itself identify as Spartans, with Spartan lambda shields heaped in front of the keyboardist’s synthesizer. Nonetheless, one of the guitarists wears a silver cross around his neck, signaling his Orthodox faith. There is no contradiction, but instead harmony of Hellenic traditions forming a proud modern identity (e.g. a tradition of self-sacrifice). The band performing on the battlefield reminds the audience that this has been their homeland both then and now. The intent behind the song and video becomes clear. These Greeks are taking the story back from Hollywood and its long exclusion of Greeks from blockbuster epics based on their own mythology and history.
Two decades after 300, little has changed. While right-wing commentators’ objections to the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen and Elliot Paige as Achilles in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey amount to little more than racism and transphobia, they seem to have no qualms at all about the fact that Page is Anglo-Canadian, or that an Anglo-American is playing Odysseus. While there is nothing wrong with a diversity of racial and national backgrounds among actors in a film portraying classical mythology, it is nonetheless a legitimate criticism that none of the cast of Nolan’s Odyssey is Greek or even of Greek ancestry. Not just that, but the film’s international press tour skipped Greece entirely.
This may seem deeply ironic, but this is precisely how cultural appropriation operates: a love of a culture does not translate to a love of its people. It is also part of a wider erasure of modern Greeks from the Western reception and study of Greek antiquity, which is also reflected in the fact that the fields of ancient Greek history, philology, and archaeology have long been dominated by northern and western Europeans and their diaspora. Graduate programs for these fields expect students to learn to read scholarship in English, German, and French, but modern Greek has traditionally been excluded. This is a legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racism and Orientalism, whereby modern Greeks were seen as culturally and biologically severed from their ancient Hellenic ancestors by centuries of Romanization, Christianization, and Ottoman occupation. Even the medieval Greek continuation of the Roman Empire, which was responsible for preserving most of our surviving ancient Greek literature, was redubbed the Byzantine Empire by the West to further alienate the Greeks’ Christian inheritance from their pagan forefathers.
Unlike with Firewind and 300, we thankfully don’t have to wait a whole decade for a Greek heavy metal response to this film. Enter Triumpher. Formed in Athens in 2019, their current lineup consists of Antonis Valias (stage name Mars Triumph) on vocals, Christopher Tsakiropouolos and Marios Petropoulos on guitars, Stelios Zoumis on bass, and Agis Tzoukopoulos on drums. They have thus far released three studio albums within an impressively short span of four years: Storming the Walls (independent, 2023), Spirit Invictus (No Remorse Records, 2024), and Piercing the Heart of the World (No Remorse Records, 2026). Mythology and history are predominant lyrical themes throughout, especially from their Hellenic heritage. For example, Storming the Walls devotes a song to Zeus (“The Thunderer”), while the title track of Spirit Invictus honors Leonidas and the 300 Spartans.
Triumpher deliver a mixture of power metal and more traditional heavy metal, with a healthy dose of extreme metal aggression reminiscent of their country’s black metal scene—think Manowar meets Judas Priest meets Rotting Christ. The American band Manowar, in fact, were among the first to introduce fantasy and mythology into metal lyrics in the 1980s, and their album The Triumph of Steel (Atlantic Records, 1992) opens with “Achilles, Agony and Ecstasy in Eight Parts,” an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad clocking in at a truly epic 28 and a half minutes. The most well known heavy metal adaptation of the Odyssey, in turn, came a decade later with the American progressive power metal band Symphony X’s album The Odyssey (InsideOut Music, 2002), whose title track’s length of 24 minutes corresponds to the number of books of the Homeric original. But we are now noticing a familiar pattern, with the “classic” adaptations of classical mythology produced by Anglo-Americans (the same can be said for the reception of Alexander the Great by both Oliver Stone and Iron Maiden).
Triumpher are far from the first Greek metal band to tell their own stories (Northwind from Thessaloniki were doing it back in 1987), and today there are scores of them. Of course, Homeric poetry is a major inspiration—take the track “Epitaphios” from Triumpher’s debut record.
Its lyrics are entirely a quotation of Iliad 6.146–149, the famous meditation on human mortality and ephemerality delivered by Glaucus. The first section of the song uses Robert Fagles’ 1996 English translation:
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.
These lines are recited against typical heavy metal power chords played with a slow drum rhythm mimicking a funeral march, while Mars Triumph delivers the Homeric lines in whispers and wails. Next, the second section (starting at 1:04) transitions into the tremolo guitar picking and blast beat drum pattern typical of black metal and death metal, befitting the dark subject matter of the Homeric lines (though this section is without lyrics). Then at 1:42 comes the sound of a thunderclap and the metal music fades out, replaced by a male choir singing somber, Byzantine-style chants. Amid this gloomy, stormy atmosphere, Mars Triumph reprises the Homeric quotation in whispers—but this time, the translation is in modern Greek:
Η Γενιά των ανθρώπων είναι σαν τη γενιά των φύλλων, που αλλά φύλλα ο άνεμος σκορπά χάμω αλλά πάλι φυτρώνουν όπως η άνοιξη αναχλωραίνει τα πράσινα δέντρα. Έτσι και η γενιά των ανθρώπων, η μία φυτρώνει και η άλλη χάνεται.
I Geniá tōn anthrópon ínai san ti geniá ton fíllon, pou allá fílla o ánemos skorpá hámo allá pálifitrónoun ópos i ánixi anahloraíni ta prásina dédra. Étsi kai i geniá ton anthrópon, i mía fitróni kai i állihánetai.
As Greek classicist Marios Koutsoukos observes, this particular translation is heavily based on the poetic rendering by Iakovos Polilas used in Greek schools, but adapted into a modernized prose version of the quotation found on websites devoted to Hellenism. To listeners raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, the choral music in the background would have also reminded them of liturgical hymns sung on Good Friday, which marks Christ’s crucifixion, specifically the Epitáfios Thrínos (“Lament upon the Tomb”). In an Orthodox context, Epitáfios also refers to an iconic shroud illustrating the entombed Christ used in Holy Saturday services. The title of Triumpher’s song “Epitaphios” certainly refers to the liturgical dirge—though with its quotation of Homer it may also evoke the classical meaning of the word, epitaphios (logos), referring to a “funeral oration” such as that delivered by Pericles over those who fell in the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 2.35-46). In “Epitaphios,” like the Greek band Firewind before them, Triumpher weave together the inherited conglomerate of their heritage from classical, to medieval, to modern—taking a “timeless” excerpt from the Iliad and representing and reclaiming it in their own image as proud Greeks.
On March 6th of this year, Triumpher returned with their own answer to the Odyssey as well, in not one but two tracks on Piercing the Heart of the World: “Ithaca (Return of the Eternal King)” and “Naus Apidalia.”1 On the vinyl release, both songs conclude either half of the record and musically stand somewhat in contrast to the album’s other six tracks, such as the galloping, Spartan-themed opener “Black Blood” and the brutal, sinister “Erinyes,” whose placement right before “Naus Apidalia” portends Odysseus’s return as divine vengeance.
The title of “Naus Apidalia” is Greek for “ship without a steering oar” or “rudderless ship,” and refers to the ships of the Phaeacians, which Homer describes thus in Book 8 of the Odyssey (557–558, my translation):
οὐ γὰρ Φαιήκεσσι κυβερνητῆρες ἔασιν,
οὐδέ τι πηδάλι᾽ ἔστι, τά τ᾽ ἄλλαι νῆες ἔχουσιν.
ἀλλ᾽ αὐταὶ ἴσασι νοήματα καὶ φρένας ἀνδρῶν.
For the Phaeacians have no pilots,
nor any steering oars (pēdali’), which other ships (nēes) have.
Rather, the ships themselves understand men’s thoughts and minds.
The land of the Phaeacians has traditionally been identified with the Greek island of Corfu (Κέρκυρα, known classically as Corcyra), and the Apidalos Naus (Απήδαλος ναυς, “rudderless ship”) has been a popular motif there. A sculpture of such a vessel, by the artists Cleia Brenner and Kostas Panaretos, was erected in the island’s port city in 2003. Its pedestal bears a plaque inscribed with the above passage from Homer. It is a poetic irony of the Odyssey that it is a ship without a pilot or steering oar that successfully gets Odysseus home to Ithaca.
Triumpher’s “Naus Apidalia” is “epic” in length (clocking in at 9:27) and divided into multiple parts—suggesting that it’s a properly Greek answer to both Manowar’s “Achilles” and Symphony X’s “The Odyssey.” A proper analysis of the track would therefore be quite lengthy, but its music and lyrics are well worth a listen and/or read.
Both “Ithaca (Return of the Eternal King)” and “Naus Apidalia” are based on the events of Book 13 of the Odyssey, when a sleepy Odysseus is ferried by the Phaeacians on one of their “rudderless ships” back home. “Ithaca” is a power ballad—think of something structured like Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”—starting off mellow but concluding with heavy riffs and bells tolling in solemn grandeur.
Like Symphony X’s adaptation of the Odyssey, the lyrics to “Ithaca” are delivered from Odysseus’s first-person perspective. But while the former song covered the episodes that Odysseus himself narrates to the Phaeacians in Books 9–12, e.g. Cyclops, Circe, Sirens, Triumpher here focus on a specific moment in Book 13 (one that Homer’s Odysseus does not narrate), immediately after the events covered by “Naus Apidalia.” The Phaeacians had just transported Odysseus, who had fallen asleep on the voyage, safely back to Ithaca, and deposited him still sleeping on the beach. The lyrics begin as he awakens:
I wake
As the shoreline slowly sighs
Aura of scents
From jasmine and thyme
A palette of memories
From years long ago
The chariot of sun
Rides with its warming glow
Lighting the fields
Where the wild roses grow
They’re calling me home
Through the wind’s mighty blow
Through the rain
Through the snow
Carrying Nostos in my soul
Through the calmness
Through the storms
And the Fates now lead me home
I place my heart
On this sweet holy shore
She’s calling my name
From the king’s Mighty Throne
Seas open wide
Let the Heavens now sing
For the eternal king
Coming back home
I am crowned by the Gods
I shall step into the halls of your hearts
This is a moment in the story that’s not as fantastical or glamorous as the adventures that preceded it, but it is certainly one of the most emotional. It is the moment Odysseus realizes he is finally home after 20 years of violence, loss, and isolation. He takes it in through all his senses, and permits himself some time to be positive and comforted by the memories of life before he had left for Troy. He can briefly be satisfied that he has at last achieved his nostos, his homecoming, at least geographically, before he undergoes his remaining, fated trials through the second half of the epic. Penelope is calling him from his own throne. He knows how capable she is of holding her own for so long until the appointed time.
In “Ithaca,” Triumpher’s Odysseus not only expresses his emotions and sensations; he is also now fully aware of his role in the divine scheme, even far beyond its conclusion. He has consulted the shade of the prophet Tiresias during his necromantic rendezvous with the underworld in Book 11, and knows what he has to face back in Ithaca. He trusts in the gods’ plan for him, just before he even meets his patron Athena face-to-face. And with the final, triumphant line of the song, Odysseus reveals that he is not only to regain his mortal kingdom, but also immortal fame. Switching to a second-person address, he speaks across the ages directly to the listener. Call it Elysium or the halls of Valhalla, but true immortality is living on in the minds and hearts of posterity and being embodied by your descendants. That is how Triumpher lay claim to Odysseus and his story as their own.
Whether or not Triumpher composed “Ithaca” and “Naus Apidalos” in deliberate anticipation—or preemption—of Nolan’s Odyssey, these two songs make a powerful statement: the “tales of brave Ulysses” are theirs to be told, or rather sung, whether to a lyre or electric guitar—as they were originally a musical performance. Taking a look into how Greek heavy metal musicians reclaim the Homeric epics is not to argue that only Greeks can retell these stories. Rather, it is a reminder that their perspective is of paramount value, because these stories have been integral to their identity, from the poets of archaic Lesbos, to the scholar-monks of medieval Constantinople, to the heavy metal musicians of twenty-first-century Athens. So much is lost when they are excluded.
Jeremy gives special thanks to Christina Hotalen and Marios Koutsoukos for offering their assistance and perspectives in preparing this piece. Triumpher can be followed on Instagram and Facebook, and their music can be streamed and purchased via Bandcamp and YouTube.
Notes
1. Triumpher had already included the song ‘Arrival of the Avenger’ about Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors on their previous record Spirit Invictus.
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