When tickets for Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey went on sale a year before its release, the speed at which they sold made headlines. Nolan’s reputation as a consummate filmmaker was, in part, responsible, but so too was an appetite for Greek mythology that has helped assure the success in recent years of everything from the young adult Percy Jackson novels to the musical Hadestown. Yet this is not just a modern phenomenon: Homer’s Odyssey dates back to at least the eighth century BCE, when it was circulated by travelling performance poets who riffed on stories that they themselves had heard.Footnote ¹ Adaptation has always been at the heart of re-tellings of the Odyssey: one challenge for the storyteller is to find a way to make the ancient myth fresh and relevant for each new audience. To tell the tale not just re-tell it.

It is this adaptability—a quality encapsulated in Odysseus’s epithet of “polutropos” (which translates from the Greek as “the man of many ways”)—combined with what Nolan hailed as the “foundational” nature of the epic, that underpins the enduring appeal of Homer’s ancient narrative.Footnote ² It is foundational in a number of respects, as Joseph Campbell recognised when he modelled his influential theory of “the hero’s journey” on it, a paradigm that has proven significant for filmmakers.Footnote ³ In its story of an adventurous quest and perilous return home, the Odyssey can be recognised as a palimpsest underlying films ranging from The Wizard of Oz to Apocalypse Now, from Le Retour de Martin Guerre to O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Footnote ⁴ But it has also formed the backdrop to experiments with artistic form that have coalesced into works that are themselves foundational: from the Modernist megalith of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to Monteverdi’s pathbreaking opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) with its musical innovations. Those two artistic works announce their engagement with Homer’s epic in their titles but do unexpected things with the ancient material, rendering them freestanding creations that are nonetheless fundamentally entangled with the Odyssey. For Joyce, this resulted in a stream-of-consciousness epic novel that shrinks Homer’s landscape to such a precise rendition of early-twentieth-century Dublin that it is said that one could use the novel as a map of the city, even while it expands it to a locale that can be dislocated from its geographical bearings to speak to the experience of life in the modern city. The heroic Odysseus becomes the unprepossessing Leopold Bloom who, the reader recognises over the course of the novel, is heroic in a new way. For Monteverdi, Homer’s epic warranted not only embodiment in the emerging genre of opera (of which Monteverdi himself was one of the founding fathers), but also the deployment of a sonic innovation, the stile concitato, a form of music that could amplify agitated emotions, such as anger, in a way that had previously been thought lacking.

As an artistic substrate, then, the Odyssey has long been recognised as fertile soil, providing the earth that can generate and nurture such productivity. But that fertility also has its negative aspects, as the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott emphasised with his memorable observation about “All that Greek manure under the green bananas,” where classical antiquity is both fertiliser and excrement.Footnote ⁵ Walcott’s phrase, in his 300-page epic poem Omeros (its title reflecting the Greek pronunciation of Homer’s name), highlights another way in which Homer’s epic has been foundational: as a work that—for better and for worse—has given expression to new political realities. It is no coincidence that the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões chose Homer’s epic combined with its Roman successor, Virgil’s Aeneid, as a model for his imperialistic poem, Os Lusíadas, celebrating Vasco da Gama’s voyage from Lisbon around the Cape of Good Hope to India. Several British imperialists did likewise, including James Anthony Froude, whose 1888 work, The English in the West Indies; Or, the Bow of Ulysses, not only figures himself as a more modern Odysseus (under his Roman name of Ulysses), but also suggests that the British Navy and its exploits in the Caribbean warranted a laudatory epic poem of their own.

The capaciousness of the Odyssey has led to it not only being co-opted for nationalistic and imperialistic purposes but also adopted by those who oppose such oppressive tactics. When the Martiniquan poet and politician Aimé Césaire penned his 1939 poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, the Cyclops is re-envisioned, as Sylvia Wynter has observed, as a victim of racist ideology. His distinctive single eye, which is cast as terrifying and monstrous in the ancient poem and many later adaptations of it, is revealed as a metaphor for racial alterity: the Cyclops looks different to Odysseus, and it is this that allows the ancient hero to treat him as he does.Footnote ⁶ Transposed to a colonial context, Odysseus becomes the invading imperialist, mistreating the indigenous inhabitants of a discovered land: entering their homes without permission, stealing their goods, betraying their trust, and violently attacking them.

From a different angle but still with nationalism and identity at its core, David Farr’s 2005 theatrical adaptation of Homer’s epic depicted Odysseus as a refugee desperate to get home but detained by those who believe he is trying to enter their country as an illegal immigrant. This is a theme that can be traced in Fernando Frías de la Parra’s 2019 film, Ya no estoy aquí (I’m No Longer Here) too, starring Juan Daniel García Treviño as Ulises, a young Mexican man forced to flee his homeland for the United States after witnessing a gang killing. Like Farr’s drama, the film played with the irony of wishing to return to one’s homeland but being trapped in a land that is simultaneously hostile to migrants and cannot imagine that they, too, may not want to be there. In both works, the malleable nature of Homer’s epic and its eponymous protagonist are clear: adaptations of the Odyssey persistently reveal that the epic is as polutropos as its central figure.

If there were ever a time before nationalist concerns over borders, walls, and self-and-other, we can be sure that exclusionary dynamics persisted nonetheless, most prominently perhaps, along lines of gender. So, it is no surprise that the Odyssey has been a rich vehicle for contestations of the very gender roles that the epic has also been appropriated to consolidate. When Margaret Atwood published her novella The Penelopiad in 2005, its title proclaimed its intent: an epic work with Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, at its heart. At last, the reader had access to one version of the thoughts of Penelope, who is famously opaque in the Homeric poem. In depicting a woman whose interior world is no less complex than that of her ancient male counterparts, Atwood’s work may have been one of the catalysts for the flurry of female-centred rewritings of ancient Greek mythology that have proliferated over the last two decades. But it was certainly not the first of its kind: Atwood herself had already given voice to the beguiling witch Circe in her “Circe/Mud” poems, published in 1974, more than forty years before Madeleine Miller’s much-lauded Circe (2018) did something similar.

And while Toni Morrison, who “minored” in Classics at Howard University and engaged with ancient Greek literature throughout her oeuvre—most famously in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987), which reverberates with the myth of Medea—it is in her second novel, Sula, published the year before Atwood’s feminist focus on Circe, that Morrison created a new Odyssey with women at its centre.Footnote ⁷ While not explicitly adapting Homer’s epic, Sula is a narrative that had not often been told: one with a female questing hero at its heart. Sula is a hero who, as glancing allusions in the text imply, is Odyssean in nature but who, as a character who is both female and Black, will not be granted the heroic status of the ancient Odysseus or his white male successors.Footnote ⁸

It is a theme that Njabulo Ndebele pondered too, in his novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003), in which a collection of South African women forge a new Penelope-paradigm.Footnote ⁹ They do so by drawing inspiration from one of the most contentious of South African heroes, Winnie Mandela, even while the novel refuses to resolve the conflicting aspects of her life and actions. As such, Ndebele’s Winnie Mandela stands as a comment on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s efforts to reach a resolution in South Africa built on the co-existence of multiple conflicting truths. In a superb moment of magical realism at the close of Ndebele’s novel, the group of South African women set off together on their own journey, pausing to pick up a hitchhiker who, it turns out, had the same thought as them albeit millennia earlier: for the hitchhiker is the ancient Penelope who, counter to the myth, did not continue to wait for Odysseus, but instead set out on her own adventure, becoming one version of a female questing hero, just as Morrison’s Sula is another.

Adaptations of the Odyssey, then, do not always announce their engagement with the Homeric epic in their titles, nor even develop a sustained dialogue with it that permeates the more modern work. Rather, echoing the Odyssey’s origins in oral composition and performance, many of them draw from the ancient poem to develop its themes in radically new directions.

How Nolan will tell the story of the Odyssey is yet to be seen, though the trailer suggests that his will be a traditional re-telling that mirrors the epic nature of Homer’s poem through its big-budget deployment of technological innovation, awe-inspiring locations, and a starry cast. Like his film’s protagonist, Nolan has had plenty of time to contemplate how he might craft his tale: he was originally slated to direct the 2004 film Troy, before it was given to Wolfgang Petersen and Nolan was awarded the highly lucrative “consolation prize” of Batman Begins. Footnote ¹⁰ So, like Odysseus’s re-telling of his adventures in Homer’s epic, Nolan too has had twenty years or so to choose how to tell this tale. But with so many aspects to explore and so many ways to re-tell the ancient epic already at hand, one can hope that he will, as the modernist mantra urged, “make it new.” If he does, Nolan’s film could be as radically fresh as some of the best re-tellings, both for those who already know the myth so well and for those encountering it for the first time.