Homeric epics are important to western civilization
We’ve never had a problem imagining ourselves in the heroes of Greek myth. Alexander the Great saw himself as Achilles despite having no real ethnic connection to Mycenaean Greece. In the 1950s sword and sandal epics, Americans and Brits played everyone from Odysseus to Jesus, and nobody treated it like some sacred ethnic violation.
That’s because these stories became foundational to the entire Western tradition a long time ago. They do not belong exclusively to a tiny region of the Mediterranean. They belong to everyone shaped by that cultural inheritance. The Odyssey is universal precisely because people from completely different backgrounds can see themselves in it: the struggle against fate, failure, pride, temptation, nature, war, and the desperate pursuit of home.
That is why racially blind casting has existed in these epics for decades. Nobody spent years asking why a Scottish actor was allowed to play Leonidas or why English actors played Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Hebrews interchangeably in older films. The standard was always whether the actor could embody the role and whether the story resonated.
What some people refuse to accept is that the West itself has changed. Its demographics are broader than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Naturally, the people stepping into these mythic roles will reflect that reality too. Those stories still belong to them. They have just as much right to see themselves in Achilles or Odysseus as some random British actor does, or even someone living on the same land where the myths originated thousands of years ago.