POV: Why Is Homer’s Odyssey Suddenly Everywhere?
Head of Odysseus. Marble, Greek, probably 1st century AD. From the villa of Tiberius at Sperlonga. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
POV: Why Is Homer’s Odyssey Suddenly Everywhere?
Perhaps the story returns so often to remind us of the values we want to see in our heroes
Reading the Odyssey in 2025
In the College of Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum, all first-year students in CC101: Ancient Worlds are gifted a copy of Homer’s Odyssey (translation by Robert Fitzgerald), thanks to the support of our alumni. It is a central book in the course, an epic narrative composed around the eighth-century BCE that follows the hero Odysseus’ 10-year journey home to his wife, Penelope, from the Trojan War.
Faculty from many disciplines guide students with close reading to discuss themes of grief, nostalgia, family, intelligence, and the very nature of storytelling. We see how the character of Odysseus must be exceptionally adaptable so that he can navigate his return home. He is a father, a hero, a king, a wanderer, a master of disguise, and an excellent improviser. His character also returns three more times in the class, slightly adapted as a villain in Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Hecuba, and ultimately as a kind of Everyman at the end of Plato’s Republic. In each iteration of the hero, the values aligned with him change slightly because he has always been Polytropos, a man of many ways.
Lately, Odysseus, and many versions of Homer’s epic, have returned to the spotlight. Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche recently reunited in The Return (2024), a film focusing on Odysseus’ arrival home to Ithaca to get revenge on the suitors who were the worst guests in the ancient world. The American Repertory Theater is currently staging a new adaptation by playwright Kate Hamill (no relation) that reimagines the stories of Odysseus and Penelope, asking “how we can learn to embrace healing and forgiveness in order to end cycles of violence and revenge.” And it was just announced that Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan’s next film will be a star-filled adaptation of The Odyssey, although we will have to wait until 2026 to see the results.
Why is Homer’s Odyssey so fashionable of late? Perhaps the story returns so often to remind us of the values we want to see in our heroes. In 1954, W. B. Stanford argued in The Ulysses Theme that the adaptability of Odysseus has to do with the ethical ambiguity of his most distinctive attribute: intelligence. Odysseus has a desire to know, but this curiosity vacillates between cunning and true wisdom. That he has an extremely changeable nature is the very reason why later authors such as Euripides, Virgil, Dante, and Margaret Atwood in her 2005 The Penelopiad (which retells the story from the perspective of Penelope) find him to be untrustworthy and dangerous to the men he is supposed to lead.
Even Elon Musk posted on X that his followers should “Listen to the Odyssey” and “Love the Iliad and Odyssey,” and “I love Odysseus most.” Although, I cannot help but wonder what kind of Odyssean values Musk aligns with when reading the epic. In February 2024, SpaceX sent a robotic lunar lander to the moon, the first American spacecraft to land there in over 50 years. They called it Odysseus, Odie for short. Seven days later, it became inoperable, and it will not be returning to Earth any time soon.
To read the book closely is to know that Odysseus is a complex hero: he is reckless, he is sharp, he is inventive, he is violent, but he is also empathetic.
Our first impressions of Odysseus are offered by his son, the suitors, and his brothers in war respectively: “He’s gone, no sign…and I inherit trouble and tears”; “Odysseus perished far from home”; “The man was born for trouble.” When the reader finally meets him alive, Odysseus “sat apart…with eyes wet scanning the bare horizon of the sea” (Book V, 86-89). Odysseus survived 10 years at war and 10 years at sea by holding onto his humanity. This is not the only time he weeps.
In Book VIII, after hearing the harper sing of his own story at the court of the Phaiakians, Odysseus “let the bright molten tears run down his cheeks, weeping the way a wife mourns for her lord on the lost field where he has gone down fighting…” (VIII, 560-64). The simile compares him to an enslaved woman. The king states that his unknown guest must have “grief fixed upon his heart” (VIII, 580).
Again, Odysseus weeps when he finally arrives home to Ithaka, although he does not know he is there. Odysseus sat alone and “…made a tally of his shining pile—tripods, cauldrons, cloaks, and gold—and found he lacked nothing at all. And then he wept, despairing for his own land” (Book XIII, 273-77).
Perhaps we return to adaptations of The Odyssey over and over again because we need to be reminded of human stories. To know that in the end, justice is served with the help of Athena, the suitors are punished, and Odysseus is reunited with his family. It is comforting to be reminded of familiar endings, especially now.
Kyna Hamill is a master lecturer and the director of the College of Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum. She can be reached at kyna@bu.edu.
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