The Odyssey, the Homeric epic now breaking box office records thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation, is a tale full of mythical monsters, witches, and gods meddling in human fate. But it’s also a kind of document of ancient Greek technology, and maybe ancient Greek science fiction, spanning the Bronze Age through the Iron Age.
According to the journal Nature, Homer imagined ships that resemble today’s AI-piloted drones. The Phaeacian vessels that carry Odysseus to Ithaca know every city and every fertile land. They have no helmsmen and somehow know on their own what their sailors are thinking and planning to do.
Along with the earlier Iliad, the Odyssey drew on myths and oral traditions going back to around 1600 BCE, during the Bronze Age when Mycenaean and Minoan civilization flourished in Greece. Both epics were passed down orally for generations before Homer set them in writing around the 8th century BCE, by which point Greece had already moved into the Iron Age.
As a result, the Odyssey contains a string of anachronisms around metalworking, mixing bronze spears and swords with iron gates and iron knives. There are even references to steelmaking: Homer describes the hot wooden stake Odysseus and his men used to blind the Cyclops as hissing when it plunged into the creature’s eye, the way a blade hisses when dipped in water to be tempered.
That technique hardens steel, but not bronze or plain iron, notes Michael Wright, former curator at London’s Science Museum. Homer, he said, appears to be describing the working of a tool with a steel tip.
Findings echoing the Odyssey’s metallurgical references have turned up at the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor in Pylos, including vessels made from alloys of bronze, silver, and gold, and a depiction of a perforated axe head dated to 1450 BCE.
The holes recall the archery contest staged when Odysseus returns to Ithaca, in which an arrow had to pass through twelve axes lined up in a row. Homer doesn’t explain how, but some scholars have suggested the axes had openings for exactly this purpose. Archaeologist Sharon Stocker of the University of Cincinnati said the more excavation work is done, the more details get confirmed.
British actress Samantha Morton plays Circe in Nolan’s Odyssey (Universal Pictures).
The Odyssey also describes a trade network linking different Bronze Age civilizations. The first supporting evidence for this came in the 1980s, with the discovery of a 14th-century-BCE shipwreck off Uluburun, Turkey, carrying luxury goods from Europe, Africa, and Mesopotamia. These archaeological finds confirm that the peoples of the region were sailing across the Mediterranean much earlier than previously assumed, according to Brendan Foley, an archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden.
Herbs and Magic Potions
The epic also references a range of plant-based drugs, poisons, and antidotes. Helen of Troy uses a drug called “nepenthe” that banishes grief, while the witch Circe gives Odysseus’s men a potion that turns them into pigs and makes them forget their homeland.
Nepenthe may refer to hallucinogenic plants like mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) and henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), which block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and were used in antiquity as painkillers and anesthetics, according to Rafael Molina-Venegas, a botanist at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain. Homer describes the god Hermes giving Odysseus a mysterious herb called “moly,” with a black root and white flower, meant to protect him from Circe’s potion.
Molina-Venegas and colleague Rodrigo Vergara have proposed that moly may refer to a group of local plants, Pancratium species, which have white flowers, dark bulbs, and counteract the effects of henbane and mandrake.
Astronomy
Like all ancient sailors, Odysseus and his crew navigated by the stars. In one passage, the nymph Calypso tells Odysseus that to sail toward Ithaca, he must keep the constellation of the Great Bear on his left. The epic contains other astronomical references too, according to James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Washington. The names Pleiades, Hyades, and Orion date back to the earliest days of Greek astronomy, he noted.
There are hints of other celestial observations as well. When the seer Theoclymenus foretells the death of Penelope’s suitors, he says the sun has vanished from the sky and darkness has swallowed the world. Several scholars, from ancient philosophers Plutarch and Heraclitus to modern researchers, have argued this describes a total solar eclipse. A 2008 study proposed the event took place on April 16, 1178 BCE.
The Wounds of War
Finally, the epic brings to the surface the deep psychological toll of war, including Odysseus’s struggle to reintegrate into society and his eerie encounter with the souls of the dead in the underworld. There, the now-dead Achilles laments that he’d rather be a lowly servant on earth than ruler of the underworld. For Foley, the Lund University archaeologist, this could be read as a metaphorical description of post-traumatic stress. Whether it’s the 21st century or the 21st century BCE, he said, the psychological toll is the same.
