Is the Odyssey the first historical novel? How Homer recreated a world of gods and monsters

Homer’s great epic looks back to the age of the Trojan War, but it was composed centuries after the world it describes had vanished. That distance, argues classicist Daisy Dunn on the HistoryExtra podcast, makes it closer to historical fiction than straightforward history

After 20 years away, Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca. In one of the Odyssey's most dramatic scenes, he reveals his identity by stringing his great bow before turning it on the suitors who have overrun his household, bringing his long journey to a violent and decisive end | Credit: Getty Images

Published: July 20, 2026 at 11:45 AM

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Before the Odyssey begins, Odysseus has already become one of the most celebrated heroes in the Greek world.

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He has sailed to Troy with the coalition of Greek rulers determined to recover Helen, wife of Menelaus, after she was taken by the Trojan prince Paris. He has fought in a war that lasted ten years. And, according to later tradition, it was Odysseus who devised the most famous trick in ancient literature: the Trojan Horse, the enormous wooden structure used to smuggle Greek warriors inside the walls of Troy and bring the conflict to its bloody end.

But the Odyssey isn’t about the Trojan War.

It begins after Troy has fallen, when the victorious Greek armies are attempting to return home. Most of the other kings make that journey successfully, or at least relatively quickly. Odysseus instead, he spends another ten years wandering through a world of storms, hostile gods, monsters and strange islands, while his wife Penelope and son Telemachus struggle to preserve his household and kingdom on Ithaca.

To modern readers, it can seem as though the poem offers a direct window onto the heroic age itself: the world of Greek warriors, Bronze Age palaces and long-lost kings. After all, the Odyssey is one of the defining works of ancient literature and one of the main sources through which later generations have imagined early Greece.

But according to classicist Daisy Dunn, that is not quite how we should read it.

“I often describe the Odyssey as being almost like a historical novel,” she says, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

“I think it’s the easiest way to think about it because we can get so lost in the idea that this is a really ancient work, so we assume that everything it’s describing is contemporary. But that’s not the case at all.”

The Odyssey is a work composed centuries after the events it describes, preserving fragments of an older world while reshaping them through the imagination, assumptions and concerns of a later age.

A dramatic painting of the fall of Troy, showing the city engulfed in flames beneath a smoke-filled sky. The Trojan Horse stands inside the city as soldiers and civilians flee burning buildings, while ships crowd the harbour and figures carry children and possessions to safety.

The fall of Troy marks the end of the decade-long war described in Homer's Iliad, but it is only the beginning of the Odyssey. | Credit: Getty Images

Looking back across four centuries

To understand the historicity of the Odyssey, there’s one fact that is central to keep in mind: it is telling a story from a time long before it was written.

“The endpoint of the Odyssey is around the eighth century BC, when you start to get a decent version of it,” Dunn explains. “But the events it’s describing belong to the Late Bronze Age, about 400 years earlier than when the poem was being composed and finished off.”

That is a huge distance. To put it in perspective, it is roughly comparable to a writer today producing a story set in the Tudor period.

The poem emerged from oral tradition. Long before it was written down, generations of singers – known as bards or aoidoi – performed stories about the Trojan War and its heroes. These tales were adapted for different audiences over time, while preserving recognisable characters, episodes and themes.

By the eighth century BC, those traditions had been shaped into the poems we now call the Iliad and the Odyssey, conventionally attributed to Homer. Whether Homer was a single historical individual, a name attached to a tradition, or something more complex remains one of the great unresolved questions of classical scholarship.

What matters, Dunn says, is that the poems weren’t immediate reports from the age they describe.

Remembering a lost golden age

“We have a real disjunction between the period in which the poem was composed and the period in which it is set,” Dunn says. “It is looking back at this really glorious age, just before it fell and times became a lot darker.”

For the Greeks who heard the Odyssey, the Late Bronze Age represented something like a heroic golden age. Dunn says that the Odyssey is “partly, I think, a tribute to that age because the Bronze Age, in the Greek memory, was this time of heroes and splendour and wealth.”

Modern archaeology helps explain why that memory had such prestige.

From around 1600 to 1200 BC, mainland Greece was dominated by the Mycenaean civilisation: a network of wealthy palace societies centred on sites such as Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos. These kingdoms built monumental architecture, established complex bureaucracies, traded across the span of the eastern Mediterranean and possessed considerable military power.

This was the world later Greeks associated with the great warrior-kings of legend: Agamemnon of Mycenae, Menelaus of Sparta, Nestor of Pylos, Achilles and Odysseus himself.

According to Greek tradition, these heroes fought together in the Trojan War. Then something happened that brought the Bronze Age world crashing down.

After the Bronze Age collapse

“The Trojan War is right on the cusp of the end of the Bronze Age,” Dunn explains, “and what followed was the Dark Age.”

Many historians today use the phrase “Greek Dark Age” cautiously, because it can imply a total absence of culture, complexity or evidence. That is misleading. But the Bronze Age world did collapse (precisely why is still a matter of extraordinary speculation and debate) sparking an immense decline.

“It’s become deeply unfashionable for historians to talk about the Dark Age, full stop,” Dunn says. “But in truth, the population shrank quite drastically. Art became far less ambitious than it had been. There seems to have been a kind of cultural hiatus.”

One of the most striking changes was the disappearance of writing.

“Certainly, writing was no longer taking place,” Dunn says. “Before that, in the Bronze Age, they had a certain type of writing on tablets.”

That script is known today as Linear B. It was an early form of Greek used mainly by palace administrators to record stores, livestock, taxes, workers and official inventories. When the palace system collapsed, the bureaucratic world that had sustained this writing system collapsed with it.

For several centuries, Greece appears to have been effectively non-literate. Only much later, after Greeks adapted an alphabet from Phoenician traders, did writing return. The Greek world was waking up again, now in a new era.

“Then, around the eighth century BC, the Odyssey and the Iliad come into being,” Dunn explains. “They are then written down, and Greece is kind of waking up again. It’s the beginning of the Archaic era.”

The Archaic Age saw many of the developments that would eventually define classical Greece. Greek communities founded colonies across the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and populations grew again. City-states such as Athens and Sparta began to take more recognisable shape. Art, poetry and public life flourished in new ways.

So the Odyssey belongs to a society that was rebuilding itself while looking back to a grander, more heroic past.

A scene painted on an ancient Greek vase showing Odysseus and his companions carrying a long sharpened stake toward the seated Cyclops Polyphemus. The giant, identified by his long hair and larger size, holds a drinking cup, while the men prepare to blind him with the stake.

This ancient Greek vase depicts one of the most famous episodes in The Odyssey: Odysseus and his men blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus after becoming trapped in his cave. | Credit: Getty Images

Can we still find real history?

“The writing is so far removed from when it’s set, and this is why the Odyssey is so fascinating,” Dunn says. “You have certain traces in it which are genuinely from that earlier period because some of these stories have been passed down across the centuries.”

Historians and archaeologists have often noticed that some features of Homeric poetry seem consistent with what is now known about the Mycenaean world. Certain forms of kingship, aspects of palace life and details of warrior culture may preserve memories of Bronze Age practices that survived through oral storytelling.

At the same time, other elements clearly reflect the eighth century BC rather than the world of 400 years earlier. The poems blend different periods together.

“There’s also this concerted effort in the eighth century BC to make the poem sound a lot older than it is,” Dunn says.

That is what makes the comparison with historical fiction so apt.

Modern historical novelists use surviving evidence, inherited stories and imaginative reconstruction to create a past that feels authentic, even though it is written from a later perspective. Something similar is happening in the Odyssey, where the poet is consciously attempting to invoke a remote heroic age.

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It’s a poem that preserves memories of a civilisation that had fallen into decline centuries before, filtered through generations of oral performance, myth-making and poetic invention. It looks back to a world of palaces, kings and legendary warriors from the perspective of a later Greece, grappling with its own deep origins.

Authors

James OsborneSenior content producer

James Osborne is a senior content producer at HistoryExtra

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