What Modern Retellings Miss About The Odyssey
- Rodrigo Ruiz
- Oct 15
- 11 min read
Updated: Nov 13
By Rodrigo Ruiz
Homer’s Odyssey (c. 8th–7th c. BCE) is a 24-book Greek epic about Odysseus’s long, messy return (nostos) after the Trojan War. It isn’t just monsters and islands; it’s recognition, justice, and the longing to return home. The poem breaks roughly into three arcs: The Telemachy (Books 1–4: the son comes of age), The Wanderings (5–12: storms, Cyclops, Circe, the underworld, Sirens, etc.), and The Homecoming (13–24: disguise, the bow contest, the killing of the suitors, the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus). It took Odysseus 20 years to get home. Hence our everyday phrase: “that was an odyssey”.
Adaptations and Retellings
Right now Homer’s epic poem is everywhere: from Uberto Pasolini’s The Return and Jorge Rivera-Herrans’s EPIC: The Musical to Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey (2026) and literary retellings like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. This isn’t new. Fascination with Homer’s homecoming epic is centuries—millennia!—old, and its influence so vast it’s impossible to list.
One of the earliest operas is Monteverdi’s Odyssey-inspired Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (“The return of Ulysses to his homeland”). It premiered in Venice in the 1639–1640 Carnival season. It bypasses the wanderings to dramatize the epic’s second half in Ithaca. Written late in Monteverdi’s life, this once-forgotten work is now a landmark, widely performed. Blending recitative, arioso, duets, and ensembles, it shows how the Odyssey’s themes (constancy, return, recognition) have inspired artists for centuries.
The story has been filmed since cinema’s dawn: from Méliès’s 1905 short and Italy’s silent L’Odissea (1911) to Camerini’s Ulysses (1954) and the peplum boom of the late ’50s–’60s. Later came RAI’s faithful 1968 miniseries, NBC’s Emmy-winning 1997 version, and modern riffs like O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Nostos (1989), The Return (2024), and Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026, forthcoming).
But why the fixation? Composed in a world without printing presses, electricity, or Google, this ~12,000-line poem still grips a world with attention spans shorter than a pitstop. Partly it’s the Odyssey’s Protean quality: like its hero, it shape-shifts—absorbing good, average, bad, and frankly even dismal readings—without breaking. Across cultures and ages, countless retellings keep circling Homer’s story, each choosing to focus on one or two aspects of it.
To take a recent example, in The Return (2024), a beautifully filmed and masterfully acted movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, Odysseus is cast as a traumatized veteran struggling to regain the love of his son, depicted here as resentful of his father’s long absence. Older films like Ulysses (1954), featuring a young Kirk Douglas and rooted in the Italian peplum era, turn the Odyssey into a sweeping adventure or fantastical travelogue: a sailor blown from island to island, tangling with seductive sorceresses and monstrous foes before stumbling home. Born as an online phenomenon on TikTok and streaming platforms, with millions of fans propelling it up the charts, EPIC: The Musical adapts the story into a sung-through, serialized narrative in contemporary English, proving this ancient Greek poem still exerts enormous emotional pull today. In contemporary literature, The Penelopiad gives voice to the twelve hanged maids, retells the epic from Penelope’s point of view, and even presents a mock trial of Odysseus, foregrounding female experience and perspective.
What do these retelling and adaptations tell us about the Odyssey? What do they leave untold?
The Return (2024)
I recently watched The Return and found the production—cinematography, locations, costumes, lighting, performances—exquisite. The bow-trial sequence is compressed, managed, and choreographed with real clarity. All the more frustrating, then, that the film stumbles on several key points. The sequence of events is off. A small blemish at first, but the cracks widen: the recognitions are handled in ways that gut the poem’s core logic. Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachus in front of Eumaeus and two others, moments after two suitors have already come sniffing around to kill him (i.e., they’ve basically recognized him). The scripted hero is thus rash and reckless—the opposite of the master of self and timing we come to know in the Odyssey. In Homer, he tests, withholds, and times revelation like a master tactician. In the film, a single angry “Who are you?” from Telemachus triggers a public self-disclosure that ignores danger and undermines Odysseus’s mētis (cunning). The production is worthy of Homer; the handling of character is not.
The film wisely narrows its focus to Book 13 onward (Odysseus’s arrival on Ithaca) following a
respectable precedent (Monteverdi did the same in the 1640s with The Return of Ulysses). This choice sidesteps the costly task of staging giants, the underworld, storms, and enchantments, and allows the time to concentrate on the thrill (both psychological and strategic) of reclaiming his place at home. That very focus, however, seems to have motivated another decision that’s hard to understand. Odysseus is recast as a traumatized Trojan War veteran whose son Telemachus resents his father’s absence.
Homer’s Odysseus, though, returns as sharp (indeed, even wiser) than when he left—far from the broken, traumatized figure Pasolini portrays.
Homer’s Odysseus, though, returns as sharp (indeed, even wiser) than when he left—far from the broken, traumatized figure Pasolini portrays. This imposition worryingly implies trauma is inescapable, that even the greatest hero cannot be rid of it. It makes the man a slave to the past, not a hero who has broken free from it. Given what Odysseus endures, Homer could have easily written a traumatized hero; instead, he shows the transcendence of trauma and the healing of mind and soul. Transcendening demands change; a change that runs across the epic’s dactylic-hexameter-filled pages. Odysseus changes both outwardly (literal bodily transfigurations) and inwardly (character). We see the former when Athena wrinkles and withers him into an old beggar, then later restores his youth and stature on Ithaca; and earlier, when he emerges on Scheria and is made taller, more radiant and beautiful to meet Nausicaa. We see the latter by comparing the Cyclops episode to the suitors. Early Odysseus cannot resist naming himself to Polyphemus—an unwise boast that brings a terrible curse and incurs Poseidon’s enmity. The Odysseus who returns to Ithaca, by contrast, endures the suitors’ insults silently. The man who once blurted his name out has learned to withhold it; the recognition-hungry braggart becomes a self-effacing, patient man
capable of resisting former impulses of pride. The Odysseus of the Cyclops episode would have been killed on arrival at Ithaca; the Odysseus who actually returns is shrewd enough to endure in anonymity until the time is ripe to strike the suitors and reunite, through recognition, with his faithful wife, Penelope. In such details Homer speaks not of trauma enshrined, but of character transformed. The Odyssey demands metamorphosis, not the enthronement of trauma. It offers the hope of healing and return.
Homer speaks not of trauma enshrined, but of character transformed.
Ulysses (1954)
Film is almost the perfect medium for a story like Homer’s Odyssey. (The perfect one being, well, epic poetry itself.) No other performative medium can really cope with what the poem demands: constant shifts of setting, scale, and reality. The poem moves from sea to shore, island to palace, underworld to Olympus. On stage, like in the theatre or at the opera, that means endless scene changes, impossible perspectives, and unstageable storms and monsters, and that’s just the beginning. The logistics make it ruinously expensive. Film, by contrast, is built for this. Editing and visual effects can glide between worlds—real, mythical, or dreamlike—while keeping the story coherent. It can range from intimate close-up to vast horizon, animate gods and ghosts, and layer time as Homer does in verse. This is why those who dare to tackle the entire poem, not just the homecoming in Ithaca, deserve a medal for effort—and our attention—regardless of their results.
Mario Camerini’s Ulysses (1954) does precisely that. Whereas The Return (2024), like others, cuts the entire first half of the Odyssey, Camerini at least attempts to encompass Odysseus’s sea-journeys. His film belongs to what could be called the “adventure travelogue” type of adaptation: colourful, action-filled, and spectacular (at least for the 1950s). It condenses the epic’s sprawl into 104 brisk minutes, inevitably cutting much from the wanderings of Odysseus (played here by Kirk Douglas). Yet even the most ambitious attempts often reduce the Wanderings, whether by constraint or choice, to a sequence of chronological set-pieces: monsters, temptresses, enchantments, shipwrecks. The episodes become a travel checklist of marvels to tick off. We get action and adventure at the expense of character development, psychological depth, and symbolic resonance. It creates itinerary where we should find interiority—more: initiation. The map moves; the man does not. Adventure-style adaptations of this type turn the poem into fantasy and tourism—like the glossy Instagram profiles of travellers who circle the globe but who have perhaps never thought of treading the meaningful road that goes from instinctive, animal existence to a higher state of being.
In Homer, the mileage is there for the meaning: the episodes are true crucibles of transformation. Odysseus’s trials are the forge in which the old self is dissolved and something new begins to take shape. We can see this most clearly in one of the poem’s turning points—the storm that carries Odysseus from Calypso’s island to the land of the Phaeacians in Book 5. There’s a huge storm and waves called upon by a raging Poseidon. Odysseus loses his little raft, clings to the last beam, then there’s Leucothea the woman-turned-goddess appearing from the depths and giving Odysseus a sort of talisman in the form of a white veil. It’s all very cinematic!
But, there’s more to it. As E.B. Holtsmark has shown, this episode stages a symbolic rebirth,
which, according to Rick Newton, is reaffirmed by the presence in Book 7 of what seems to be an ancient Greek ritual for rebirth. There’s more. As I argue in “Delivering Athena: Odysseus’ Second Birth” (forthcoming, 2026), this rebirth ties Odysseus to Athena closer than was ever thought before, and can be traced across the entire Odyssey. There are a number of clues in the text that reveal Odysseus undergoing a kind of divinization, with Athena gradually incarnating within him until she is, in effect, reborn in and through him. In fact, the poem’s point may be precisely to show rebirth as the path to awakening—or, in Homer’s terms, to return home: to nostos.
The real Odyssey, as every reader eventually learns, takes place not on the map but in the man.
Now that series have become the storytelling form of our time, I’d love to see the Odyssey turned into a true series—not one that drags on forever, but one with enough time to unravel meaning, reveal detail, and build character. That would be glorious. Until that happens, cinema will likely take the next stab at it: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026). Like many, I’ve been impatiently waiting for it ever since it was announced. I only hope it doesn’t turn out to be another adventure travelogue—full of spectacle but empty of soul. Because in the end, the real Odyssey, as every reader eventually learns, takes place not on the map but in the man.
The Penelopiad (2005)
A view of the greatest of homecoming epics from the perspective of its central female figure,
Penelope, is, in principle, an undeniably compelling idea. Homer’s heroine is such a stunning
character, her virtue a match to her husband’s. She is a figure like no other in Greek mythology. Exploring her point of view more deeply is bound to be deeply gratifying. This is the route that Margaret Atwood chooses to follow in The Penelopiad, where she gives voice not only to Penelope but also to the twelve maids hung by Odysseus in the palace after having killed all the suitors. Yet Atwood’s version, for all its great intentions, and in a tragically ironic twist, ultimately works against itself. In her retelling, Penelope gets to “tell her story” but in doing so she uses the maids as bait, a choice that leaves her morally entangled in their fate. By having Penelope urge the maids to ingratiate themselves with the suitors, Atwood makes her partly complicit—a stark reversal of Homer’s poised, irreproachable, self-mastered queen.
The Odyssey’s Penelope is ethically above using her maids as semi-prostitutes, and surely aware of the consequences the maids would face down the line. In Homer Penelope berates the girls that choose to meddle with the suitors, seeking only pleasure and power.
In seeking to give Penelope “more agency,” The Penelopiad unfortunately diminishes the very qualities that make her remarkable: iron discipline, strategic intelligence, unending patience, and extraordinary self-mastery to rival Odysseus’s own. Instead of the woman who matches cunning with greater cunning, and bests Odysseus in a test of cleverness, Penelope becomes a figure adrift, tossed like driftwood on the wine-dark sea of bitterness and jealousy.
The Odyssey is neither feminist nor masculinist—it is profoundly humanist.
Atwood’s retelling invites reflection on the role of the feminine in this Homeric epic. And, although it might be tempting to posit a patriarchal injustice needing redress through a feminist counter-narrative, I don’t think The Penelopiad sees it that way. I certainly don’t. After all, the Odyssey simply cannot be understood without its women. Odysseus’s journey would categorically fail without the feminine. After admittedly changing his men to pigs and attempting to change Odysseus himself into one, Circe equips him with knowledge and, crucially, sends him to the house of Hades; she teaches him how to summon the dead and warns him, in detail, about the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the cattle of the Sun—guidance that, via Teiresias’s prophecy (suitors devouring his house; vengeance required), keeps him from sailing home to slaughter. Calypso pulls the half-drowned survivor from the sea, shelters and sustains him for seven years, then (once compelled by Zeus) furnishes axe and adze, timbers and sailcloth, food, wine, water, and a fair breeze so he can build a raft and embark on the last stage of his wanderings. Nausicaa finds the castaway on Scheria, clothes and feeds him, and coaches him on how to approach Arete and Alcinous, thus securing his passage home to Ithaca. Athena orchestrates throughout: pleads in Olympus for him, steels Telemachus, veils and unveils Odysseus, plants counsels, holds back the night, and finally stands with him in the hall in battle. Penelope guards the home, delays the
suitors through the loom ruse, refuses replacement, sets the bow trial only Odysseus can win, and proves his identity with the bed test to finally receive her husband in her loving arms. And we haven’t even begun to speak of their symbolic meaning and weight. Without them, there is no Odyssey.
Thankfully, The Penelopiad avoids an overly simplistic feminist retelling. It does not, I think, seek to turn the Odyssey into a power struggle of women versus men, not into an argument of whether Odysseus or Penelope, one or the other, is better. It would be a mistake to reduce the myth to an opposition, where Homer creates a cosmology of completion. It is, crucially, not a tale of opposition of the sexes but of reciprocity: male and female as different yet complementary forces whose cooperation is necessary for renewal. The Odyssey is neither feminist nor masculinist—it is profoundly humanist.
The Odyssey encodes this in its core, in its timeline. Astronomically speaking, it takes roughly
nineteen years for the cycles of sun and moon to realign—the Metonic cycle used in ancient
lunisolar calendars to reconcile solar years with lunar months. Interestingly, Odysseus returns “in the twentieth year”. That is, after nineteen full years have passed. Odysseus and Penelope reuniting echoes the celestial cycle of sun and moon meeting again after a long separation. Their homophrosynē (“harmony of minds”) mirrors complementary forces in nature. The Odyssey isn’t a battle of the sexes at all. This is a gorgeous metaphor for the dance that male and female principles must participate in to finally converge and, in their union, for the world—and the self—to be made whole. The nostos of the Odyssey is cosmic as much as it is domestic.
Even with deeper readings, however, Homer leaves us with questions, eluding the tidy answer, inviting us to remain forever in that blissful state of wonderment. This is precisely what makes the Odyssey so hard to fathom and, at the same time, so enduring.
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