What happens if we translate polutropos in the first line of Homer’s Odyssey as ‘much-travelling’? The result is Jonathan Burgess’ comprehensive and compelling exploration of The Travels of Odysseus.Footnote ¹ By centring the theme of travel in Odysseus’ character and story, Burgess brings together the diverse parts of the multifaceted Odyssey and brings them into conversation with the Iliad, the Cyclic Nostoi, and Telegony, and comparable narratives of heroes such as Gilgamesh, Heracles, Perseus, Bellerophon, and Jason. It is a thematic study, then, that does not confine but rather reaches out and forges new and valuable connections, certainly across the Homeric and non-Homeric epic traditions but also across genres and cultures. The emergence of ‘travel writing’ that we can see in, for instance, Herodotus, Xenophon, or Pliny’s Natural Histories is tracked back to the Odyssey, the stories of the Argonauts, or the Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor.

From this overarching thematic viewpoint Burgess can draw a set of informed conclusions, some of which I pick out here. A comparison between the Apologos and Odysseus’ lying tales, for instance, shows that ‘Though false, the travel tales are paradoxically realistic, whereas the “wanderings” are true yet fantastic travel narratives’ (3). Whilst the Homeric Odysseus is a complex character with many skills and laudable attributes, the post-Homeric hero is portrayed less generously, as simply the folktale trickster (22). Odysseus as the ‘socio-economic hero’ reveals the aristocratic bias of the poem as the good/bad ethical binaries show ‘class-based artifice’ (28),Footnote ² and Burgess concludes that ‘the Odyssey expresses interest in the humble without challenging the socio-economic assumptions of heroic aristocracy’.

Particularly intriguing is Burgess’ term ‘Homeric Vagary’ (and not just because it’s a pun). He uses this term to encapsulate ‘Homer’s wayward tendencies’ (4) – and now I think there needs to be a study of Classical Reception in Kansas songs. These tendencies include tangents, equivocation, and paradox: ‘a notable bundle of related characteristics that I attribute to the poet, or if you will, to the poetics of the main narrator’ (4). The Homeric Question need not overwhelm us here: suffice to say that Burgess sees the meanderings of the Odyssean story as intrinsically connected to the importance of travel to the narrative. Burgess then reflects this in his analytical approach as, much like for instance Maureen Alden in Para-Narratives in the Odyssey, he often leaves ‘the main path of Odyssey travel to pursue Homeric Vagary’ (29).

A great complement to Burgess’s book is Jonas Grethlein’s accessible Reading the Odyssey: A Guide to Homer’s Narrative, originally published as Die Odyssee: Homer und die Kunst des Erzählens and now available to the anglophone reader (translated by Sabrina Stolfa).Footnote ³ The thematic focus here is not travel but narrative, as the Odyssey is ‘a narrative about narrating’ (29) (as much as it is a traveller’s story about travelling and storytelling). Sub-themes pulled out include Homeric ethics, the reception history of the poem, and exploration and colonization. The structure follows the story ‘in order to do justice to th[e] temporal dynamic or experiential character of the narrative’ (27), but leaves room for digressions as Grethlein, too, follows Homeric Vagary – as far, in this case, as early vase paintings or, strikingly, Primo Levi’s references to Odysseus in his descriptions of his first-hand experience of concentration camps. For Levi, Odysseus provides a model for humanism defying dehumanizing conditions (270), yet the stark contrasts between the situations ultimately underline the senselessness and atrocity of the camps. The message for our readings is a broad but important one: ‘Levi’s chapter on Odysseus illustrates how literary patterns help to process reality. Experience is not simply pressed into a schema, but rather acquires form in a space containing both similarities and differences.’ (271) Another example given of this use of the Odyssey to process contemporary experiences is Patrick Kingsley’s 2016 book The New Odyssey: The Story of the European Refugee Crisis. Beyond its characteristically insightful close readings balanced with a clear overview of the poem and its history, this is perhaps the main takeaway of Grethlein’s book: that narrative can provide a channel for and mastery over lived experience, building identity.

Susanne Lye’s book Life/Afterlife focuses on one narrative topos: the Underworld.Footnote ⁴ Lye offers a study of Underworld narratives from Homer to Lucian (though focusing mainly on the archaic and classical periods), casting a wide net because she treats these scenes as ‘hyperlinks’ (5): that is, nodes in a network that link up across texts, serving a metaliterary purpose by allowing authors and texts to talk to each other. Perhaps we could make this argument with any literary topos or narrative frame, using it as a rationale for a diachronic intertextual study; but Lye does make the valid point that Underworld scenes are particularly ‘hyper’ and ‘meta’ in that they function as a ‘tool for promoting fundamental changes to how ancient Greeks at different points in time conceived of themselves, their place in the cosmos, and their relationships to both the gods and their own past’ (5). She navigates the scenes across time by sorting them into categories, such as the heroic Underworld scenes of the Iliad and Odyssey (emphasizing kleos), or scenes of Underworld Judgement (Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter) in which the Underworld becomes a moral space: ‘Underworld scenes in fifth-century bce Athens democratized the Underworld, making its perceived borders more permeable and its benefits more accessible to people from different classes and backgrounds.’ (156). I found this a really interesting claim, which Lye roots in Athens’ rise to prominence and the rise in Underworld scenes as ‘communicative devices across media to process political, religious, and societal changes’. Over time, afterlife society became more reflective of contemporary society, with the deeds of the living being more closely linked with the experience of souls in the afterlife. So linked were the two realms, in fact, that we see the idea emerging of the dead coming back to interact with the living (for good or ill), and the increasing importance of the necromancer or goēs. After a chapter on Plato’s ‘idiosyncratic vision of the afterlife’ (12), Lye concludes with ‘The Afterlife of the Afterlife’: a whistle-stop tour of Underworld stories in later periods and other genres, including satire. She shows that, while the religious and cultural contexts change, the communicative purpose remains, providing the space to reflect on tradition and ‘promote revolutionary ideas’ (13). The ‘meta’ and the ‘hyper’ are, ultimately, opportunities for authors to insert critical commentary, to negotiate power, and to both drive and map change.

There is one part of the Homeric narrative that is not like the others, and that is book 10 of the Iliad, the so-called Doloneia. It is a story of ambush, lokhos; a kind of guerilla warfare requiring mētis; a night conference and a night mission; a Shakespeare-like comedy of errors in which both the Trojans and the Achaeans, unbeknownst to each other, are sending out spies. Dué and Ebbott’s 2010 book Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush reclaimed the story from editorial suspicion by arguing that ambush is not ‘spurious’, but represents a traditional alternative type scene to polemos, open warfare, and is just as endorsed by the best warriors as are conventional battlefield tactics.Footnote ⁵ But there is still much that is peculiar about the narrative. I am forever curious about Dolon himself. When Hector asks for a volunteer to spy on the Greeks, the z-list Dolon steps forward as the only candidate. He is nowhere near the calibre of the Greek spies Odysseus and Diomedes, but rather extravagantly wants the horses and chariot of Achilles as a reward for his efforts. Before Dolon even sets out, we are told that he will not be returning: he is irresistibly like a red-uniformed ensign from Star Trek sent on an away mission, or the teenage girl in a horror film who is ‘just going to check outside’. So what can we make of this episode? Christos Tsagalis’ book, The Homeric Doloneia: The Evolution and Shaping of Iliad 10, takes up its complexities by approaching the episode as thematically consistent with and complementary to the rest of the Iliad, and by proposing the theory that what we have is an evolution from an earlier Iliadic version. On the interconnectedness of the Doloneia to other parts of the epic, Tsagalis explores themes such as mētis, travel, hubris, and horses, and examines Iliad 9 and 10 as an antithetical thematic pair (deliberation versus action), proposing therefore an even more integrated picture of Book 10 than do Dué and Ebbott. On its evolution, he argues that the ‘Rhesus phase’ of the story actually developed from an original ‘Hector version’ in which the Achaeans targeted not Rhesus, but Hector himself. Tsagalis argues that we can see the dynamics of oral composition in action in the development of this narrative, as the story is recalibrated over time. In the last two chapters, Tsagalis then reaches beyond the Iliad, to present comparative material from the Cyclic tradition (examples of late-arriving heroes), the Aeneid (with Virgil ‘operating as a neoanalyst avant la lettre’, offering a ‘working analogy’ for the gradual narrative recalibration of Iliad 10 (27)), and even the Mahābhārata, which shares a story of a night mission and, importantly, the kind of set-up for that story that we see in Iliad 9.

Narrative is built on language. The language used to build Homeric narrative is a complex balance of creativity and formularity. It is this paradox, now quintessential to Homeric studies, that drives Chiara Bozzone’s ambitious book Homer’s Living Language.Footnote ⁶ There are, Bozzone argues, two ways of approaching the meeting point of creativity and ‘mechanicity’. The first is ‘to investigate how Homer could have exercized his creativity despite the mechanicity involved’ (2): to explore how Homer ‘transcended’ the machinery, what made him ‘unique and original’. The second is to focus on the machinery itself and see it as ‘what enabled Homer’s creativity and greatness’: to consider that Homer did not transcend the machinery but used it masterfully. Bozzone follows the second route, looking at oral traditions as adaptive, and as supporting the poet’s cognitive abilities. She analyses formularity, metre, and dialect in terms of how they help, rather than hinder, the poet’s creativity. What I particularly appreciate about this book is that it is written ‘with the beginner in mind’ (3) – and this is no mean feat with a study of the intricacies of Homeric language, while also reaching higher levels of argument and analysis. Bozzone gets the balance right, with the help also of analogies to music or sports-commentating that lift the technical study.

A highlight is Chapter 3.6 (162 ff.) ‘Kunstsprachen in Popular Music Today’ (though the phonetic notation is difficult for the non-specialist to navigate). From Adele’s mixed dialect to Britpop’s Americanized pronunciation and Dylan’s ‘mysterious idiom’ (169), Bozzone presents us with examples of artificial linguistic features adopted for singing: a concrete and relatable analogy for Homer’s mixed dialect and (drawing on sociolinguistics) its societal function. Grethlein in his round-up of how Odysseus’ narrative ‘reverberates’ through modern literature, art, and film mentions the oft-cited Coen Brothers’ comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou (5); Bozzone zooms in on the minutiae of the language of the narrative by treating us to a linguistic analysis of Dylan’s version of ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ compared with earlier folk versions. And we can learn a lot from the dialectical trajectory of The Beatles that Bozzone traces: from American assimilation early on, to retaining more features of their own dialect in their singing as their fame rose. Would that we could all feel comfortable enough in our positions to unleash our accents!Footnote ⁷ The point for Homerists is an interesting one. What is actually happening is a synchronic competition between American and British English; but if we did not know anything about the sociolinguistic situation, we might posit diachronic language change. This is to say that there is a lot about the Homeric Kunstsprache we don’t know – and Bozzone’s book is compelling for raising new questions. The broader methodological questions are gathered at pages 191–3, but the specific prompts along the way also get us thinking: ‘Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong openly explained: “I’m an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent.”…Was “Homer”…a Euboean guy faking an East Ionic accent, faking an Asiatic Aeolic accent?’ (181)

Stories are living things with their own agency. Words and phrases connect with their communicative ecosystems in much the same way as the recombination of DNA. Those phrases and ideas build up into larger structures and patterns (such as ring composition or doublets), like multicellular organisms scaling up. These structures become like symbiotic life forms, needing human communities in order to replicate and spread, with both beneficial and harmful effects. Joel Christensen forms his book, Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things, around these central ideas.Footnote ⁸ The ideas are primarily analogies, metaphors, and similes: arboreal metaphors used to model complex relationships like the Homeric tradition; narratives likened to viruses or parasites. Christensen claims to present both a weak and a strong form of these analogies of narrative to (quasi-)living things, the former being that the analogy ‘helps us understand the complexity of meaning making’, the latter suggesting that ‘narrative has an agency and purpose of its own, and we are merely part of its environment’ (21). Throughout the book, however, the weak form of the analogical argument predominates as comparisons crowd in from all manner of intriguing interdisciplinary angles, from evolutionary biology to AI and Natural Language Processing to the sociology of fake news or cancel culture. These analogies are interesting, and good to think with. They certainly do offer descriptions and images to help us understand complex concepts, but they are sometimes lacking in analytical force and they are hardly original (Umberto Eco’s arboreal metaphors in his semiotics and narrative theory come to mind but are not mentioned – there are many other examples we might cite). More compelling, I believe, would have been the strong form of the argument. But this would depend on a fuller engagement with the concept of agency and how it has been employed in recent scholarship and theoretical approaches. The opening gambit that stories are living things with their own agency actually comprises multiple components that are never really pinned down in the book. In the Conclusion, Christensen comes close to revisiting the strong form of his analogy when he reflects:

There is a compelling ethical component here, driven by the entanglement between people and stories, but the sticking point is ‘imagining’. This stops the second part of the reflection arriving at that strong form of the argument we were promised. Further, the singular focus here on living things and being alive elides the importance of agency in the opening claim, as the two are not always or necessarily synonymous. I would agree with Christensen when he writes: ‘Debating to what extent they are alive distracts us from more immediate questions’ (180). These questions, centring around agency (What impact do stories have on us? How are humans and stories intertwined? To what extent do stories have their own independent agency?), might have been answered with the help of relevant fields in the Environmental Humanities and theoretical approaches keyed into the material turn and a concerted move away from anthropocentrism, such as material-discursive practices (Barad), material-semiotic processes (Haraway), storied matter and narrative agency (Oppermann), and biosemiotics and natural metaphor (Wheeler).Footnote ⁹ Christensen embraces an impressive range of theoretical and scientific standpoints, but in my opinion he misses the very fields that have focused in on exactly the questions he is asking. Sadly missing, too, are his Classics colleagues who have written so comprehensively on these topics in recent years.

Travel, narrative, language, and the power of story – all these themes and more come together in the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic, edited by Emma Greensmith.Footnote ¹⁰ The aim of the Companion is to reflect the state of scholarship in which ‘a more capacious approach to Greek epic across time is beginning to take hold’ (4), so ‘The volume is therefore decidedly, and proudly, kaleidoscopic’ (7). There is a lot to be said for this kaleidoscopic, capacious trajectory. It means that the volume includes dialogue with ancient Mesopotamian poetry, Greek lyric, and didactic writing; it means that canonical epics from Homer to Nonnus interplay with their afterlives in Byzantium or early Christianity; it means that classical reception is interwoven and foregrounded rather than tagged on as an afterthought; it means that insights from theoretical approaches are integrated. Greensmith argues that ‘the time has come to put new and further pressure on Greek epic as a concept: a cultural object, a self-reflexive agent, or a wide-ranging affective experience’ (1). I actually think this undersells the volume, as I’m not sure it accurately represents the range and variety of the chapters. These are structured in six parts: Epic Engagements, Epic Space, Epic Time, Epic People, Epic Feelings, and Epic Without End, with a helpful timeline of Greek epic at the end of the volume and an accompanying free, downloadable resource that provides plot summaries of all the epics discussed (both great teaching resources).

In the final section, Martin Winkler (442–59) takes us to the cinema but more specifically and excitingly to the western as a quintessential modern epic. He looks at themes of rivalry, heroism, mortality, ritual, and story patterns, and under the theme of foundation myths zooms in on Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Perhaps I’ve been primed by Bozzone’s study of modern music, or classical reception in Kansas lyrics, but this chapter prompted me to think once more of the importance of song. Winkler discusses The Magnificent Seven and the acknowledgement of a heroic deed as ‘They’ll make up a song about you … sing ‘em for years’. He notes that in The True Story of Jesse James the eponymous outlaw becomes the subject of a ballad as we see a legend forming before our eyes (and ears). This is just a small part of the chapter, but it’s a great way in to the questions of the agency of story as posed by Christensen: the longevity, independence, and memorializing function of ballads, folk songs, and, to continue the western line of analysis, modern country songs:

Part IV Epic People features a chapter by Emily Hauser on ‘Women in Homer and Beyond’ (274–94). It picks up on threads from the author’s 2023 book How Women Became Poets,Footnote ¹¹ such as the emphatic masculinity of the aoidos anēr (singer man), but also gives a detailed picture of how Homeric women are simultaneously silenced and are absolutely central to the plot and themes of epic. Hauser concludes her chapter with a discussion of the recent wave (still going strong) of women-authored novels giving voice to the marginalized female characters of Greek epic and myth, her own Golden Apple Trilogy included. She rightly argues that ‘These receptions are changing the way we look at the Homeric texts in new and productive ways’ (293) – and we might note that the feedback loop now includes scholarship on the novels, too. We now have a Companion that includes discussion of these novels, and I take this opportunity to congratulate my PhD student Theshira Pather who recently completed her thesis on Briseis and her reception in these very novels.Footnote ¹²

Hauser’s chapter leads me to yet another book from the classicist and novelist: Mythica (or Penelope’s Bones for the US market).Footnote ¹³ In this stunning book, Hauser combines and juxtaposes her scholarship and her fiction, expertly weaving the two writing styles together and creating something truly compelling. It opens, as do all great stories, with an invocation to the Muses:

Our attention is well and truly grabbed. The sixteen chapters are each framed around a woman and a female role: Helen: The Face; Thetis: Mother; Nausicaa: Bride. Each begins with a brief piece of creative writing that propels us into the storyworld of that character, the lived experience of that role. Thetis’ visceral and moving description of childbirth; Cassandra’s immersive prophetic dreams of impending horrors; Andromache’s memories of her wedding day harshly contrasted with her marriage ‘scarred by the war that has ripped it apart like a festering wound slashed open again and again’ (110). The women of Homer are brought out from the shadows of history and narrative, and foregrounded in their own stories by telling those stories. Also brought to the fore are ‘the pioneering women intellectuals – their names often lost to the record, or not recognized as they should be – who have dedicated their lives to uncovering the lost worlds of Bronze Age Greece, and of Homer’ (xix). One such story begins: ‘A cigarette burns in Alice Kober’s hand as she leans over one of her index cards’ (54). And so we are drawn in to the lesser-told story of the woman whose research stood behind Michael Ventris’ eventual cracking of the Linear B code.

‘If recent novels have worked on giving Helen back her voice, it’s Helen’s face that has been a source of fascination for millennia’ (45). Hauser strips away the layers of myth and glamour and gives us an honest reconstruction of that face by drawing on DNA analysis, archaeological finds, and AI tools to show us, in compelling colour and character, a real woman from late-Bronze-Age Greece. She reconsiders Calypso: Weaver, by bringing in experimental archaeology to suggest that weaving a sail and making Odysseus’ clothes (collecting and preparing wool, washing, dyeing, spinning, weaving, stitching), alone on an island without a group of weaving companions, would have taken a vast amount of time. Perhaps, then, Calypso’s story is less about keeping a man captive for seven years and more ‘about a woman who’s been given an impossibly large and lonely task, who’s been held hostage by the demands of her labour’ (250). I give just two examples among many, as this book deserves to be read immersively and without spoilers. Suffice to say that these are fascinating shifts in perspective that not only bring the lived experiences of real women to the fore, but will forever change the way we see the Homeric poems.