The women of Homer’s Odyssey were cunning, desiring and powerful. Nolan’s adaptation turns them into figures of suffering, sacrifice and regret.
Articles on Odysseus
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Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has been criticised for simplifying its complex characters – particularly women. We asked an expert to fill some of the film’s gaps.
The magic flower is used by the nymph Calypso to purge Odysseus’ trauma.
When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca he doesn’t walk through the door and say who he is. Here’s why.
Hollywood has a habit of rendering complex literary heroes into one-dimensional figures. Nolan’s The Odyssey dodges this trap.
The Sea Peoples are widely blamed for the collapse of the interconnected world of the Bronze Age. But what’s the evidence say?
Attempts to transpose the locations of The Odyssey accurately to modern maps have proved difficult.
Preserved in the margins of ancient literary works are notes that reveal how the Greeks strove to map mythical places onto locations in the known world.
The Odyssey hits cinemas in July 2026. But will it celebrate Odysseus as the clever hero – or finally confront the wreckage he leaves in his wake?
Odysseus is one of ancient literature’s most complex figures.
The shifts associated with being in your 40s and 50s – gray hairs, career doldrums, a longing for something more – seem as inevitable as aging itself. It wasn’t always this way.
Kevin McCarthy, the only speaker of the House to be ousted, has quit Congress. The ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as Shakespeare, understood the price of ambition like McCarthy’s: humiliation.
A classics scholar reflects on Greek myths and what they can help us understand about recreating relationships – as a bridge from our past to present selves.
These books and poems give the women of the Odyssey a say and other new perspectives on the classic tale.
On Father’s Day, a scholar of ancient Greek poetry explains how he came to understand the father-son relationship and his journey of loss and yearning through reading the epics.
A scholar of Greek literature writes why we need to turn to the past to understand the present – and the lessons that Homer’s hero, Odysseus, holds for us.
Hell-themed Halloween attractions play on people’s fears. The early depictions of hell were meant to use fear as a moral guide to help others.
Why right-wing populism gets the tradition of legality and justice exactly the wrong way round.
The ancient Greeks knew what made a good leader. Why does it seem we have forgotten their lessons?
American cinema mines Greek myth most strongly at times of profound social anxiety. In the age of Trump, we are already seeing key political battlegrounds framed as underworld quests in film.
Top contributors
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Professor of Classical Studies, Brandeis University
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Research Associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen
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Research Associate, Curation and Communication, University of Tübingen
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Associate Professor of Christian Origins, University of Dayton
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Visiting Professor of Social Inequities and Injustice, Loughborough University
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Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London
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Rachel Hadas is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of English, Rutgers University - Newark
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Post-doctoral researcher, Classics and Ancient History, University of Sydney
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Senior Lecturer in Creative Practice and Public Humanities, The University of Melbourne
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Lecturer in Greek Culture and Classical Receptions, University of Liverpool
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Lecturer, Université de Lille
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Associate Professor of Classics (Ancient Greek & Latin), The University of Melbourne
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Trinity College Dublin
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Honorary Associate, Classics and Ancient History, La Trobe University
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Professor of Classics and Archaeology, Brock University