Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea
The epic tale of ancient myths, monsters, and heroes, sung over 2500 years ago by bards in ancient halls, is still being told today. Discover how The Odyssey has changed hands and been remade through the ages.
With the headlines full of ancient myths, heroes, and monsters ahead of the release of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey, we take a step back and explore how Homer’s epic poem has been adapted in print over time.
One of two major epics of ancient Greek literature attributed to Homer, it is one of the oldest surviving works of literature. The Odyssey laid the intellectual bedrock of Greco-Roman civilisation and the Western canon, making it an endless source of inspiration for generations of writers and artists.
So how has it appeared in print over the centuries?
Alexander Pope’s 1725-1726 English translation of The Odyssey shaped 18th-century literary aesthetics. Pope shifted the original Greek dactylic hexameter into rhyming iambic pentameter (heroic couplets). This granted the epic a structured, musical rhythm highly prized during the neoclassical era.
Though some scholars, like Richard Bentley, criticised it for its textual inaccuracies (quipping, ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer’), it served as the most widely read translation well into the 20th century.
In 1793, the artist John Flaxman envisioned his own fantastical version of The Odyssey in 28 plates engraved by Thomas Piroli. Whilst studying in Italy, Flaxman perfected this distinctive style of line illustration and applied it to scenes from The Odyssey and The Iliad.
The plates were an immediate success, celebrated for their groundbreaking, minimalist style, chiefly inspired by Greek vase paintings. Their strikingly primitive appearance was seen by contemporaries as being well suited to archaic poetic subjects, with Flaxman heightening the authenticity of each scene by basing furniture and costume on ancient sources to great effect.
A new standard in classical scholarship in England was set in the early 19th century with the Grenville Homer (1800-01). A sumptuously printed work in Fell Double Pica Greek type, our copy is one of the 25 Large Paper copies, containing two engraved busts of Homer by L. Schiavonetti after Tendi.
The edition benefited from the expertise of renowned classical scholar Richard Porson, who contributed his collation of the crucial 13th-century Harleian manuscript (Harley MS 6325). Described as ‘the most critical edition’, a copy of Grenville’s Odyssey was famously owned and extensively read by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Harking back to Homeric oral tradition in the 20th century, Lawrence Durrell composed songs for Ulysses Come Back, a projected musical based upon the last three love-affairs of Ulysses [Odysseus].
The piece was intended to be humorous, with Durrell apparently wryly sympathetic with Ulysses’ trouble with women. Issued by Bernard Stone’s Turret Records with a pamphlet of verses in an edition of 99 signed copies, it was a project that was never staged, but received warm, chuckling reactions from Durrell’s inner circle.
It is no small feat that the story that was sung over 2500 years ago by bards in ancient halls is still being told today. Each remake shares a different vision of the story, capturing the next generation of re-tellers and inspiring epic versions still to come. Having moved from song, to manuscript, to print, to film, we can be assured that The Odyssey will never fall out of fashion.
Written by Classics Specialist Hannah Lessiter
