As Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey has reignited a global fascination with Homer, few scholars are better placed to explain the enduring power of the ancient epics than Gregory Nagy, the distinguished Homerist of Hungarian-American background and Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Now in his 90s, Nagy remains animated by the Homeric world. For him, the Iliad and the Odyssey are not simply ancient masterpieces preserved in books. They are living works that have continued to acquire new meanings through centuries of retelling, performance and interpretation.
He insists that the Odyssey cannot be considered in isolation from the Iliad. In classical Athens, the two epics were received as a pair: complementary and structurally symmetrical. “There is no complete Iliad without the Odyssey and vice versa,” he argues. While the Odyssey may be more immediately accessible, particularly to younger readers, both poems speak to different aspects of the human experience.
Nagy recalls the observation of his Harvard teacher John H. Finley that deciding which epic is “better” depends on the day of the week and what happens to be on one’s mind. That flexibility, he suggests, is precisely what makes Homer timeless. Homeric poetry developed through some 2,000 years of interaction between performer and audience, and that process did not stop in antiquity.
In this sense, every encounter with Homer becomes a new encounter. Nagy invokes Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition: each time something is repeated, it is also renewed. To read Homer, he says, is to reconnect with humanity itself. A work that has touched the human spirit so deeply for thousands of years can hardly cease to be relevant.
Yet the Homer who stands behind these poems is far more elusive than the familiar image of a single blind poet. Nagy’s background in anthropology and linguistics has led him to question the assumption that there was only one Homer. Across the Greek-speaking communities of the ancient world, particularly in Asia Minor, different traditions existed, and Nagy suggests that there were potentially dozens — perhaps hundreds — of culturally specific Homers.
When modern readers refer to the Iliad or the Odyssey “of Homer,” he explains, they are dealing with what he calls verbal art: a form of poetry rooted in an ancient tradition rather than the biography of a clearly identifiable historical individual. Already in the classical period, Homer was understood less as a conventional author than as “the poet” — the creator, the craftsman. The Greek verb poieō, from which poetry ultimately derives, originally carries the sense of making or crafting something, much as a sculptor or potter creates an object.
The Homer who has ultimately prevailed in Western culture is, in Nagy’s view, what might be called the “Athenian Homer,” the version that emerged prominently in fifth-century BCE Athens. Plato’s Ion offers a revealing glimpse of this tradition. In the dialogue, the rhapsode Ion is preparing to perform Homer at the Panathenaia, and one of its most striking moments comes when he describes Odysseus revealing his identity after stringing the bow that only he can master and preparing to turn his arrows against the suitors. The audience, Ion explains, experiences fear and pity so intensely that they are moved to tears.
For Nagy, that response is central to understanding what Homeric poetry was meant to do.
The very name “Homer,” he argues, may itself preserve an ancient metaphor for the poet’s role. One traditional etymological interpretation connects Homēros with ideas of bringing things together or joining them. Nagy likens the Homeric poet to a master craftsman assembling pieces of wood into a perfectly balanced wheel — the kyklos.
Homeric poetry, metaphorically, becomes such a wheel: a work whose individual elements are joined into a coherent whole. In parts of Asia Minor, he notes, the word could also carry the sense of someone who brings people together, someone who unites Greek-speaking communities.
That idea of unity is also embedded in the ancient image of Homer as blind.
Blindness, Nagy explains, is not simply a biographical detail. In oral poetry, the poet does not need ordinary physical sight. Homeric poetry repeatedly contrasts human vision with the superior knowledge of the Muses. Human beings can only hear kleos — what is spoken or heard — whereas the divine powers are portrayed as knowing everything.
The blind poet is therefore someone whose authority does not depend on his own limited vision. In the Odyssey, the blind singer Demodocus demonstrates precisely this symbolic power: through his song, he makes what is hidden visible to the audience. Blindness becomes a guarantee that the poet is not relying on his own eyes but on a higher form of knowledge granted by the Muses.
There are numerous ancient traditions about Homer’s life and blindness. Some depict him as having sight before losing it in old age. One particularly haunting tradition from Smyrna, however, presents his blindness in an entirely different light. In that story, Homer becomes a hostage or guarantor of peace and is blinded by the Lydians, sacrificing his sight in order to bring Greeks together. Blindness therefore becomes a symbol not of weakness, but of social solidarity and the poet’s independence from ordinary human vision.
The journey of Homeric poetry from oral performance to written text is equally complex. Nagy traces its development back to the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE, when traditions associated with the Panionion and the Greek communities of Asia Minor eventually evolved into the 24 rhapsodies of each epic. By the second half of the sixth century BCE, performances of the Iliad and Odyssey had become part of the Panathenaic tradition in Athens. They were initially not texts in the modern sense, but traditions of performance.
The Library of Alexandria later became the great guardian of those traditions in written form. Nagy draws a striking parallel between the library and the tomb of Alexander the Great. Ptolemy brought Alexander’s body to Alexandria and placed it at the symbolic heart of the city. Just as the mummified Alexander awaited a kind of resurrection, the papyri preserved in the Library could come back to life whenever someone read the written words aloud. The written text, in this interpretation, was not simply an archive. It was a means of bringing the “dead letter” back to life.
At the centre of this tradition stands the Homeric hero — a figure whose meaning is profoundly different from the modern superhero.
Nagy has argued since the publication of his 1979 book The Best of the Achaeans that the heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey, like heroes in other poetic traditions, were not merely fictional characters. They were objects of hero cult. The stories therefore carried a sacred dimension alongside their entertainment value.
The Homeric hero is also fundamentally flawed. Unlike contemporary fictional heroes, who are often expected to embody near-perfect moral virtue, imperfection is intrinsic to the ancient Greek heroic ideal. The hero experiences pathos: an overwhelming emotional state that can take the form of fear, pity, love or anger. Crucially, the audience does not merely observe that emotion; it participates in it.
At the Panathenaia, Nagy imagines thousands of spectators responding physically and emotionally to the rhapsode’s performance — freezing with fear as Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors or weeping with Andromache as she anticipates Hector’s death and the destruction awaiting her child. The audience confronted the limits of human existence through the suffering of the hero and, in doing so, experienced the awe described by Plato and the emotional and spiritual catharsis later theorized by Aristotle.
Nagy’s interpretation also brings a different Homeric woman into focus: Penelope.
Far from being merely the faithful wife waiting patiently for her husband, Penelope emerges as an extraordinarily complex and psychologically layered figure. Her name itself has been associated with pēnelops, a wild duck, while her character embodies a deeper connection to grief, longing and the emotional experience of women confronting death or the end of love.
One of the most revealing moments comes in the 19th book of the Odyssey, when Penelope describes a dream to the disguised Odysseus. She has seen an eagle killing her 20 geese, leaving her overwhelmed with grief. The eagle then speaks, telling her that it is not truly a bird but her husband, returning to punish the suitors. Penelope asks the disguised Odysseus to interpret the dream. He confirms the obvious interpretation — that the eagle represents Odysseus and that her husband is returning — but she remains uncertain whether the dream has passed through the “gates of horn,” associated with truth, or the “gates of ivory,” associated with deceptive dreams.
The emotional ambiguity is crucial. Why, Nagy asks, does Penelope mourn the geese? They can be understood as representing the suitors, men who have spent 20 years desiring her and competing for her attention. Her grief therefore opens up a psychological dimension that disappears entirely when Penelope is reduced to the conventional image of the endlessly faithful wife.
That complexity makes Homer feel surprisingly modern.
Nolan’s film draws on Emily Wilson’s landmark translation, the first English translation of the Odyssey by a woman. For readers approaching Homer for the first time, however, Nagy is less concerned with recommending a single definitive version than with encouraging them to read the poem in any form that brings them into contact with it.
No translation, he argues, can reproduce an ancient work perfectly. Translation is an inherently noble but imperfect undertaking. His own approach seeks to preserve, as far as possible, the order of the ancient Greek words so that readers can sense something of the rhythm of the original. He also favors open-access resources, particularly for students, so that cost does not become a barrier to engaging with Homer.
