One quick question: Why can’t we stop telling the story of Odysseus?

As one of the oldest surviving works of literature, the stories in Homer’s “Odyssey,” never actually seem to get old.  

The adventures of the heroic but flawed king of Ithaca is getting a fresh retelling with the opening of the much-anticipated film, “The Odyssey.”  

WWU Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Studies Miller Krause has been thinking lately about Homer’s epic almost as much as the film’s producer Christopher Nolan. Krause is preparing to teach a class this winter exploring the different versions of the story of the Trojan War, which includes Odysseus and his journey home, from ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  

We recently asked Krause about the enduring popularity of the “Odyssey.” 

Why can’t we ever stop telling the story of Odysseus? What’s the secret of the enduring appeal of Homer’s “Odyssey”?

Nothing entertains quite like a good pirate story. The “Odyssey” certainly has pirates, witches, monsters, love and revenge, and all sorts of ingredients to keep an audience entertained.  

But the “Odyssey” has more than that: It has Odysseus, a morally flexible protagonist who appears as different to each audience as he does to each character he meets in the epic. Combining such an ambiguous and adaptable character with such an exciting world invites retelling and re-interpretation.

What we call the “Odyssey” itself retold older, traditional stories. Traces of those survive in legends about Odysseus’ adventures in Thesprotia and Epirus, much closer to Ithaca than Troy. They survive too in the fragments of the Aristotelian “Constitution of the Ithacans,” which tell us that Odysseus had to go into exile for killing his wife’s suitors, while the “Odyssey” lets him remain on Ithaca with his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. The so-called “lying tales” that Odysseus tells on Ithaca to hide his identity may also reflect an earlier Cretan “Odyssey” in which Telemachus and Odysseus meet up on Crete. Each time someone retold the story, it changed to accommodate a different kind of adventure.  

The version of the “Odyssey” that we have today became canonical because it reworked its story to be relevant to its audience while also ensuring that it entertained. The poets of the Panionian festival made the “Odyssey” link Ionia to Achaean roots on the Greek mainland, and the Athenians later bound themselves to Ionia by adapting the Ionian epic for the Panathenaic festival. Establishing such cultural links through revision of traditional stories was important work for poetry in a pre-literate society, but the poem also had to entertain. At both festivals, the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” likely took six days to perform together, and one cannot keep an audience through six days of boredom. A successful festival, one that audiences enjoy and would talk about and come back to, needed to keep its attendees entertained. So, the “Odyssey” always had to entertain and to appeal to its audiences.

Even after the Athenian “Odyssey” became the canonical account, poets and historians and philosophers continued to use its characters and rework its story. Stesichorus, Herodotus, and Euripides tell us that Helen never sailed to Troy; an illusory phantom replaced Helen, who lodged safely in Egypt until after her husband, Menelaus, had destroyed an innocent Troy. New characters alien to the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” appear, like Palamedes, who outsmarted Odysseus and forced him into leaving Ithaca and sailing to the Trojan War, and who in turn died through Odysseus’ cunning revenge during the war. Likewise, sequels to the “Odyssey” emerge, Odysseus’ only son Telemachus multiplies into Telegonus, Latinus, Agrius, Polypoetes, and many others.  

In the Roman era, the Augustan epic poet Vergil and later prose authors, who forged for themselves the pseudonyms of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian as supposed eyewitnesses to the Trojan War, retold Odysseus’ story in ways that adapted it for Roman audiences. Medieval authors like Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido de Columnis inherited what they called the “Matter of Troy,” making chivalric heroes out of the Trojan and Greek warriors, and of Odysseus at times an ideal knight, an eloquent diplomat, and a vengeful manipulator: he never loses the moral complexity his character had borne for two thousand years.

Pirate stories remain entertaining today, and Odysseus remains as flexible and adaptable as ever. And so, people continue re-inventing and re-imagining the “Odyssey” for modern audiences today, just as they have for millennia. 

Interested in studying the classics? Learn more about Western’s classical studies minor. 

Mary Gallagher covers Western’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences for WWU Communications and edits WWU’s Window magazine and the Family Connection Newsletter. Email her story ideas at mary.gallagher@wwu.edu.