Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is about to surf the wine-dark sea into theaters everywhere, and between its star-studded cast and ecstatic early reviews, it’s likely to be a blockbuster. So if you’ve never read the 2800 year old poem on which it’s based — or you skimmed it in the 10th grade and haven’t thought about it since — is this the time for you to finally read it?
There’s a strong argument to be made that the answer is yes, because The Odyssey is an absolute blast to read. It’s funny, gripping, and sexy, an epic adventure with a human heart. If you’re willing to deal with the fundamental strangeness that comes with reading a text so old, you’ll come away from The Odyssey with a new understanding of how and why the West tells its stories.
How The Odyssey invented the asshole trickster hero
The genius of The Odyssey is that it’s both a family story and an adventure. Clever Odysseus is trying to make his way back to his wife and kid after 10 years at war, but at every turn, he’s beset by angry gods, jealous nymphs, or world-shaking storms. What we see of Odysseus’s home life is tender and sweet, and the voyage is thrilling, but Odysseus is the real secret weapon here.
Odysseus is one of those guys who’s super smart but, unfortunately, knows it, so as soon as he’s talked his way out of one jam, he can’t help but talk himself right into another. He defeats a Cyclops by using the admittedly very funny gambit of giving his name as No Man, so that the Cyclops’s pained shrieks of “No Man is killing me!” fail to summon any of his fellow one-eyed monsters to his aid. But, then, Odysseus is arrogant enough to yell his real name at the fiend he just maimed so he can get proper credit for his feat — and is shocked that doing so comes back to haunt him. It’s hard not to root for Odysseus to get home, but you also have to admit that he bears a lot of responsibility for his own problems.
That storytelling tool — someone clever and charming enough to get out of every sticky situation but hubristic enough to keep making it worse for themselves, too — is so satisfying to read that it birthed an archetype. You see Odysseus in Ferris Bueller, in Bugs Bunny, in Don Draper, in Marty Mauser. Trickster heroes who infuriate allies and antagonists alike all owe a debt to Odysseus, who showed the West what a powerful narrative engine such figures are.
Just as powerful is Odysseus’ quest to find his way home, which is so human and relatable that it’s become the basis for many of our go-to adventure stories. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas, Robinson Crusoe wants to get back to England, and even E.T. wants to phone home. Who hasn’t felt at one time or another like though they’re stranded in a big scary world and longed to find a way back to the safety and comfort of their family? The Odyssey is the earliest story we have that put that feeling into words and blew it up larger than life.
That’s the thing about The Odyssey: It’s been around so long and is so influential that it’s the source for a lot of story structures. Reading it will help you understand the obvious culprits like Ulysses and O Brother Where Art Thou, sure — but it will also unlock a lot of old favorites that you wouldn’t have thought could connect so neatly to the ancients and make you experience them in new ways. If you care about storytelling, that’s an experience worth having.
Reasons to skip The Odyssey
If you decide to read The Odyssey, and you aren’t used to dealing with ancient texts, you have to go in knowing that it’s going to be a weird experience. This is an oral poem, first composed in a dead language, likely developed by a lot of different people over generations, that’s now been translated into modern written English. It’s structured around repetitions, like the famously recurring phrases “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn” to help bards deliver the poem from memory. It can be confusing and even boring to navigate if you’re not prepared.
The Odyssey is also a story from an ancient culture with its own moral system. Greek heroes love a little unprovoked murder and theft, and Odysseus is always bragging about the cities he’s conquered and all the treasure he stole from them. Almost all the characters, even the ones we are supposed to admire, behave in misogynistic and deplorable ways. That can be jarring.
Ancient myths for everyone
If you don’t want to wrestle with these old, dense texts directly, there is a thriving universe of art based on classical myths just waiting for you to explore them. The bad news is that a lot of those adaptations are mid tier and leave me wistfully humming, “Wait / they don’t love you like I love you,” over my D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths.
I have trawled through the adaptations so you don’t have to, and I will only recommend the good stuff. These are the ones that meet my very high bar.
- Netflix’s 2024 hit Kaos brings the Olympian gods to the modern day and leaves behind none of their amoral hedonism in the process.
- The 2019 Broadway musical Hadestown, soon to be showing in movie theaters, transforms the myth of Orpheus and Euridyce into a jazz-inflected anti-capitalist fable.
- C.S. Lewis’s 1956 reinterpretation of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Till We Have Faces, is a rich philosophical exploration of faith in a time of suffering.
- In her 1958 novel The King Must Die, Mary Renault pulls from archaeological scholarship to bring the Bronze Age myth of Theseus and the minotaur to pulse-pounding life.
- The great Ursula K. Le Guin builds a whole immersive world around the unspeaking woman who Aeneas marries at the end of Virgil’s Aeneid in her 2008 novel Lavinia.
- Madeline Miller’s much-beloved 2011 novel The Song of Achilles places Achilles and his companion Patroclus at the center of a swooningly tragic love story. I usually seek out more cynical perspectives in classical adaptations, but this novel means so much to so many I would be remiss if I did not bring it to your attention.
If any of these oddities are a deal breaker for you, it’s fine to leave The Odyssey alone. But if you’re willing to put in the work to look past them, The Odyssey will reward you for it. As alien as its source culture is to us, the story it tells is so gripping, and funny, and human that we keep raiding it, Odysseus-like, looking for new tropes.
How to pick an Odyssey translation
There are a lot of different English translations of The Odyssey on the market, and the experience of reading each one is different — and will affect your perception of the text and the core story. Here are the four I would recommend for four highly specific circumstances.
If you like your classics accessible and self-aware
Emily Wilson’s 2017 edition, which generated a ton of buzz when it came out, is the first English translation of The Odyssey written by a woman. Her language is plain, terse, and unadorned — at times winkingly ironic, at times severe, always refreshingly direct and to the point. What’s most impressive is her ability to make plain the misogyny of the characters without asking the reader to be a misogynist along with them. “Earlier translators are not as uncomfortable with the text as I am,” she told Vox in 2017, “and I like that I’m uncomfortable.”
Read the first line: “Tell me about a complicated man.”
If you like your poetry lyrical and sensual
Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation has some of the most ravishing language of all the Odyssey translations. Every translator has to choose what to prioritize and what to discard. Fitzgerald prioritizes the beauty of his own words, and he doesn’t care too much about being faithful to the ancient Greek. He’s also not fond of footnotes and extra material to tell you about historical details you might miss. If you want your Odyssey translation to read like a poem that stands completely on its own, Fitzgerald is your best bet.
Read the first line: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, that wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.”
If you’d like your translation to be as accurate as possible
Richmond Lattimore’s 1965 translation is a favorite among academics, because Lattimore tried to stay as close as possible to the original Greek. While Fitzgerald and Wilson write in English-friendly blank verse (unrhymed lines of five-beat iambic pentameter), Lattimore uses a six-beat line that echoes Homeric rhythms. Given a choice between making a sentence sound beautiful in English and capturing the nuances of the original Greek, he opts for faithfulness every time.
Read the first line: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s secret citadel.”
If you’d rather listen to the audiobook
The best audiobook edition of The Odyssey is the one Ian McKellan narrates using Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation. Fagles tries to walk the line between Lattimore’s accuracy and Fitzgerald’s poetry, and he manages nicely. But the best way to experience his version of the story is to have McKellan’s rich, rolling voice read it out for you and bring this poem back into the oral tradition.
Read the first line: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” (Or, just listen.)
Whichever translation you choose, it will immerse you in Odysseus’s strange, ancient, but very human world. It will show you some of the source code for Western storytelling. And it will give you a chance to experience a wise-ass beat up a one-eyed monster and, then, ruin his own life by bragging about it. What more could a person ask for from one book?
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