Elon Musk Got 25,000 Likes Attacking Lupita Nyong'o's Casting. The Ancient Greeks Would Have Found Him Ridiculous.
The woman who launched a thousand ships was never given a skin color by Homer. White supremacist beauty standards filled in the blanks centuries later.*
This week, rumors surfaced that Lupita Nyong’o might portray Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey.”
Nyong’o’s casting was first reported back in November 2024, and her specific character has never been disclosed as of the posting of this article. However, that hasn’t stopped the internet from losing its mind, or Elon Musk from weighing in with a post claiming that Nolan “has lost his integrity.” His response to a user who complained that the casting “make[s] the premise incoherent” already racked up 25,000 likes.
Over numerous other responses and comments, it became clear that the backlash rested on a major collective assumption: that Helen of Troy was white, blonde, and blue-eyed, and that casting a Black woman in the role is some kind of historical violation. There’s just one problem. The history doesn’t support that claim. Not even close.
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The Helen Nobody Actually Described
Here’s what most people don’t realize: in terms of features we could attribute to race, Homer never describes what Helen looks like. In “The Iliad,” when the Trojans see her, they say she has “the terrible appearance of goddesses.” She has “smooth arms” and “beautiful hair” in “The Odyssey.” There is no mention of skin color, nor eye color, nor hair color. The woman who supposedly launched a thousand ships is, in Homer’s text, essentially a blank canvas.
Later poets added a bit more. In lyric poetry, Helen is called “xanthe,” a word people love to translate as “blonde.” But as the classical language blog Sententiae Antiquae outlines, the actual semantic range of xanthe covers everything from fiery red to tawny brown. A Byzantine etymological dictionary ties the root to fire and heat, not to any specific shade of European blonde. The word was also applied to Demeter and Aphrodite, goddesses whose appearances were never fixed to one phenotype. As for her “blue” eyes, the Greek word kuanopis, sometimes attributed to Helen, actually describes something dark and gleaming, like lapis lazuli. Sententiae Antiquae notes it’s the same term applied to Poseidon’s hair and to sea nymphs, suggesting sheen and depth rather than a specific modern hue. As the blog’s author puts it, Helen functions as a “floating signifier” for desire, a blank symbol onto which every audience projects its own idea of beauty.
Color terms in ancient Greek are notoriously difficult to translate, and scholars have long noted that our modern associations with these words are filtered through centuries of white supremacist beauty standards. The conventional image of a pale, golden-haired Helen isn’t drawn from ancient texts. It’s drawn from Renaissance paintings made by Europeans who had their own ideas about what “beautiful” looked like.
“This Boy Is Beautiful”
For the people who think Ancient Greece was a white utopia where people never met or conceived of the existence of Black Africans, I have news for you. In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts sits a 2,500-year-old janiform drinking cup, a two-faced vessel used at elite Athenian symposia. One side shows a brown face, the other a black face, both female. Along the rim, the Greek inscription reads: “attractive is this boy, this boy is attractive.”
In a detailed academic study of these cups, scholar Josiah Blackmore’s chapter “Masks of Blackness: Reading the Iconography of Black People in Ancient Greece” documents how museum curators for centuries labeled the brown face “beautiful” and the black face “humorous,” projecting their own modern biases onto ancient clay. The cup itself makes no such distinction.
Another janiform cup, now at the Archaeological Museum of Polygyros, features a smiling face scholars have labeled “African” or “negro.” The inscription above it reads: “Timyllos is as handsome as this face.” The cup literally calls him beautiful. As the “Masks of Blackness” study notes, scholars like François Lissarrague insisted the face was meant as parody, as a joke. But exposed teeth were common on archaic Greek pottery, and as the study argues, there is no scholarly consensus that they signaled ugliness.
The academic record is blunt about this pattern. As the “Masks of Blackness” analysis documents, the whitening of ancient Greek bodies created a hierarchy that pushes Black bodies to its lowest rung. When scholars like J.D. Beazley looked at Black faces on Greek pottery and described them as having the expression “of one born to serve, and to suffer confusedly,” they were broadcasting their own attitudes.
So if Homer didn’t describe Helen as white, and archaeologists have found Black people positively depicted in millennia-old pottery, what did the ancient Greeks actually think about Black beauty? This is where it gets really interesting, and really inconvenient for the outrage crowd.
Herodotus, the so-called father of history, wrote that the Ethiopians were “the tallest and most attractive of all people” (Histories 3.20). This wasn’t a fringe opinion. Diodorus Siculus, the Greek historian, went even further, writing that the Ethiopians were the first of all people and so beloved by the gods that the gods themselves traveled to feast with them. The poet Memnon’s story in the “Aethiopis,” a lost epic from the same tradition as “The Iliad,” centers an Ethiopian king who was considered so magnificent that he rivaled Achilles himself.
The scholar Claude Bérard, in his analysis of Attic pottery, proposed that black faces on janiform cups represented a site of “exotic beauty,” noting that skin color in Greek art functioned as a flexible tool for locating people geographically, not as a marker of inferiority. In other words, the Greeks saw Blackness and saw beauty.
The actual archaeological evidence shows “Black” people depicted throughout Greek art as soldiers, musicians, and participants in religious rituals. From Nubian warriors in Minoan frescoes to figures on Attic pottery, people of African descent were woven into the Mediterranean world in ways that “historical accuracy” advocates conveniently never mention.
The Real Incoherence
Whoopi Goldberg put it simply on “The View”: “Lupita is also considered one of the world’s most beautiful women. So I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.”
If (1) the fundamental truth about Helen is that she was so beautiful men started a war over her, and (2) the ancient Greeks themselves wrote that Africans were the most beautiful people on earth, and (3) Nyong’o is an Oscar-winning actress who People magazine has named one of the most beautiful women alive, then the casting practically argues for itself.
If someone’s argument is that Helen must be white to be beautiful, that’s not a historical claim. The ancient Greeks, who depicted Black faces on their finest drinking cups and inscribed the word “beautiful” above them, would find the outrage baffling. You can’t claim to care about historical accuracy while knowing absolutely nothing about the history.
*NOTES:
As signaled throughout my previous works on this topic, I do not believe that Ancient people understood race completely as we do so when I use Black to describe an ancient person or depiction I basically mean “what we would consider to be Black as the social category is defined in a modern lens.”
ALSO huge thank you to Professor Curtis Dozier for helping me formulate my thoughts and providing extra resources and commentary for me as I wrote this piece. You can purchase his book, “The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate” HERE.
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Sources:
McArdle, Tommy. “Whoopi Goldberg Slams Elon Musk for Questioning Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey: ‘Look in a Mirror.’” People, February 3, 2026.
“Masks of Blackness: Reading the Iconography of Black People in Ancient Greece.” Chapter 2, Museum of Fine Arts analysis of Attic janiform cups.
“Helen of Troy.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“Trojan War.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“What Does Helen Look Like?” Sententiae Antiquae, May 11, 2018.
Th3Birdman. "Exposing the Grift: Lupita Nyong'o As Helen of Troy." YouTube, February 5, 2026.
Elon musk is a child molesting real good piece of shit. Fuck his rocket program and he can shove staring up his fascist ass.
Your impressive scholarship on Black people's presence in Antiquity reminds me of Prof. Snowden of Howard University in the late 1980s.....
ApartheidNazi knows nothing of integrity or decency as a pedophile and massl murderer, his opinion is worthless as he is...