The Story Homer Never Finished: What We Really Know About How The Odyssey Was Made

Somewhere around the eighth century BCE, in a world with no paper and no printing press, someone began performing a poem about a soldier who couldn't get home. It ran to tens of thousands of lines, and no one wrote a single word of it down for generations. He'd be gone for ten years. He'd lose every one of his men. He'd be shipwrecked, seduced, disguised, doubted by his own wife, and nearly murdered in his own hall by the men who'd moved in on his kingdom while he was away.

That poem became The Odyssey. And with Matt Damon now playing Odysseus on IMAX screens the size of a building, in Christopher Nolan's epic fantasy action film adapted from Homer's poem, it feels like a good time to go back to the source – and to a detail that might surprise a lot of people: The Odyssey was never meant to stand alone.

At some point (most likely the second half of the eighth century BCE, with the text stabilising further over the following two centuries) this oral epic was fixed into the form we now call The Odyssey. The oldest complete manuscripts we actually possess don't come from anywhere near that era, though. They're Byzantine copies from the medieval period, over a thousand years after the poem was first composed, with only scattered papyrus fragments from Hellenistic Egypt bridging some of that gap. Everything before those manuscripts is reconstruction, inference, and educated argument – which is exactly why classicists still debate how much of "Homer's" Odyssey reflects an eighth-century original and how much was reshaped by later editors, particularly Alexandrian scholars centuries afterwards.

This is the part of the story I find striking. The Iliad and The Odyssey came first. The other six poems that eventually surrounded them – now known collectively as the Epic Cycle – were composed later, by different and mostly obscure poets, specifically to fill in everything Homer's two epics left out: the causes of the Trojan War, and everything that happened after it. They weren't planned as a matching set. They were patched in around the edges of two poems that already existed, and only grouped together as "the Cycle" by scholars long after the fact.

Even so, once assembled, the sequence ran to eight poems covering the whole saga. The Cypria opened it, covering the quarrel of the goddesses, the Judgment of Paris, and the first nine years of the war. The Iliad picked up a few furious weeks near the end of that war. The Aethiopis carried the story past the Iliad's ending, through Achilles' death. The Little Iliad and the Sack of Troy (Iliupersis) covered the building of the wooden horse and the city's fall. The Nostoi – "the Returns" – followed the surviving Greek commanders home, one by one, most of them coming to grief. The Odyssey then told the most complicated return of all. And the cycle closed with the Telegony, which picked up Odysseus's story again after the events of The Odyssey and, according to the little we know of it, brought about his death at the hands of his own son by the sorceress Circe.

Only two of those eight poems survive complete: The Iliad and The Odyssey. The other poems are now lost, though for the Trojan poems we still have a summary written by a figure named Proclus, along with scattered quotations preserved by later grammarians and a brief retelling by the mythographer known as Apollodorus. It's a strange kind of survival – we know roughly what happened in the Cypria or the Nostoi, we know who was credited with composing them, and we know they existed as real, performed, widely known poems for centuries. We just don't have the poems themselves. Everything Homer's contemporaries would have already known walking into a performance of The Odyssey – the fall of Troy, the deaths of Ajax and Agamemnon, the fates of the other returning heroes – exists for us only as a skeleton. It's a bit like owning volumes two and seven of a nine-book series and being told, fairly convincingly, what happens in the rest.

From ancient recitation to an IMAX screen

What happened to The Odyssey after its composition is almost as remarkable as the poem itself. It became a cornerstone of Greek education, recited at festivals, memorised by schoolchildren, and picked apart by scholars in Alexandria who worked to fix a standard text from the many versions circulating around the Greek world. The Romans absorbed it too – Virgil built the second half of the Aeneid partly as a Roman answer to it. Through the Byzantine centuries it kept being copied by hand, one of the threads that kept Greek learning alive at all. When Renaissance Europe rediscovered Greek scholarship, Homer came back with it: Petrarch famously owned a Greek manuscript of the poems for years before he could find anyone to translate it for him.

Since then it's barely stopped being retold. Dozens of English translations alone, from Chapman in the seventeenth century through to Emily Wilson's widely read 2017 version – the translation Nolan has said drew particular inspiration for this film. James Joyce restructured it into modern Dublin for Ulysses. It's been staged, painted, sung, and filmed dozens of times before Nolan ever picked it up, going back to the swords-and-sandals epics of the 1950s. And now it's the first film shot entirely on IMAX's 70mm format, with a cast that includes Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena and Charlize Theron as Circe.

My take

What resonates for me about this story isn't really the monsters or the shipwrecks – it's that we're only holding two-eighths of the original picture, and it's still enough to have shaped three thousand years of storytelling after it. Every writer since has been filling in gaps the ancient Greeks didn't need filled, because they already knew how the Cypria ended. We're reading the sequel without the first six books, and somehow it still works as one of the greatest stories ever told. I'd love to know what the Nostoi actually sounded like performed aloud – whether it was as strange and haunting as the fragments suggest. We'll probably never get to hear it. But I think that's part of why The Odyssey has never let go of us: it was always a story about what gets lost on the way home, and in a very real sense, the poem itself has lost almost everything that once surrounded it too.

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