The Journey Never Ends: Why We Keep Returning to Homer’s Odyssey

Today marks the national release of Christopher Nolan’s new version of the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey. The budget? Huge. The casting? Stellar. The marketing? Extensive and laden with pyrotechnics. Without a doubt it is a retelling for today’s audiences who require something extraordinary to tempt them into a cinema, and are well-versed in the cinematic language of quests and superheroes, a language in part redefined by Nolan himself.

You might forgive the professional teacher and researcher of ancient Greek literature for feeling somewhat jaded about all this. Of course, it is genuinely thrilling to think of the new audiences who will get to experience this ancient story for the first time. And, while study of arts and humanities continues to be attacked, a blockbuster that draws on recent scholarly translations and recent scholarly research provides an eloquent case for the financial, as well as cultural and intellectual, capital held within arts and humanities departments.

And yet, there have been, shall we say, a very healthy number of adaptations of the epics of cinema already, not to mention the thousands of adaptations and versions found in art, poetry, theatre, and music. Durham’s own Professor Edith Hall – some decades ago now – wrote of the cultural history of the epic (freely available to read online). In my own teaching I mount a spirited, if not always successful, defence of Wolfgang Peterson’s semi-panned Troy (2004) for its bravura and thoughtful cultural politics.

So why do we keep returning to these epics? The Odyssey is spectacular but by no means unique in exploring deeply humane questions through the medium of performance poetry. Before Homer there were the epics of the ancient near east – Enuma Eliš, Gilgamesh – works which you can read today (and study in their original languages in our department, thanks to colleagues like Dr George Gazis). Far, far longer than these is the gargantuan Mahabharata from southern Asia. Mythic legends, daring quests, tales of love and loss are told in every culture around the globe (my four-year-old is currently obsessed with the adventures of Pele and Hi’iaka – goddesses from Hawaii). But it is the seeming intensity and frequency with which these Homeric poems have been reworked and revisited that sets Homer apart.  So well-worn are the metaphorical pages of the Odyssey, it is poem that anyone and everyone can claim for themselves. It was perhaps with this accessibility in mind that Professor Arlene Holmes-Henderson and colleagues selected Homer’s Odyssey to be the text for teaching English to newcomer children in Derby, and base their education practice in using classical mythology as a starting point.

It is generally agreed that no individual, ‘Homer’, even existed, but rather this telling of the story of Odyssey was created iteratively and by many singers of tales, collaborating across space and time and performance until the poem was, eventually, set down in print, although scholars (and students taught by the Durham Classics and Ancient History department!) continue to argue over the supposed ‘definitive’ form of the text to this day.

But the poem has always existed in the space between humans, between storytellers and audiences, between geographies and times. The text itself, like Odysseus, wanders and (spoiler alert) never really reaches a definitive ‘home’. The journey continues. Our next stop in that journey will be Nolan’s cinematic creation. We wait to see if we’ll be greeted by a monster or a goddess, by a friend, or foe.