In some ways, the Odyssey needs no introduction: it is everywhere around us. Over the nearly thirty centuries since Homer’s thrilling epic about the hero Odysseus’s homecoming from the Trojan War began to circulate, its story, characters, and themes have become so tightly woven into the fabric of our literature and art, music and drama, that they seem to us inevitable, natural. It’s with a start that we recall that someone had to invent them.
Whether you’re reading Virgil’s Aeneid or watching The Wizard of Oz or Finding Nemo, you are enjoying a story that borrows the Odyssey’s plot: a hero, separated from home and loved ones, must wander among strange peoples and fantastical places during a difficult and often dangerous journey before arriving at last to reclaim both family and homeland. As you make your way through Dante’s Inferno, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, or Stephen King’s Stand by Me, you are following a metaphorical arc first traced by Homer: the journey through space and time as a symbol for intellectual growth and discovery, for a deepening appreciation of the relationship of the self to the world, for the trajectory, finally, that we all follow from birth to death. The most suspenseful and exciting of the Odyssey’s plot twists—when the hero finally returns, he is in disguise and can thus secretly test the loyalty of those he left behind—has been endlessly recycled, from authors such as Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo) to filmmakers such as Ridley Scott (Gladiator). And the climactic testing of the Odyssey’s hero, who must prove both his identity and his worthiness to assume his destined role by meeting a series of challenges both physical and mental, has resurfaced in modern epics like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones.
Over the nearly thirty centuries since Homer’s thrilling epic…its story, characters, and themes have become so tightly woven into the fabric of our literature and art, music and drama, that they seem to us inevitable.
The Odyssey bequeathed to the West entire genres. The poem’s fascination with the alien creatures and unfamiliar cultures that its wandering hero confronts was the seed from which both fantasy literature and science fiction would eventually blossom; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Star Trek share strands of an Odyssean DNA. The Odyssey also established the blueprint for the picaresque novel, whose rollicking narratives about sly characters barely scraping their way through a series of hair-raising escapades, from Don Quixote to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, echo Odysseus’s progress from Troy (where the ingenious ruse he dreamed up, the Trojan Horse, won the war) through encounters with monsters, seductresses, and ghosts, to Ithaka, the home he strives so hard to reach. The marital drama of Odysseus and his wife, Penelope—a couple agonizingly separated, the man and woman each facing different kinds of peril, eventually reunited only after a tense test of wits proves to each that the other is an ideal mate—contains the germ of all romantic comedy. The pleasure readers experience when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy finally come together at the end of Pride and Prejudice is a direct descendant of an emotion experienced by Homer’s audience thirty centuries ago as they listened to a bard sing of the reunion of Ithaka’s royal couple, fully revealed to each other at last after a separation of twenty years.
The Odyssey has provided inspiration for a number of important modernist and contemporary authors. James Joyce’s 1922 classic Ulysses (the title uses the Roman name for Homer’s wandering hero) is composed of sections that are both named for and modeled on episodes of Homer’s epic: “Circe,” “Proteus,” “Lotos-Eaters,” and so forth. Motifs and characters from both the Iliad and the Odyssey resurface in Omeros, a 1990 epic poem on themes of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade by the St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize, while the American poet Louise Glück, also a Nobel laureate, examined a collapsing marriage through a retelling of the Odyssey in her 1996 collection Meadowlands. More recently, numerous women writers have taken the epic’s female characters and reimagined the events of Homer’s story from their points of view. In books such as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s Circe, the reorientation of narrative perspective reminds us that the ancient works, originally composed by men for primarily male audiences, are nonetheless rich in complex female characters whose literary potential is still being tapped.
The large themes of Homer’s epic have proved to be enduring ones. The poem’s presentation of Odysseus as someone whose desperation to return home is tempered by an endless curiosity about the strange places through which he wanders provokes questions about how we navigate between the allure of adventure and the satisfactions of home. The depiction of the poem’s protagonist as a gritty survivor who—in stark contrast to the haughty warriors of the Iliad, for whom dying young in battle is a fair price to pay for everlasting glory—will stoop to virtually anything in order to stay alive demands that we reevaluate what we mean by the word “hero.” Odysseus’s fraught interactions with immortals such as the nymph Kalypso, whose offer of eternal life and youth he rejects in favor of returning to his aging wife, force us, like the hero, to grapple with the meaning of mortality and the value of human love, even as his relationships with his wife, his bedmates, his son, and his father offer insights into the relations between men and women, parents and children. And the epic’s complex portrayal of its morally ambivalent main character—a man whose impressive intellectual gifts, technological expertise, and “godlike” cunning nonetheless very often leave destruction and sorrow in their wake—often reads like a dark parable about Western civilization itself.
The Odyssey further displays a marked interest in a subject that some readers are more likely to associate with the work of twentieth-century modernist writers: the workings of language and rhetoric, the nature of poetry and literature. Odysseus’s expertise as a talented raconteur (and, when the occasion demands, an expert liar), along with the epic’s many scenes of him and other characters telling, exchanging, and enjoying a tale whose point is clearly self-serving, raises tricky questions about the uses of narrative and its relationship to truth. Meanwhile, the Odyssey’s frequent references to and depictions of poets, singers, and bards, along with repeated episodes in which professional bards—like Homer himself—give performances on whose formal qualities and emotional power other characters comment, can lend the proceedings a startlingly “meta,” even postmodern feel.
Strikingly modern, too, is the Odyssey’s sophisticated inquiry into the nature of identity. The vehicle for that investigation is the poem’s constantly shifting presentation of its chameleon-like hero, whose adeptness at both falsifying his appearance and fictionalizing his life story makes it almost impossible to trust what we think we know about him—and, hence, impossible to know who he is. The issue is slyly raised already in the Odyssey’s opening line, which avoids naming its protagonist, referring to him instead simply as “a man.” Not very helpfully, that same first line allots this nameless man precisely one adjective—polytropos, literally “having many twists and turns”—which, at once vague and yet suggestive of endless possibilities, seems intended simultaneously to illuminate and to confound our understanding of just who this man might be. Over the twelve thousand one hundred nine lines that follow that opening, we see so many “turns” or facets of this character that it sometimes feels as if he is becoming more, rather than less, difficult to grasp as his story proceeds.
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And so we can read the Odyssey today with a bracing sense of déjà vu: we feel we know these narratives, we have met these characters, we recognize these themes. Yet the epic of Odysseus’s return is, in many ways, as unfathomably strange to us as the one-eyed giant Cyclops was to its hero. Its origins, even after centuries of scholarly investigations, are opaque, its poetic conventions sometimes off puttingly foreign, certain of its values passé when not outright repugnant.
Small wonder. The Odyssey is the product of the civilization of Archaic Greece—that is, Greece before the classical era, before the “golden age” of Pericles, Greek tragedy, Athenian democracy, the Parthenon. That civilization flourished between around 750 BCE, when the Iliad and the Odyssey likely began circulating, and around 500 BCE—the moment when the Athenian democracy was established. But the civilization described in the Odyssey had flourished another half millennium earlier, in the final stage of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600—1150 BCE). This was the civilization of Greek kingdoms such as Mycenae, Argos, Tiryns, and Pylos, of the luxurious and sophisticated cities of Knossos on Crete and of Troy in Asia Minor. These states, known as “palace-cultures,” were organized around a royal palace, or megaron, as the center of social, political, and economic activity, and each palace was presided over by its warrior-king. The principal characters in both the Iliad and Odyssey are such kings: Odysseus of Ithaka, Achilles of Phthía, Nestor of Pylos, Menelaos of Sparta, Agamemnon of Mycenae. Between 1200 and 1150 BCE, nearly all these cities were destroyed, probably as the result of both natural disasters (drought, earthquakes, fires) and of economic and political upheavals.
During the centuries after the fall of the Bronze Age palace-cultures—a period of such greatly reduced literacy and such minimal large-scale building and craft production that it was long referred to as Greece’s “Dark Ages”—the tales Homer would later tell about the Trojan War began circulating, aglow with idealized reminiscences of the civilization that had so suddenly vanished. These tales eventually coalesced into a grand sequence of epic verse narratives known as the Epic Cycle. Composed by various poets and together comprising many tens of thousands of lines and at least seventy-seven “books”—that is, papyrus scrolls—this cycle traced the arc of the war from its distant prehistory (the wedding of the parents of Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior) through its proximate cause (the Trojan prince Paris’s seduction of Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaos), to the events of the Trojan War itself, culminating in the Sack of Troy; and thereafter the adventures of a number of the Greek warriors as they returned home (related in an epic known as the Nostoi, or “Returns”). The final bizarre ramification of the cycle’s most attenuated plotline was the slaying of Odysseus, in his old age, by his son Telégonos, his child by the witch Circe, related in a work called the Telegony, at the conclusion of which Telégonos marries Penelope and Telémakhos marries Circe(!). Of this cycle, only fragments and summaries survive. The only two complete epics about the Trojan War that have come down to us are the Iliad, about events that took place during the final year of the war, and the Odyssey, about the nostos, or “return,” of one particular hero. Scholars continue to debate the relationship between those two epics and the Epic Cycle: which came first, and which inspired the other.
As distant as they were from each other, both the civilization that the Odyssey commemorates and the civilization that produced the epic shared a number of features that are profoundly alien to modern sensibilities. For one thing, both were deeply patriarchal cultures. Although they played key roles in religion and cults, women had no political rights or status, could not own property, and were themselves often little more than chattel, objects of exchange whose chief role was to produce children and perform homely domestic tasks. (Even the queens in the Homeric epics, from Helen of Troy to Penelope, are often depicted engaged in spinning and weaving; so, too, the goddesses Kalypso and Circe.) The economies of these cultures, moreover, were based largely on the labor of enslaved people—prisoners taken in war, victims of forced abductions—who, like many of the slaves depicted in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, spent their lives performing work both domestic and agricultural for masters who expected their loyalty as a matter of course. Hence, like other great works of literature from remote eras and different cultures, the Homeric epics present us with a classic conundrum: How can a work that seems to speak with such truth about so much that matters to us have been produced by a culture with certain institutions and values so alien to us? Only an attentive reading of the poem can begin to forge an answer to that question.
As to the poem’s formal conventions, they are likely to strike modern readers as equally inscrutable. You don’t have to progress very far into the text before you notice a number of peculiarities unlike anything familiar from other literary encounters. Of these, the high degree of repetition is likely to be the most striking. Not only do most characters have descriptive epithets that are repeated nearly every time their names appear—“Athena of the bright owl-eyes,” “Telémakhos, sensible lad,” “Penelope, clear-thinking woman”—but entire lines and even whole passages are repeated, verbatim, throughout the poem. Scenes of feasting, for instance, nearly always include the line “Then they stretched out their hands toward the food that was spread before them,” while the end of the meal is just as regularly signaled by the phrase “But once they had put away their craving for drink and for food…” Between those two moments, Homer often repeats the following five-line passage, describing the dinner preparations and service:
A maidservant brought in water, pouring it out from a ewer—
Exquisite, wrought in gold—into a basin of silver,
For the guest to wash his hands. Then she placed a table nearby.
The housekeeper, worthy woman, brought the meal and served it,
Glad to have so many dishes to set out from her storerooms inside.
(1.136–40)
Such devices were, in fact, almost certainly the products of the distinctive manner in which the epics were composed and transmitted—which is to say, not in writing but orally. The texts of both epics were long thought to have been the work of a single genius named Homer, who wrote his poems. Scholars began to reconsider the origins of the poems, however, in the late eighteenth century, when a manuscript of the Iliad containing not only the text of the epic but transcriptions of the “scholia”—the marginal notes by various ancient commentators that had accreted over the centuries—was discovered in Venice. These precious annotations were of enormous value in their own right, since relatively little has survived of the vast body of ancient scholarship and commentary on Homer, which was often impressively erudite. (The Roman geographer Strabo, a contemporary of the emperor Augustus, makes reference to a thirty-volume work by someone called Demetrius of Skepsis that treated just sixty-two lines of the second book of the Iliad.) But what was so exciting about the marginalia in the Venetian manuscript was that many of the notes, which referred to a number of ancient editions of the poems, concerned questions that the ancient commentators had about the authenticity of certain lines and passages. If the epics had been penned by a single author, scholars wondered, why were there so many variants already in ancient times? Could the authentic text by Homer be recovered by judiciously sifting through the variant versions?
By the early nineteenth century, the Venetian manuscript and the writings of those who had studied it were roiling the intellectual and literary worlds by raising a different set of questions. What if there were no authentic Homeric versions of the poems—what if, indeed, there had been no Homer in the first place? As the century progressed, more and more classicists were persuaded that the epics must originally have been composed by illiterate oral poets in an era before the Greeks adopted an alphabet and writing became widespread; the Iliad and Odyssey, they argued, could not have been the work of a single bard but instead represented an accumulation of smaller, self-contained poems (or “lays”) composed by different poets of different eras. Adherents of one school of thought, known as “Analysts”—from the Greek word analyô, “to break [something] down into its component parts”—claimed to be able to distinguish among the various strata of composition in each of the epics; some insisted that they could make out “original” versions of the poems lurking beneath the layers. The Analysts were opposed by so-called “Unitarians,” who continued to insist that the poems, whatever flaws in consistency and irregularities in style and coherence they might occasionally display, were the product of a single genius.
The debate about the authorship and transmission of the epics, known as the “Homeric Question,” raged on into the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, a classicist named Milman Parry proposed a theory, based on an insight he had into Homer’s verbatim repetitions, that transformed the way we understand how the epics were composed. Parry suggested that those repeated lines, passages, and epithets—the latter almost always occurring in the same position within a line of verse—must have functioned as prefabricated placeholders for oral poets who composed their works in performance. The rigidly formulaic nature of the repetitions, he argued, were traces of a poetic process that combined memorization of traditional elements with improvisation: if the bard knew in advance how a line was going to end—“Zeus, who marshals the clouds,” say—or could count on being able to insert a formulaic passage of several lines, he could devote his energies to what we might think of as the “creative” parts. (It is worth noting, however, that within an oral tradition, a poet’s canny manipulation of traditional formulas and scenes could itself be considered creative.) Parry bolstered his hypothesis by drawing parallels between Homer’s epics and the epic verse of contemporary Yugoslav bards whom he had studied, who adapted and improvised on traditional material in the way he believed the Homeric performers may well have done.
Whatever the controversies about the identity of the epics’ poet (or poets)…there has never been disagreement, either ancient or modern, about the importance of the two Homeric epics.
Most contemporary classicists, it seems safe to say, accept Parry’s core theory about the oral tradition in which the Homeric epics evolved. The poems likely began as relatively short compositions by preliterate bards who drew on traditional material—legends about the Trojan War, folklore about stock figures (wily tricksters, man-eating ogres, sage old kings), myths about the various gods—to fashion their songs. With each performance, they might elaborate on earlier compositions, refining and adding, even as they continued to rely on and employ traditional diction, epithets, and stock phrases and scenes. (Passages in the poem where a given epithet fits the meter but doesn’t fit the occasion were, according to Parry, traces of the poems’ origins as oral performances) As successive generations of poet-performers kept adding new material to their own and their peers’ works, individual lays—Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon over the enslaved captive Briseis, say, or Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops—presumably began to coalesce into larger works with grander arcs and themes: the climactic struggles of the Trojan War and what they tell us about the nature of human striving and mortality, Odysseus’s return from the war after twenty years and what it tells us about time and identity, family and home. Eventually, these increasingly vast works were committed to writing, possibly by a gifted poet-editor who collated the various versions known to him and assembled them into something like their present form.
Just when this happened is, typically, up for debate. One theory that was long prevalent—based, in part, on comments by ancient authors such as Cicero—was that the first definitive written texts of the epics were compiled in the late 500s BCE on the orders of the Athenian ruler Peisístratos, who was keen to institute a recitation of the epics as part of a grand civic festival known as the Panathenaia. (For some scholars, this explains why a minor character in the Odyssey is called Peisístratos: an ingratiating nod to the event’s sponsor.) Such festivals, along with religious occasions, funeral games, and Panhellenic gatherings such as the quadrennial athletic games, were important venues for public recitations of the epics as well as other works. These performances, quite different from the intimate recitals in the courts of kings and nobles that are depicted in the epics themselves, were a vital part of Greek cultural life from the Archaic period on. The men who performed the recitations were known as rhapsodes, a term likely derived from the Greek verb “to stitch together,” presumably because they would piece together the mythic and folkloric material they inherited, the lays and various episodes, the traditional lines and formulas, into their compositions.
Ancient texts refer to a law enacted by a son of Peisístratos requiring that the epics be performed in their entirety at the Panathenaia, each work being divided into parts that were assigned to the rhapsodes by lot, with successive rhapsodes reciting the different sections in order. For this to happen, of course, there needed to be a fixed text. And yet, it is clear that numerous versions and variants continued to circulate and the poems continued to evolve. Starting in the early 200s BCE, the plethora of such variants in the collections of the Library of Alexandria convinced the scholars who worked there that it was imperative to create a definitive critical edition of the poems. The version they and their successors produced eventually became the basis of a standard edition, widely circulated throughout the classical world and eventually copied and recopied by hand over the next millennium and a half, until the invention of the printing press. The first printed edition of the Odyssey was published in 1488, in Florence.
All this helps to explain why the existence of “Homer”—the blind bard who, people thought for centuries, single-handedly composed both the Iliad and the Odyssey—is now questioned. Today, the name has become a convenient way of referring to all the obscure processes by means of which a loose collection of legends about the Trojan War and its aftermath were transformed, over time, into the two great epics we have today: masterpieces of astonishing structural complexity and coherence, great dramatic power, and profound insight into the human condition. (I will use “Homer” in this way.) Indeed, whatever the controversies about the identity of the epics’ poet (or poets), whatever the debates about the date and manner of their composition, there has never been disagreement, either ancient or modern, about the importance of the two Homeric epics.
Through two millennia of Greek civilization, they remained the twin foundations of Hellenic culture, from the Archaic Era through the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, twenty centuries later: an essential part of education, the inspiration or models for much if not most subsequent literary and dramatic works, revered as sources of insight into subjects from ethics to medical treatments, and enjoying the supreme status and exerting the pervasive influence on Western culture that we associate with the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, which the Homeric poems eventually joined as the foundations of European civilization.
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Reprinted with permission from The Odyssey by Homer and translated, with an Introduction and Notes by Daniel Mendelsohn, published by the University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 2025 by Daniel Mendelsohn. All rights reserved.
