Stephen Fry has just published his version of The Odyssey. In April, Ralph Fiennes stars as Odysseus in a new film, The Return. And, next year, Matt Damon plays the Greek hero in Christopher Nolan's film of The Odyssey. Harry Mount, who travelled in Odysseus's footsteps for his book, explains why it is the greatest story in history
Whoever Homer – or the Homers – was, he, she or they set the template for the Greek literature that followed; the Latin literature that followed that; the renaissance literature that followed that …
In the preface to his Iliad translation, Alexander Pope said it was near impossible not to be influenced by Homer’s greatness. ‘If Homer has funeral games for Patroclus, Virgil has the same for Anchises,’ Pope wrote, ‘if Ulysses visits the shades, the Aeneas of Virgil is sent after him. If he be detained from his return by the allurements of Calypso, so is Aeneas by Dido.’
The Odyssey became the archetypal going home story, and the archetypal journey. Again and again, over the last 2,800 years, it spawned imitations, from Joyce’s Ulysses – and Tennyson’s – to the Coen Brothers’ film of Brother, Where Art Thou? And now Ralph Fiennes and Matt Damon are to play Odysseus in The Return and Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.
However the epics were composed, they show exceptional literary confidence in their composer. In The Iliad, Homer was so confident in his narrative technique that he cherry-picked only a few incidents from the ten years of the war.
Most of the action of the book concentrates on only a few days at Troy – he doesn’t even mention the fall of the city and its aftermath in The Iliad. He began the first book without even saying where the action is taking place.
Homer showed the same narrative control in The Odyssey. Odysseus doesn’t appear until four books in, after 2,222 lines. For a sixth of the action, The Odyssey is Hamlet without the prince. Odysseus even used a flashback – the earliest surviving instance in literature – when he told the story of his previous journey at King Alcinous’s court.
Homeric epic is particularly sophisticated in a world of such terrifyingly short lives. Most men in ancient Greece were fathers by the age of 12, grandfathers by 24, and dead at 35. Hardly long enough to come to a considered opinion of the world, let alone write two eternal epics.
The quality of Homeric prose is astonishing, too, given it was composed at such an early stage in the life cycle of ancient Greek. The Greek alphabet, adapted from Phoenician, was probably settled by around 800 BC, less than a century before Homer was around.
That alphabet – ancestor to our own alphabet and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet – was very different to Phoenician. There are no ‘ch-’, ‘ph-’ or ‘ps-’ symbols in Phoenician, and no vowels either. Phoenician had 25 letters, Greek 24.
The new Greek alphabet used signs for sounds rather than the Phoenician signs for syllables. That allowed Greek to become a much more flexible writing tool. Eighth-century BC Greek writing – as The Odyssey probably is – should by rights be a little primitive, if the alphabet had only just settled into place.
How staggering that this new language largely survives on the Athenian Metro today; that until 2001, when Greece adopted the euro, Greeks were still spending the ancient currency, the drachma – Greek for ‘a handful’. Celtic – spoken in the shadow of Stonehenge in 1800 BC – would be unrecognisable to English-speakers today; Latin has made a pretty big leap to Italian.
But the most influential language of them all has survived nearly 3,000 years of linguistic buffeting. If you can read ancient Greek, you can read modern Greek – and bridge the millennia.
3,200 years after the Trojan War and around 2,700 years since Homer wrote his epics, Odysseus speaks directly to us - whether it's in the Odyssey or a Matt Damon blockbuster.
Harry Mount is author of Odyssey - Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus
He will be talking about the book at the Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution on Tuesday, 4 March, 8-9pm. You can buy tickets here
