Was There Ever an Original Version of ‘The Odyssey,’ and Do We Need to Worry About What Homer Would Think?

The earliest surviving fragments of the epic poem—the subject of Christopher Nolan’s latest Hollywood blockbuster—date back more than 2,000 years. But oral storytelling about a hero named Odysseus is much older

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

July 17, 2026 2:40 p.m.

*Odysseus and Polyphemus*, Arnold Böcklin, 1896 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine that you wanted to read The Odyssey, but you lived during the early 17th century and didn’t speak Greek. You would have been out of luck until about 1615, when George Chapman published the first full English translation of the epic. It begins with these lines:

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way

Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay

Two centuries later, when multiple translations competed for readers’ attention, the poet John Keats picked up a Chapman copy. By the next morning, he’d written a poem about how profoundly the text had moved him. He’d been up all night reading.

These days, most readers choose versions by different translators, such as Robert Fitzgerald (“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending”), Robert Fagles (“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”) or Emily Wilson (“Tell me about a complicated man”). These variations hinge on the first adjective that Homer uses to describe his hero: polytropos, a Greek word combining the prefix poly (“many”) and tropos (“turn”).

Odysseus and his men navigate between the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images

Wilson’s 2017 translation was particularly controversial among amateur classicists, who insisted that Homer shouldn’t sound like that. Did they mean that she should be more faithful to the original poem? Wilson has written about preserving the ambiguity of polytropos, which some translators have flattened. Is Odysseus turning or being turned? As for the meter, the Greek text is in dactylic hexameter, so Wilson chose iambic pentameter as the “anglophone equivalent”—“the meter of Shakespeare and Milton,” as she tells the New York Times.

The search for the one true Odyssey is a tradition in its own right. Translation debates aside, readers have been arguing about the right way to tell the epic for thousands of years. Scholars at the Library of Alexandria attempted to establish an authoritative version of the Greek text as early as the third century B.C.E.

The latest writer to interpret the epic is, of course, Christopher Nolan, whose blockbuster movie adaptation is now in theaters. The filmmaker was particularly inspired by Wilson’s opening line, explaining in interviews that he was drawn to Odysseus’ characterization as a hero with an edge. Once again, a new interpretation has prompted disputes about Homer’s intentions.

“The search for the original and authoritative version is something that permeates old traditions,” says Joel Christensen, a classicist at the CUNY Graduate Center. “The Odyssey we have has been accepted as The Odyssey, and as authoritative in its own, for almost 2,500 years—and so I think it’s far more compelling to ask: Why is this The Odyssey we have rather than something else?”

The song of Odysseus

Traditionally, two epic poems are attributed to Homer. The Iliad tells the story of the warrior Achilles during the final year of the Trojan War. The Odyssey picks up after the war, but its hero is Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca, who outwits a series of mythological adversaries on his ten-year journey home. Both tales take place during the Bronze Age.

Nobody knows when Odysseus’ story started circulating. It began as oral tradition, so its earliest iterations weren’t preserved in the archaeological record. The oldest references to episodes associated with the text are illustrations, such as seventh-century B.C.E. pottery fragments depicting Odysseus blinding the cyclops Polyphemus.

Odysseus blinding Polyphemus amphora — An amphora depicting Odysseus blinding Polyphemus from the seventh century B.C.E. Butko via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 2.0

Many scholars think that the tales started taking shape much earlier. According to Mary Ebbott, a classicist at the College of the Holy Cross, material objects described in the texts—like a boar’s tusk helmet that Odysseus wears—suggest the stories were already circulating in the second millennium B.C.E.

“There’s obviously a notional first time that someone ever told a story about a warrior named Odysseus trying to get home from the Trojan War,” says Casey Dué, a classicist at the University of Houston. “But we could never recover that.”

Scholars can’t study live performances that occurred thousands of years before the invention of recorded sound. But in the 1930s, Milman Parry, a classicist at Harvard University, and his assistant, Albert Lord, traveled to Yugoslavia, where oral storytelling traditions still flourished. Over 15 months, they recorded hundreds of oral performances, hoping that these recitations could unlock “the great poems which have come down to us as lonely relics of a dim past,” Parry wrote in 1935. “We would know how to work backward from their form so as to learn how they must have been made.”

The scholars were particularly impressed with Avdo Međedović, a singer who could perform stories that were more than 12,000 lines long—around the same length as The Odyssey. One day, Međedović listened to a song he wasn’t familiar with. Although he’d only heard it once, he proceeded to sing it himself with a “depth of feeling that had been missing” from the other singer’s performance, Lord recalled in The Singer of Tales.

What was Međedović’s secret? Parry had devised his theory before traveling to Yugoslavia: “In a society where there is no reading and writing,” he wrote in 1932, “the poet, as we know from the study of such peoples in our own time, always makes his verse out of formulas. He can do it in no other way.”

A mosaic depicting Odysseus tied to the mast © Ruggero Vanni / Corbis via Getty Images

Rather than memorizing thousands of lines, oral storytellers used basic building blocks—such as themes, meter and epithets—to improvise songs at impressive speeds. In Yugoslavia, bards could sing 10 to 20 ten-syllable lines per minute. They treated each performance like a puzzle, which they solved by improvising within a set of strict constraints. For example, the song Međedović repeated so skillfully involved scenes from a gathering. Even though he hadn’t previously heard that particular piece, he knew other songs with this theme, which he always performed in a similar manner.

Parry and Lord “saw a really flexible oral tradition, where you’d have themes and plots that could be expanded and contracted at will,” Christensen says. The pair believed that this is what had happened with The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Homer’s epics feature themes that bards would have performed before. “You could have a theme of a wedding, or you could have a theme of ‘a hero gets angry and withdraws from battle,’” Dué says. “The audience would have certain expectations about what happens next when we’re in that kind of story.”

Formulas also work at the sentence level. High school students learn that The Odyssey is full of epithets (Odysseus is “the great tactician,” while the god Proteus is the “ancient of the sea”). In the original Greek, oral poets may have selected epithets based on which one would fit the meter. As biographer Robert Kanigel wrote in Hearing Homer’s Song, “In the end, Parry all but proved that for each hero, god or goddess, in each grammatical case, in each position in the hexametric line, there was normally only a single epithet that went with it.”

Quick facts: Patterns in The Odyssey and The Iliad

Parry noticed that both texts frequently use epithets during moments when one character replies to another. Examples include “Then Nestor, prince of charioteers, made answer” or “The gray-eyed goddess Athena replied to Zeus.”
“In each case,” Kanigel wrote, “the epithet formula, in its metrical value, satisfied the hexametric line—whereas the name alone, or with a random adjective, would certainly not.”

Parry and Lord’s model transformed the way classicists understood the Homeric tradition. But who wrote down the version of The Odyssey that we recognize today? “Nobody knows the answers to these questions,” Ebbott says. “You really have to work from the evidence you do have to try and come up with the best model that you can.”

How did The Odyssey become a stable text?

In antiquity, audiences expected to hear stories they already knew. Bards didn’t need to craft original tales, but they did need to sell their renditions of old ones. “The premium for the performers—and for the audience—is to tell the story the right way, the way it’s always been told,” Ebbott says.

Storytellers also needed to read the room, calibrating their performances based on the audience’s response. A recitation would be judged by “how much it adheres to the tradition in such a way that those who respond to it respond with great emotion,” Dué says. “So if they respond with great emotion, if they weep when they hear it—that’s how you know you got it right.”

In the fourth century B.C.E., the philosopher Plato imagined a conversation between Socrates and a man named Ion, a performer of Homeric poetry who brags that he “obtained the first prize” at a recent competition. Socrates is curious about what it’s like to recite particularly “striking” passages, such as Odysseus’ attack on the suitors who have been tormenting his wife. Does Ion ever feel as if he’s “among the persons or places of which you are speaking, whether they are in Ithaca or in Troy?” the philosopher asks. “Are you aware that you produce similar effects on most of the spectators?”

Ion replies that he always monitors the audience’s reaction, “for if I make them cry, I myself shall laugh”—that is, if he can deliver a tear-jerker, he’ll win a valuable prize. If his performance falls flat, however, “I myself shall cry when the time of payment arrives.”

Odysseus and Polyphemus mosaic — An ancient Roman mosaic depicting Odysseus and the cyclops Polyphemus Prisma by Dukas

Gregory Nagy, a classicist at Harvard, argues that The Odyssey was composed not by a single talented poet known as Homer but by generations of performers immersed in oral storytelling traditions. These ancient festival performances, which were subject to strict regulations, helped shape a stable version of the epic.

During the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., Nagy says in an email, “earlier (not original) forms of the two epics we know as ‘our’ Iliad and ‘our’ Odyssey were performed” at a seasonal festival called the Panionia (“festival of all Ionians”). Later, in the sixth century B.C.E., the Athenian state sponsored performances of the two epics at a festival called Panathenaea.

“During this phase, the worldview of the earlier Ionian audiences was readjusted to the worldview of later Athenian audiences,” Nagy explains. “Such readjustments were happening in terms of oral performances, where each new performance entailed less and less recomposition.”

At the Panathenaea, rigid rules stipulated how Homeric poetry was presented. Performers were required to recite the epics “in relay, one man following on another,” according to one ancient source. “You get assigned a part, right? And then the entire competition covers the whole story,” Ebbott says. “So part of your skill also has to be picking up from where the last guy left off.”

Christensen compares these performances to Stop Making Sense, the famous concert movie by the band the Talking Heads. “It’s a coherent performance from beginning to end,” he says. “But it’s actually edited together from multiple concert videos, and then the songs come from different albums, from different performance traditions, and they’re integrated into a narrative whole.”

Odysseus and Penelope — Odysseus reunites with his wife, Penelope, in Ithaca. Culture Club / Getty Images

Hoping to win prizes, performers were sensitive to their audiences’ experience, ensuring that their recitations would feel like part of a coherent whole. A “relatively stable version of The Iliad and The Odyssey” may have emerged over many years through these competitions, Dué says. At some point, scribes perhaps recorded these established versions of the stories.

Other scholars disagree that the epics took shape gradually. The late Martin West believed that one single poet wrote The Odyssey in the seventh century B.C.E. This individual was familiar with The Iliad (which was, in West’s view, the work of a separate poet) and drew from existing stories. As West argued in The Making of The Odyssey, the poet wanted to form an epic that would “emulate The Iliad in scale and be likewise stabilized in writing.”

Based on an analysis of the language, Richard Janko, a classicist at the University of Michigan, argues that one poet composed both The Iliad and The Odyssey in the eighth century B.C.E. He’s also skeptical of the idea that the poems were composed gradually over the centuries, as surviving versions vary only in minor ways. “I don’t see how something so intricate could have been designed by a committee,” he says. “I think the person who performed this epic was an exceptionally great singer.” This poet, however, likely couldn’t write. Instead, Janko explains, a scribe recorded the poet’s words, perhaps at the behest of a patron.

An illiterate poet wouldn’t have been unusual at the time. But even as literacy spread, oral tradition endured. “Probably most people experienced the epics in performance,” Dué says. “They didn’t have personal libraries. They didn’t sit on the couch with a good book. They went to festivals. They heard performances.”

The early Odysseys

The oldest known records of The Odyssey are papyrus fragments discovered in Egypt, some dating back more than 2,000 years. These early copies are fairly similar to the version today’s readers are familiar with. But because they feature small differences, they’re sometimes described as “wild” or “eccentric” versions of the texts. Some include lines that aren’t present in later established versions, while others omit lines that are. None alter the plot in significant ways.

The scholars at the Library of Alexandria who compared papyrus versions of The Odyssey noticed these differences. “They can see evidence of what we call multiformity, or fluidity, in the texts that they have,” Dué says, “but they’re looking for a correct version.”

Odyssey papyrus fragment — A third-century B.C.E. papyrus fragment with lines from *The Odyssey* Sepia Times / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Although the Alexandrian editors’ copies don’t survive, later versions feature annotations that reference them extensively. “Most people agree that the texts the Alexandrians established … are pretty close to our modern texts,” Christensen says. In surviving versions created after this point, the text of The Odyssey appears to be relatively stable.

The oldest complete versions of The Odyssey and The Iliad are medieval manuscripts. Written on parchment, these copies were made more than 1,000 years after the earliest fragments. They frequently feature extensive commentary surrounding the main text.

Sometimes, this commentary references ancient versions of the story that have been lost to time. For example, The Iliad traditionally ends with the funeral of the Trojan prince Hector (“And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses”), but one 11th-century version features an annotation offering an alternate ending: “And so they buried Hector. And then an Amazon came, daughter of brave Ares, slayer of men.”

Some scholars wonder whether certain offbeat details could be traces of lost versions that once circulated. When Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, sets out for Ithaca, “there’s an interesting scene in which a man named Theoclymenus comes and says, ‘Hey, could I come with you? I killed a man back in my hometown, and I need a ride out of here,’” Ebbott says. “I always laugh about this with my students. Telemachus is like, ‘Yeah, sure.’” What purpose does this character serve? What if, in a lost version of the text, this interloper is Odysseus in disguise?

Years ago, Dué and Ebbott started the Homer Multitext project, an effort to present The Iliad and The Odyssey in a way that doesn’t privilege any one version. They started by digitizing a tenth-century manuscript known as Venetus A, the oldest known complete Iliad. Each page features around 25 lines of Homeric text surrounded by extensive annotations.

Folio 12r from Venetus A, a tenth-century C.E. manuscript of *The Iliad* VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images

“Any way you try to present The Iliad or Odyssey in book form, you mislead people. You put one text at the top of the page, implying that that’s the real version,” Dué says. “So we were trying to think, how could we present the text in a way that doesn’t give that impression of there being the one true text?”

The scholars have since digitized several other Iliad manuscripts, but the process is time-consuming, and they haven’t yet made it to The Odyssey. Perhaps, they venture, the new film will inspire younger generations of scholars to immerse themselves in all of the surviving versions of the text.

Nolan’s Odyssey

Stories associated with the Trojan War have inspired writers (Virgil’s Aeneid, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Madeline Miller’s Circe), filmmakers (the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and artists alike (J.M.W. Turner’s Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, Peter Paul Rubens’ Odysseus on the Island of the Phaeacians, even wall frescoes in Pompeii). The scholars I spoke with view Nolan’s movie as a continuation of a long tradition, and they’re encouraged to see audiences engaging with the text. The film has prompted essays about The Odyssey’s enduring appeal, the history behind the epic and a breakdown of which translations may appeal to different readers.

“We have adaptation or reinvestigation of Odyssean narrative as early as Euripides’ satyr play The Cyclops,” Christensen says. Instead of questioning whether a specific version is Homer’s Odyssey, he thinks that we should be asking, “Is this an adaptation of The Odyssey that preserves some of its essential themes and presents them in a way that new audiences find persuasive?”

Matt Damon as Odysseus — Matt Damon plays the Greek hero Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's *The Odyssey*. Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures

Nolan’s characters speak in contemporary English, with the director telling the Los Angeles Times that he was aiming for “language that has emotional, not intellectual, meaning to people.” Still, the film is built on familiar scenes (the Trojan horse, the cyclops, Charybdis and Scylla), themes (hospitality, homecoming, disguise), and even epithets. “You have wise eyes, Athena’s eyes,” recurs throughout.

Nolan saw a theatrical production of The Odyssey when he was 5. When he began production on the movie, he made a list of everything that stuck with him. “I remember the horse. I remember them tying Odysseus to the mast. It’s in our bones,” he tells USA Today. “I didn’t want to do a revisionist version. I wanted to be true to my expectations of it.”

Will Nolan, like the ancient rhapsode Ion, be able to move the audience? Projections are bullish, but box office sales will soon determine whether the filmmaker laughs or cries when the time of payment arrives.

Was There Ever an Original Version of ‘The Odyssey,’ and Do We Need to Worry About What Homer Would Think?

The song of Odysseus

How did The Odyssey become a stable text?

The early Odysseys

Nolan’s Odyssey

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