Beyond the Odyssey: A beginner’s guide to Greek mythology

The success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) has motivated many moviegoers to pick up their own copy of the ancient poem. But while Homer’s take on the tale of Odysseus is one of the most famous classical texts to have survived into modern times, it’s hardly the only one worth reading. And for those looking to dive deeper into Greek myth, it may not even be the best place to start.

We wanted to put together a beginner’s guide to Greek mythology and literature, but to do it right, we needed help. We reached out to one of the most popular — and, owing to her decade-long stint as a stand-up comedian, wittiest — classicists working today: Natalie Haynes. The host of BBC Radio 4’s Natalie HaynesStands Up for the Classics, she is the author of more than a dozen fiction and non-fiction books, including The Ancient Guide to Modern Life (2011), Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth (2023), and A Thousand Ships (2021), which retells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of its women.

Chatting with Big Think over Zoom, Haynes explains why you shouldn’t be scared of learning Greek, what Nolan doesn’t tell you about the world of Homer, and how contemporary scholarship is looking at antiquity from fresh angles. Along the way, she also offers reading recommendations that will hopefully make your journey less arduous than Odysseus’.

All Greek to me

Many literary scholars and native speakers say it’s better to read a work of literature in its original language than in translation. Of course, learning a new language can be strenuous, time-consuming, and above all intimidating, especially when it comes to Greek and Latin.

“People often tell me they wanted to study Greek or Latin in school, but were told they weren’t clever enough,” Haynes says. “There is this bizarre belief that you have to live up to the classics instead of the classics coming to you, and I wish we’d start to teach them in a more open way. Certainly, the moment Greek myth is having right now suggests there’s a huge audience.”

Learning a little Greek will help you assess the quality of translations and better understand the practice’s limitations more generally. This not only goes for word choice — like Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey interpreting the polytropos as “complicated” rather than “many-sided” or “resourceful,” as previous translators had done — but also the structure of a text itself.

[T]he trouble is that if you want to share some of these amazing stories with children, you tend to sanitize them.

Many epic poems were written in hexameter, a poetic meter with six metrical feet, and their words were chosen and arranged based on length rather than sound. “The Greeks and Romans didn’t rhyme, yet early translations were often in verse, which is just terrible,” Haynes says. “Then again, it’s quite hard to capture hexameter in English without it seeming sort of weirdly sing-songy.”

Modern translators tend to avoid verse, either recreating hexameter to the best of their ability or, as Wilson did, opting for iambic pentameter, the five-metrical-feet rhythm of Chaucer and Shakespeare. To illustrate how drastic these differences can be, compare the following renditions of the opening lines of Homer’s other magnum opus, the Iliad:

“Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!” (Alexander Pope, 1715-1720, verse).

“Sing of the wrath, my goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles / doomed and destructive, which gave the Achaeans numberless sorrows” (J. Simon Harris, 2018, approximated hexameter).

No two translations are the same, and each will give you a unique impression of the text, the author’s understanding of it, and the time period it was translated in.

Xenia and kleos

Aside from getting acquainted with the Greek language, it also helps to learn a thing or two about ancient Greek history and culture. Although they communicate feelings and ideas that continue to resonate with readers, Greek myth and literature are also firmly rooted in a time and place very different from ours. The better we understand those differences, the less likely we are to project our modern worldview onto this past civilization.

For instance, one ancient custom Nolan’s film familiarizes its audience with is xenia or “guest-friendship.”

“The Greeks believed that a host should make their guests feel welcome, and that mistreating a guest was a crime on par with injuring one’s own family,” Haynes explains. It’s an important theme in both of Homer’s epic poems, one that influenced how his contemporaries would have judged the moral fiber of the characters.

A less familiar concept to us — though no less crucial to understanding Homer and the Iliad in particular – is kleos or “glory.”

“In the time of oral tradition, before the adoption of writing, a Greek warrior’s number one goal was to accomplish such remarkable things that bards would sing about them after their death,” Haynes says. “That’s why, when the Sirens try to seduce Odysseus, they tell him the most beguiling thing a man whose entire value system rests on fame can hear: ‘Everyone knows your name.’”

But as much as Homer’s poems reflect fixtures of the ancient world, they also deconstruct and question them. “When Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld, the great hero of the Trojan War says he’d rather be tilling the fields as an indentured farmer than be king among the dead,” Haynes adds. “It turns out that this pursuit for glory [kleos] was a terrible idea, that it would have been better to have lived a long, unfamous life than to have died young.”

There is no original version of a myth

Many people, Wilson included, have taken to the internet to complain about how Nolan’s adaptation diverges from the poem. While some of these critiques are more substantial than others, Haynes urges anyone interested in exploring these ancient texts to keep in mind that “myth is never static.”

“There is no such thing as an ‘original’ version,’” she explains. “The earliest versions we have are just that: the earliest we have. There’s a version of the story of Helen of Sparta where she doesn’t become Helen of Troy and goes to Egypt instead. That one is at least as old as Homer’s, just not as famous. The Homeric epics were treasures, which is why so many manuscripts were preserved, but that also means there are lots of scholars who spent their entire careers arguing about which of these is more Homeric.”

One reason people struggle to wrap their heads around this fact is that — courtesy of Greco-Roman heritage’s impact on storytelling and media — many of us first encounter myths as children. “Children often believe what they’re told by authority figures, and later come to believe that some were right and others wrong.”

When reading Greek myth and literature, it’s crucial to put these early childhood encounters aside or scrutinize them. “Heracles — or Hercules, if you prefer his Disney name — was very violent towards women. You probably don’t want that in a children’s book. I wouldn’t. But the trouble is that if you want to share some of these amazing stories with children, you tend to sanitize them. And then these men look uncomplicatedly heroic, which, of course, is not how they’re presented in antiquity.”

Old stories, new light

Disney is not the only one guilty of reshaping ancient myth in its own image. One of the goals of Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey was to excise the more modern, male-centric biases of some of her predecessors, several of whom introduced into the text a misogyny that is nowhere to be found in earlier Greek versions.

New generations of classicists are now exploring Greek myth and literature from angles that scholars in previous centuries might not have considered worth their time. Their work brings to light aspects of these texts that would have otherwise remained obscured, such as their representation of non-Greeks or the environment.

There is this bizarre belief that you have to live up to the classics instead of the classics coming to you, and I wish we’d start to teach them in a more open way.

In one episode of Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, Haynes covers the work of women poets from ancient Greece. “I had to do all nine of them in one go,” she says, “because so little of their work has survived.” Still, what little we have is worth looking at — not only for its own sake, but also for what it can tell us about Greek and Roman gender norms.

“The surviving material suggests an interest in the domestic, which is to be expected given how many women didn’t really have a life outside the home,” Haynes says. There are exceptions, though. “There’s a Roman poet named Sulpicia, of whom we have six poems. For a long time people said these couldn’t have been written by a woman, because they were too filthy, too sexual, and it’s gratifying to finally live in a time where we generally no longer allow such stupid assessments to prevail.”

Haynes’ reading recommendations

To guide you further on your journey into Greek myth and literature, Haynes recommends three books depending on your familiarity with the subject. Read them in order, and you’ll have an easier time finding your way in the ancient world.

Novice: Edith Hall’s Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

“It’s only 220 pages long and somehow manages to be both thematic and chronological. As the title indicates, it will give you a genuinely good idea of what ancient Greeks were all about, from their seafaringness and inventiveness to their democracy.”

Intermediary: Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“An Odyssey. Not the Odyssey. Mendelsohn has translated the poem as well, but this is not it. He teaches classics at Bard College and has a course on the Odyssey. One year, his retired dad — who is not a classicist but a scientist — decided to come to his lectures, and the two mend their conflicted relationship. It’s moving, and makes you see that Greek literature is bigger than itself. It’s all of us.”

Expert: Catherine Atherton Levante’s Monsters and Monstrosity in Greek and Roman Culture

“Odysseus’ encounters on his journey home from Troy used to be seen in quite a colonial light: this plucky hero coming back from a distant land after sacking a city using his brilliant wits, coming across all these weird, terrifying, monstrous peoples on the way. Now we wonder what it would have been like for those on the receiving end. What if the monsters aren’t monsters, even if they’re gigantic and one-eyed?”

This article is featured on Big Think.