Why The Odyssey is still worth reading
Vox · L · trust 46/100
If you’ve never read the 2,800-year-old epic (or only skimmed it in high school), here’s how to get into it.
Gift Odysseus threatens Circe, 1635. Creator: Jacob Jordaens I. Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. 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. Readers are taking note. According to Circana Bookscan, unit sales across all editions of The Odyssey are up 76 percent year-to-date. This 2,800-year-old poem has never been hotter.
So if you’ve never read The Odyssey — or you skimmed it in the 10th grade and haven’t thought about it since — is this the time for you to get in on the hot Odyssey summer?
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.
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.
Book recommendations — both old and new — that are worth your time, from senior correspondent and critic Constance Grady.
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’s 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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