I'm an expert on ancient Greece – here's what you need to know before you watch The Odyssey

Featuring Cyclopes, Lotus-Eaters and goddesses that turn men into pigs, the Odyssey reads like a fantastical adventure story. Yet, writes Daisy Dunn, Homer’s epic poem – now a Hollywood blockbuster – offers a fascinating lens onto the reality of life in Bronze Age Greece

A large ancient Greek red‑figure krater with two painted scenes. On one side, three standing figures appear in a mythological moment, including one drawing a bow. On the other, three figures are shown indoors, with one reclining on a couch and another standing beside them. The vessel is decorated with geometric and floral borders.

Published: July 28, 2026 at 2:30 PM

Save

In the late 19th century, an archaeologist was excavating a grave in the Peloponnese, 75 miles south-west of Athens, when he made an extraordinary discovery. At his feet lay a high-stemmed goblet of hammered gold with a pair of modelled birds atop its two handles. Heinrich Schliemann looked at the vessel admiringly before realising why it was familiar. Nestor, an elderly ally of Odysseus, was described as owning “a very beautiful goblet” just like it in Homer’s Iliad. There, the cup was described as footed and gold, with “four handles and two golden doves were feeding on each”. But what was a couple of handles where art was concerned? Nestor’s Cup, supposed Schliemann, had finally been found.

Ad

Schliemann, a wealthy Prussian businessman, was notoriously overzealous in his quest to find evidence of Homer’s world. His excavations at Hisarlik, the now accepted site of ancient Troy near the Hellespont, involved digging aggressively through layers of civilisation in search of the lost city of King Priam. Many of the deepest treasures that Schliemann believed to have come from the age of Homer in fact proved to be still more ancient. The gold goblet with doves was eventually dated to about four centuries before Nestor was supposed to have lived.

A tall, narrow gold cup with two long, curved handles rising from the base to the rim. Each handle is topped with a small bird-shaped ornament. The surface has a hammered texture that catches the light, and the plain background makes the bright metal stand out.

This goblet is called Nestor’s Cup, yet it dates to the 16th century BC, 400 years before the ally of Odysseus was supposed to have lived | Credit: Bridgeman Images

But Schliemann was not wrong to believe that aspects of what Homer described in his Iliad and Odyssey might be reflected in the archaeological record. It is tantalising to think that, for all their flights of fancy, the Homeric epics do contain true reminiscences and memories of the historical past. While the poems should be enjoyed as poems first and foremost, they are also valuable sources to the historian, who may find them a powerful lens onto Late Bronze Age Greece.

Strikingly old

The composition of the Homeric epics was slow and involving. Conceived in an age before writing in Greece, the poems are commonly believed to have evolved orally over several generations before being set down in writing in the late eighth century BC or just after. What makes them so striking is that the events they describe are far older than this. It would not be inaccurate to describe the two works as the poetic equivalent of historical novels: the stories are consciously set about 400 years before the poems were completed. Homer’s first audience would have been aware of this. For all that their storylines were broadly fictional, the poems were based around a world informed by history and archaeology.

In his efforts to describe a truly heroic age in Greece’s past, Homer – working in the eighth century BC – looked to the accomplishments of the Mycenaeans, a Late Bronze Age people who took their name from the Greek city of Mycenae. Located north of Argos in the north-eastern Peloponnese, Mycenae, where ‘Nestor’s Cup’ was found, was well known to Homer. In his poems, it is the kingdom ruled by Agamemnon, who led Odysseus and his men against Troy. It is described as “rich in gold” and “well-built”, “with broad streets”. Historically, it was all of those things, its limestone fortification walls rising more than 10 metres in places, with a 4.5 metre lintel supporting the pair of lionesses above its famous Lion Gate.

The Mycenaeans established important centres across the Peloponnese at cities including Tiryns, Iolcus, Gla, Greek Thebes and Pylos, as well as Mycenae, and maintained cultural contacts as far afield as Egypt and Syria. They were at the height of their powers in roughly 1350 to 1200 BC, a few generations before the presumed date of Homer’s Trojan War.

A carved stone relief showing a bearded man reclining with one hand resting against his head. He wears a soft, conical cap and a cloak fastened at one shoulder. The carving highlights the folds of the fabric and the contours of his body, giving the figure a calm, reflective appearance.

Odysseus shown on a fifth-century BC relief from a helmet. His adventures shine a light on Homer’s reverence for ancient Greece’s ‘heroic’ past | Credit: AKG

Golden walls

In the Odyssey, both Odysseus and his son Telemachus encounter palatial societies that loosely resemble those created by the Mycenaeans. Odysseus’s final journey before he reaches his home on Ithaca takes him to Scheria, kingdom of the Phaeacians. “Golden were the walls that enclosed the elegant home within,” sang Homer of the royal palace there. “And silver were the doorposts that stood on the bronze threshold.” Outside were orchards that were forever in fruit. If there seems to be something magical about this people, it is perhaps a reflection of how the Greeks of Homer’s time felt about their own ancestors.

Odysseus, King of Ithaca, himself owns a palace – a faded palace, but a palace nevertheless. He describes his island as “rugged, but a kind nurse to men”. Its relative rusticity may be accounted for by the fact that it sat on the mere fringes of the Mycenaean world. Travellers and scholars have long noted a discrepancy between Homer’s description of Odysseus’s Ithaca and the geography of modern Ithaki. The island Odysseus called home is described in the poem as low-lying and close to Doulichion, Same and Zakynthos. A convincing argument has been made for identifying it rather with Paliki, a peninsula of Kefalonia, which may have been a separate island in millennia past. It lay at some distance from the sparkling palaces of the Peloponnese.

A monumental stone gateway built from large, weathered blocks, forming a narrow passage between high walls. Above the entrance is a triangular relief showing two upright lion figures flanking a central column. The scene sits against open sky and rocky ground, emphasising the gateway’s scale and ancient construction.

The famous Lion Gate of Mycenae. Excavations suggest that the Odyssey’s description of the city as “well-built” and “rich in gold” is accurate | Credit: Dreamstime

Odysseus has been away from Ithaca for nearly 20 years – 10 at Troy and 10 travelling – when Telemachus sets off in search of information about him. In the third book of the Odyssey, Athena, his father’s long-term mentor, guides him to Pylos. The comparative grandeur of this city is immediately apparent to the youngster. It was no accident that, in Homer’s epics, Pylos is the kingdom of Nestor, owner of the gold cup – for historically it was, like Mycenae, an exquisitely rich and developed centre.

The palace built at Pylos around 1300 BC had a footprint of nearly 6,000 square metres and featured courtyards, a vast columned hall with a central hearth, and running water supplied by an early form of aqueduct. A single storeroom within the complex contained nearly 3,000 cups. There was also a lozenge-shaped terracotta bath built into a grand bathroom. Homer perhaps had this bathtub in mind when he described Nestor’s daughter Polycaste bathing Telemachus during his visit in the Odyssey. The tub is certainly wondrous for, as Homer says, “he comes out of the bath looking like the immortal gods in his physique”.

WATCH | Daisy Dunn dissects the Odyssey trailer, offering a spoiler-free rundown of the film

By Homer’s time, this and the other Mycenaean palaces and city walls were but ruins, many of them badly charred. Soon after the putative date of the fall of Troy, conventionally placed in ancient times at 1184/83 BC, the Mycenaeans entered a period of decline that culminated in the destruction of their illustrious centres. Homer’s tale of the Trojan War has sometimes been read as an allegory for the real-life devastation and decline suffered by the inhabitants of Troy and other palatial societies at the end of the Bronze Age.

The Trojan citadel was built and rebuilt many times, but one of its grandest iterations was savaged by fire around 1180 BC. The palace at Pylos was engulfed at a similar date, Mycenae was ravaged not much later, and the sites of Thebes, Iolcus and Tiryns ceased to be inhabited in the same period. The destruction of the palaces – whether by man, natural disaster, or a combination of both – presaged centuries of change, in which the population size of the Peloponnese nearly halved, the art of writing was lost, and the quality of art and grave goods declined.

A reconstruction drawing of a large, multi‑storey palace arranged around an open central courtyard. The buildings have red columns, balconies, staircases, and brightly coloured wall decorations. The complex is shown as a maze of connected rooms and terraces, highlighting its scale and intricate design.

A modern imagining of Nestor’s palace in Pylos. This huge and luxurious complex, built around 1300 BC, may have inspired a famous scene in the Odyssey | Credit: AKG

The Homeric epics belong to the end of this period, when Greece was growing richer again and a new form of alphabetic writing was developed, borrowed and adapted from the Phoenicians. For many of the people of Homer’s time, nevertheless, visiting the sites of Mycenae and Pylos with their splendid ruins would be like us visiting a burned-out Hampton Court Palace if we had known only villages of wattle-and-daub.

The parallel may be extreme, but the archaeology of the Late Bronze Age – including the grand citadel at Troy – certainly inspired awe in Homer. The sheer scale and magnificence of the architecture could only be explained if the men of that time were stronger than their descendants and more important to the gods. And so Homer presents the “wide and very beautiful wall” surrounding Troy as the handiwork of Poseidon, god of the sea. Odysseus’s ally Diomedes is said to lift a boulder so heavy that more than two men of Homer’s own time would be needed to carry it.

Speculation about what the architects of the Bronze Age societies must have been like also helped to shape Homer’s characters. The protagonists of his epics are presented as a heroic race, closer to the gods than their modern counterparts, both physically and temperamentally. Odysseus and his men even eat like gods, feasting regularly on meat, while the real-life eighth-century BC Greeks survived predominantly on vegetables, fish and beans, with meat reserved mainly for religious festivals.

The Odyssey in a nutshell

The plot of Homer's epic

Odysseus is the only man still trying to reach home following the sack of Troy a decade earlier. As the poem begins, he is detained at Ogygia with a nymph named Calypso. The gods hold a council and agree to send Hermes to make Calypso release Odysseus and set him on his way home to Ithaca. Athena approaches Odysseus's son Telemachus in disguise. The young man is surrounded by callous suitors, who have taken up residence in Odysseus's palace and are pressuring his wife, Penelope, to marry one of them. The goddess encourages Telemachus to visit Pylos and Sparta to seek news of his father. Odysseus leaves Calypso's island on a hand-built raft, only to encounter troubles at sea. Poseidon is vengeful because Odysseus had blinded his son Polyphemus. Odysseus survives the god's storms and washes up on Scheria. There, Nausicaa, a princess, leads the bedraggled Odysseus to her parents' palace. Odysseus tells his hosts of the challenges he has faced. Having left Troy with 12 ships of men, he sacked the city of the Ciconians, and came up against the Lotus-Eaters, whose flower could make men forget their homecoming. He travelled to the land of the Cyclopes where he blinded Polyphemus after he had eaten several of Odysseus's companions. The rest escaped his cave by clinging to the underside of the Cyclops' sheep. Further on, they encountered the Laestrygonians, who speared many of the men like fish. On the island of Aeaea, Circe turned some of Odysseus's men into pigs, and made Odysseys her lover for a year. Odysseus then descended to the underworld before sailing past the Sirens, between Scylla and Charybdis, over Thrinacia, isle of the cattle of the Sun, and – the last man standing – on to Ogygia, where the story began. The Phaeacians of Scheria put Odysseus aboard one of their magical ships home. Athena disguises Odysseus as a beggar and Penelope suggests a contest for her hand. Odysseus is the only man who can string his own bow and shoot an arrow through 12 axes. Reuniting with his herdsmen and Telemachus, recently returned from his travels, Odysseus leads the slaughter of the suitors and disloyal female slaves, before making his way to his private quarters. Penelope tests him by asking him to move their bed. In revealing it cannot be moved, Odysseus proves his identity, and can finally embrace his wife in love. The souls of the suitors are dragged to Hades and Athena creates peace between their families and Odysseus.

A black‑figure pottery vessel showing several human figures in silhouette against reddish clay. A group of men carry a long pole toward a seated, large figure with shaggy hair and a beard. Decorative bands of leaves and patterns frame the scene above and below.

Bones of the dead

Studying the graves of their ancestors provided the Greeks with further confirmation of their heroism. Some of the wealthiest Mycenaeans were laid to rest in beehive-shaped tombs covered by high mounds. The best-preserved of these tholos tombs, the so-called Treasury of Atreus, had a dome some 40-feet high and was named optimistically after the father of Agamemnon. Analysis of the bones of the dead interred in Bronze Age grave circles at Mycenae confirms that they ate a lot of meat and were on average at least three inches taller than their descendants.

Weapons and armour found in these graves bear a strong resemblance to those described in Homer’s poems. Although iron was the metal most commonly used in warfare in Homer’s time, the poet evoked the heroic age of the past by giving his soldiers bronze spearheads, swords and daggers. Fragments of boar tusk have been found in the Mycenae graves, suggesting some historical basis for Odysseus’s helmet, which Homer describes as having tightly set rows of “white tusks of the bright-toothed wild boar” lining its outside.

A helmet made from overlapping curved plates, arranged to form a rounded dome. Two long side flaps hang down to protect the cheeks, and a small double‑hook crest sits at the top. The pale, smooth material and rows of fastening holes highlight its careful construction.

A Mycenaean boar tusk helmet like this may have inspired Homer’s description of Odysseus’s helmet with its “white tusks of the bright-toothed wild boar”

A large repository of clay writing tablets, well-preserved at Pylos as a result of being burned by the fires as in a kiln, reveals a historical foundation for many of the jobs described in the Odyssey. What was written in Linear B on the Bronze Age tablets as “wanax” or “leader” became, in Homer’s Greek, “anax”, a position claimed by Telemachus on Ithaca as well as by Agamemnon. Women listed on the tablets as “flour-grinders” find their modern counterparts as grinders of wheat and barley, “the marrow of men”, at mills in the Odyssey. The poem even contains a reference to such tablets as these in what was either an intended tribute to the literacy of the earlier age, or an accidental slip made in the new age of writing in Greece.

Indeed, just occasionally, Homer gave himself away, and traces of his age infringe upon the historical setting of his narrative. The Cyclopes encountered by Odysseus on his voyage home, for example, are characterised as uncivilised because they lack public assemblies for law-making. The eighth and seventh centuries BC witnessed the establishment of the Greek polis (city-state) as an institution in which laws and assemblies would play an important part.

There are also references in the epics to Gorgon shield devices, cult statues and temples, which did not appear in any number until Homer’s time. The development of the epics in fact coincided with the development of hero cults, some of them dedicated to Homer’s own characters.

A marble bust of a bearded man with deeply carved curls and blank, rounded eyes. His features are serious and slightly downturned, giving a contemplative look. The smooth stone surface contrasts with the detailed hair and beard, emphasising the sculpture’s craftsmanship.

A Roman copy of a second-century BC bust of Homer. The Odyssey, writes Daisy Dunn, is “often the poem we encounter first in one form or another” | Credit: Getty Images

Meat-eating heroes

Homer’s revival of the worlds of the Late Bronze Age was not always determined or conscious. The use of words such as ‘anax’ for ‘leader’ or ‘lord’ may have been intentional, but other words and verb forms have clearly been preserved by being recited down the long ages of the poems’ composition. It is probable that some of the evocations of Late Bronze Age society were similarly memories and products of hearsay passed down through the ages rather than mere historical staging. The result was a melting pot of old and new that has proven utterly irresistible to readers and historians alike.

Homer’s Odyssey has earned a particular place in our hearts because it is often the poem we encounter first in one form or another. Stories of Odysseus’s adventures on his long journey home – his encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, his enjoyment of the Sirens’ song, his passage through Scylla and Charybdis – have often been extracted and retold.

In many ways that journey encapsulated the final voyage away from an antique age of meat-eating heroes, monumental palaces and emotionally invested gods, and toward stark Iron Age modernity and all the promise it held.

Much has been written about Bronze Age collapse, but the story of the homecoming of the last hero, a product of a long-lost era, resonates beyond all others. In returning to Ithaca, Odysseus not only closed a chapter in his life, he opened a door onto the future of the Greek world.

Ad

Daisy Dunn is a classicist and the author of books including Homer: A Ladybird Expert Book (2019)

Ad

Ad

Loading...

Ad

Loading...