The Opaque Origins of Homer’s Odyssey

In some ways, the Odyssey needs no introduction: it is everywhere around us. Over the nearly thirty centuries since Homer’s thrilling epic about the hero Odysseus’s homecoming from the Trojan War began to circulate, its story, characters, and themes have become so tightly woven into the fabric of our literature and art, music and drama, that they seem to us inevitable, natural. It’s with a start that we recall that someone had to invent them.