The Iliad & The Odyssey

The Iliad is a war poem, and it opens not with a battle but with a sulk. The Greek army has been camped outside the walls of Troy for nearly ten years, laying siege to the city to win back Helen, the wife carried off by the Trojan prince Paris. The Greeks' greatest warrior is Achilles — half-mortal, nearly unbeatable, and dangerously proud. When the commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, takes a captive woman who had been given to Achilles as a prize, Achilles is consumed by wrath. He withdraws from the fighting and sulks in his tent, and the Greeks begin to lose.

What follows is a study of pride and its price. Without Achilles, the Trojans, led by the noble prince Hector, push the Greeks back to their ships. Achilles' beloved companion Patroclus cannot bear it; he borrows Achilles' armour, drives the Trojans back — and is killed by Hector. Grief turns Achilles' anger inside out. He returns to the war a terrifying figure, kills Hector beneath the walls, and in his fury drags the body behind his chariot, day after day.

And then the poem does something extraordinary. It ends not in triumph but in tears: old King Priam, Hector's father, creeps into the enemy camp at night to beg for his son's body, and Achilles — the killing machine — weeps with him. There is no Trojan Horse here, no fall of the city. The Iliad covers only a few weeks, and closes quietly, with a funeral. The war is left unfinished, because the poem was never really about the war. It was about what rage does to a man.

If the Iliad is about a man who will not leave a war, the Odyssey is about a man who cannot get home from one. Troy has finally fallen — thanks, the tradition says, to a trick dreamed up by the cunning Odysseus: the wooden horse. But the gods are offended, and Odysseus's voyage back to his little kingdom of Ithaca, which should take weeks, stretches into ten more years of disaster.

The Odyssey is the original adventure story, and its monsters have never left our imagination. Odysseus blinds the one-eyed giant Polyphemus and escapes by clinging to the underside of sheep. He resists the enchantress Circe, who turns his men into pigs. He has himself tied to the mast so he can hear the deadly song of the Sirens and live. He threads his ship between the six-headed Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. He spends seven years held captive by the nymph Calypso, who offers him immortality if he will only stay — and he says no, because he would rather be a mortal man in his own home than a god in someone else's.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope endures a house full of arrogant suitors who assume Odysseus is dead and want his throne. She is as cunning as her husband: she promises to choose a new husband once she has finished weaving a burial shroud — and secretly unpicks her day's work every night for years. When Odysseus finally returns, in disguise, it is his patience, not his strength, that wins: he waits, watches, and springs his revenge only when the moment is exactly right. The Greek word for that homecoming is nostos — the root, three thousand years later, of our word nostalgia, the ache to return.

Here is the deepest mystery of all: we don't really know who Homer was. Tradition names a blind poet of the eighth century BC, but the poems seem to have grown out of centuries of oral tradition, sung and reshaped by many bards before anyone wrote a word down. Scholars call this the "Homeric Question." Was Homer one genius, or a name we've given to a whole tradition? Some argue the two poems are too different to share an author. Nobody can prove it either way — and that uncertainty is part of why the poems still fascinate.

And the reshaping never really stopped. The most famous scene of the whole saga — the wooden horse, and the warning to "beware Greeks bearing gifts" — isn't really Homer's at all. It comes to us most vividly from the Roman poet Virgil, writing some seven hundred years later in a language Homer never spoke. Even in the ancient world, the story was already being handed on and remade by new voices.

The Trojan War itself sits on the same knife-edge between myth and history. For a long time it was assumed to be pure legend, until the nineteenth-century treasure-hunter Heinrich Schliemann dug up a real ruined city at Hisarlik in modern Turkey — a city that had been besieged and burned. It doesn't prove Achilles was real, but it suggests the poems remember something. And because Homer wrote in ancient Greek, most of us meet him through translation: in 2017 the classicist Emily Wilson became the first woman to publish an English Odyssey, opening it with the deceptively simple line, "Tell me about a complicated man."

Which brings us to 2026. This year Christopher Nolan released The Odyssey — shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film, made for around $250 million (the most expensive of his career), with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope. It opened in July to the biggest first weekend of Nolan's career, drawing on Wilson's translation and on the old stop-motion monsters of Ray Harryhausen. The reviews were mixed. But the striking thing is the pattern itself: three thousand years after a bard first sang it to a lyre, the same story is still the most expensive, most ambitious thing our storytellers can attempt. The medium keeps changing — voice, scroll, book, screen. The story does not.