News
Why we still care about the ‘Odyssey’
By Tori Lee | July 17, 2026
Ahead of major film release, UChicago scholars discuss gods, heroes, casting and why Homer’s epic matters 3,000 years later
“Tell me the story of a complicated man,” opens Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey.
Odysseus, the epic’s hero and complicated man in question, is returning home from the Trojan War when he is waylaid by the gods. For 10 years, the king of Ithaca endures shipwrecks, enslavement, monsters and seduction to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.
“The Odyssey is a story of how hard it is to come home,” said Emily Austin, an associate professor of classics at the University of Chicago. “This is a supremely relatable human experience.”
Attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, the epic has been retold, retranslated and readapted countless times. At UChicago, the Odyssey is a foundational text in the undergraduate Core curriculum.
On July 17, director Christopher Nolan’s sweeping, A-list-studded take on Odysseus’s journey home will be released in theaters. Even before its release, the film, shot on massive IMAX cameras, sparked an equally outsized internet backlash on everything from the armor to the dialog to the casting choices.
We spoke with UChicago’s Assoc. Prof. Emily Austin, an expert on Homer, Prof. Patrice Rankine, who studies the intersection of ancient Greco-Roman classics with contemporary issues of race, gender and politics, and the Divinity School’s Prof. Carolina López-Ruiz, a scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions, to understand why we remain so invested in this ancient tale and what this version might say about our current culture.