Homer Goes to Hollywood (winks to camera)

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With Christopher Nolan set to direct a film adaptation of The Odyssey, online debates have reignited about whether familiarity with Homer's epics should be considered essential knowledge. As someone who works in education and studies classical receptions, I've long considered this question. The answer isn't as simple as either traditionalists or critics might suggest.

Ask any AI platform why we should study classics, and you'll get a predictable answer about foundational Western cultural references. But this perspective is deeply limited. It ignores equally rich literary traditions from Asia, Africa, India, and Indigenous cultures, while assuming all students share the same cultural background – an assumption particularly misplaced in multicultural societies like modern Australia. Our school curricula increasingly recognise this, incorporating Asian, Indigenous and Australian writers into reading lists.

Too often our teaching reduces ancient texts to simplistic frameworks. High school students learn to spot Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey pattern, treating myths as primitive attempts to explain the unexplained. This approach does a disservice to both the texts and our students. Instead, we should engage with these works as sophisticated literary and cultural artifacts that reward careful analysis.

Australian memory expert Dr. Lynne Kelly offers a compelling perspective in The Memory Code, arguing that what we call mythology is our inadequate term for "vivid stories that encode rational and practical and spiritual information of which the literal truth is impossible to differentiate from the metaphorical, a dichotomy not usually relevant to the traditional owners." These aren't simple stories – they're sophisticated memory devices encoding complex cultural knowledge.

Cambridge's Professor Dame Mary Beard deepens this understanding. In a 2008 BBC In Our Time discussion, she argued that myths weren't merely entertaining tales but served crucial societal functions. "Myth is an economical form of thinking about the world," she explained. "If you think of it as a process, a verb, to myth, you get the function of it better." More intriguingly, Beard suggests that myth itself is playfully subversive: "Myth always has the last laugh... Myth itself is asking: Do you really believe? How far are you going to go along with this story?"

The Odyssey exemplifies this complexity through its masterful use of literary devices that still inform storytelling today. Its structure mirrors its themes: the sea-tossed narrative, shuffling Odysseus on and off course, creates an experience for the audience that mirrors the hero's own journey. The epic's prologue summarises the entire story, yet manages to maintain suspense – a technique that deserves more attention than simply checking boxes on a hero's journey template.

The poem's sophisticated narrative techniques would impress any contemporary writer. It employs non-linear storytelling, unreliable narration, and complex literary devices to explore key themes of literature. Consider how the epic handles storytelling itself: Penelope and Helen weave narratives both literally and figuratively; Odysseus, disguised, weeps at hearing tales of his own exploits in Troy, compared to a captive woman crying – a striking image that explores empathy and identity. When Helen drugs her guests before recounting stories of Troy to prevent their grief, we see ancient understanding of trauma and memory.

Harvard Professor Gregory Nagy, in his MOOC The Greek Hero in 24 Hours, defines a Greek hero as "a man who is glorified in song" – and through this lens, the epic becomes fascinatingly self-referential. Odysseus creates his own heroic narrative through his homecoming, while Achilles' glory is proven by the very existence of the Iliad itself. The bard even refers to himself, asking for meat and wine – a postmodern touch millennia before postmodernism.

This sophistication extends to the poem's origins. The groundbreaking 1930s research of Albert Lord and Milman Parry revealed that oral epics weren't fixed texts but living performances, each telling unique. They discovered that bards constructed these elaborate narratives in real-time using traditional formulas. This understanding should transform how we teach these texts – not as fossilised classics to be dissected but as dynamic works that evolved through performance and interaction with audiences.

The question isn't whether ancient texts like The Odyssey should be part of a general education. Instead, we should ask how these works, alongside stories from other cultures, can teach us to think critically about narrative, memory, and human experience. As Mary Beard suggests, they help us think about "what human existence is like, why it is so difficult and why we do what we do."

This brings us back to Nolan's upcoming adaptation. The most exciting possibility isn't seeing how faithfully he'll recreate Homer's plot, but whether he'll capture the epic's playful self-awareness – its understanding that every story, even one about coming home, is also about the act of storytelling itself. In an era of competing narratives and information overload, perhaps that's the most relevant lesson The Odyssey can teach us: not just how to tell stories, but how to think about why we tell them at all.