Warning: This article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is based on one of the most famous works in the western literary canon. Its story also draws on centuries of writing that grew around Homer’s epic poem.
Several of the film’s best-known episodes take place before The Odyssey begins. The Trojan horse, the destruction of Troy and Agamemnon’s return are presented by Homer through memories, songs and warnings exchanged years after the Trojan War. Their fullest surviving accounts appear across other Greek epics, Athenian tragedy and Roman poetry.
Nolan brings those strands into one film, incorporating material from Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. He also compared English translations of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, EV Rieu and Robert Fagles during its development, according to the Associated Press.
The wooden horse becomes the film's moral centre. Odysseus and the Greek side initially present it as an offering to Athena, bringing it through Troy’s gates under the protection of what the film calls “Zeus’s law” and releases an army that slaughters the people inside.
The cheating victory follows him across the Mediterranean, bound up with the guilt and shame that make Ithaca increasingly difficult to face.
Throughout the film, Athena appears to him with the face of a Trojan priestess killed during the attack. She serves as his guide and as a persistent reminder of the people erased by his plan.
The Greeks also carry the violence of Troy into the journey home. By the time Circe transforms Odysseus’s men into animals, they have already been brutalised by the war and the terms on which it ended.
Nolan has compared Odysseus with J Robert Oppenheimer, another figure haunted by the weapon he helped create and the devastation that followed. Odysseus survives through disguise, manipulation and invented stories, but the years away from Ithaca also reflect a subconscious resistance to returning.
He is ashamed of what he has done, uncertain of the welcome awaiting him and reluctant to tell Penelope the truth.
The film ultimately allows him to return, confess and be forgiven. His departure from Ithaca at the end fulfils a duty to the kingdom, with Telemachus ready to take the throne and Penelope finally joining the journey she once asked him to make with her.
These seven texts provide the literary and historical background to Nolan’s version.
The Iliad by Homer
The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged from a long oral tradition in ancient Greece and were probably written down during the late eighth or early seventh century BC. Both were attributed to Homer, whose identity remains uncertain.
Despite its reputation as the defining literary account of the Trojan War, The Iliad covers several weeks during the final year of the decade-long conflict. Its story centres on Achilles, who withdraws from battle after a dispute with Agamemnon and leaves the Greek army exposed.
The poem ends with the funeral of the Trojan prince Hector. The deaths of Achilles and Paris, the construction of the horse and the fall of Troy belong to later parts of the tradition.
Odysseus appears as a soldier, negotiator and public speaker. The Greek commanders send him to settle disputes and restore order, including during the failed attempt to persuade Achilles to return to battle. He operates within an army led by Agamemnon and repeatedly destabilised by the anger, pride and rivalries of its most powerful men.
That history offers the wartime background to Nolan’s film. The horse emerges after 10 years of humiliation, retaliation and prolonged bloodshed, devised by a man whose intelligence has become one of the army’s principal weapons.
Nolan first spent serious time with the material more than two decades ago, when he was briefly attached to direct Troy, the 2004 film eventually made by Wolfgang Petersen. His conception of the horse dates to that period. In the new film, it is rough, heavy and cumbersome, pulled from the water and dragged across the sand by exhausted soldiers at the end of the siege.
Nolan has also singled out the meeting between Priam and Achilles near the end of The Iliad. Priam enters the Greek camp and appeals to the man who killed his son, prompting Achilles to return Hector’s body and suspend the fighting for his funeral. Nolan has said the scene “speaks to forgiveness”, an idea that also shapes Odysseus’s eventual reconciliation with Penelope.
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Trojan horse appears obliquely in two key passages of Homer’s epic poem. Menelaus recalls Helen walking around it and imitating the voices of the Greek soldiers’ wives, almost drawing the men inside into answering. The bard Demodocus later sings of the fighters hidden within the horse and their role in the destruction of Troy.
But the episode receives its fullest surviving ancient treatment in Book II of The Aeneid, written by the Roman poet Virgil between 29 and 19BC. The epic follows Aeneas, a Trojan who escapes the city and travels towards Italy, where his descendants will become the ancestors of Rome.
Book II recounts the final night of Troy from the perspective of the people inside its walls. The Greek fleet appears to have withdrawn, leaving the horse on the shore. Laocoon warns the Trojans about the danger it poses, but Sinon, a Greek soldier left outside the city, tells them that it is a sacred offering to Athena and persuades them to bring it through the gates. He later opens the structure and signals the Greek ships to return.
Nolan gives Sinon a new back story. Played by Elliot Page, he is a young Ithacan serving under Odysseus who knows nothing about the soldiers concealed inside the horse. He volunteers to remain behind and repeats the story Odysseus has given him about the offering to Athena, dying alone with faith in the commander who deceived him.
When Odysseus encounters Sinon again in the underworld, the young soldier has not forgiven him. The confrontation widens the guilt surrounding the horse to the Greek ranks, where Odysseus exploited the loyalty of one of his own men to complete the plan.
The film also reveals that Sinon went to Troy in place of Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson, who becomes the leading suitor in Ithaca. Odysseus returns to Antinous an object that Sinon had given him before the war, confronting him with the duty he avoided and the younger man who died in his place.
Odysseus also takes Sinon’s name when he enters his palace in disguise. He tells Penelope that it belonged to one of the bravest men he knew, speaking to her through the identity of the soldier whose death most clearly embodies the betrayal behind his victory.
Agamemnon by Aeschylus
Agamemnon’s murder appears throughout Homer's The Odyssey as a warning about the dangers awaiting a soldier at home. Telemachus hears the story while searching for news of his father, and Odysseus later meets his former commander in the underworld.
Agamemnon describes his return to Mycenae, where Aegisthus and Clytemnestra arranged his death. In Nolan’s film, he advises Odysseus to enter Ithaca without revealing his identity. Years of absence may have changed the household, and a returning king cannot rely on the status he earned at war.
Aeschylus placed the murder at the centre of Agamemnon, first performed in Athens in 458BC, roughly three centuries after the Homeric epics took shape. It opens the Oresteia, the only complete trilogy of Greek tragedies to survive. The three plays follow the murder of Agamemnon, the revenge carried out by his children and the eventual establishment of a court to bring the cycle of retaliatory killing to an end.
Agamemnon returns from Troy with Cassandra, a Trojan princess and prophetess, whose warnings of their impending deaths go unheeded. Clytemnestra welcomes him into the palace and kills them both, carrying out a revenge that reaches back to the beginning of the war. Her husband sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia after being told that the Greek fleet would otherwise remain trapped without favourable winds.
Nolan retains Iphigenia’s death and Clytemnestra’s fury, although Cassandra does not appear. Lupita Nyong’o plays Clytemnestra and her sister Helen, linking two women left scarred by the same conflict. Helen has been disfigured and carries guilt for the war fought in her name, with Paris largely absent from the film’s account of responsibility. Clytemnestra has answered the loss of her daughter through murder.
Agamemnon’s advice directly influences Odysseus’s return. He enters Ithaca in disguise, observes the household and learns who has remained loyal before revealing himself. His readiness to expect betrayal also reflects his own experience of using the trust of others, from Sinon to the Trojans who accepted the horse.
Greek Epic Fragments, translated by ML West
The Iliad and The Odyssey are the only complete epics to survive from a much larger group of ancient poems about the Trojan War. These works are now known collectively as the Epic Cycle, which carried the story from the origins of the conflict through to the death of Odysseus.
Most of the cycle has disappeared. Its contents survive through brief quotations, references in later literature and prose summaries attributed to an ancient writer named Proclus.
British classicist ML West gathered much of the surviving material in Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, first published in 2003. The volume presents the original Greek with English translations, along with evidence about poems that now survive only through summaries.
The Cypria covered the origins and early years of the Trojan War. The Aethiopis continued the story after the end of The Iliad, introducing the Ethiopian king Memnon and recounting the death of Achilles. The Little Iliad followed the final stages of the Greek campaign and included the construction of the wooden horse.
The Iliou Persis, commonly translated as the Sack of Ilium, described the capture and destruction of Troy. The Nostoi, or Returns, followed Agamemnon, Menelaus and the other Greek commanders on their journeys home. The Telegony continued Odysseus’s life beyond the end of The Odyssey and led to his death at the hands of Telegonus, his son by Circe, who arrived in Ithaca without recognising him.
West’s volume gives modern readers access to the remains of the literary world surrounding Homer. Ancient playwrights and poets inherited a body of stories filled with variant accounts, additional episodes and different endings.
Nolan has not publicly identified West’s collection as a source. The book remains a useful guide to the material surrounding his adaptation, particularly the fall of Troy, the journeys of the returning Greek commanders and the later life of Odysseus.
1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed by Eric H Cline
Eric H Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed, first published in 2014 and revised in 2021, is a straight modern history book, but links to the historical framing that Nolan references in the film.
Cline is an archaeologist and historian of the ancient Mediterranean. His book examines the upheaval that affected kingdoms and empires across the eastern Mediterranean near the end of the Late Bronze Age. The Mycenaean palace societies of Greece declined, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia disappeared and cities across Cyprus and the Levant were destroyed or abandoned. Trade networks connecting the region broke down, taking political systems and forms of writing with them.
The period sits close to the possible historical setting of the Trojan War traditions. Homer’s poems were composed centuries later and preserve a mixture of inherited memory, mythology and the conditions of the poet’s own age.
Cline examines warfare, migration, drought, famine, earthquakes, political instability and the failure of international trade, tracing the pressure placed on societies that had become closely dependent on one another. Egyptian inscriptions also describe groups now known as the Sea Peoples, whose identities, origins and role in the destruction remain disputed.
Nolan has spoken about the Bronze Age collapse and the mystery surrounding people arriving from the sea, although he has not publicly named Cline’s book as a source. The film makes the end of the period part of Odysseus’s return, with characters speaking of destroyed cities, broken trade routes and the disappearance of writing. The danger remains largely beyond the frame, but the film states plainly that the age Odysseus knew is ending, and that it is possibly his fault.
Ithaca faces the same instability. Its leaders fear that the island will be destroyed without a king capable of defending it, giving Odysseus’s return consequences for the survival of the kingdom as well as his marriage and household.
The descriptions of the Sea Peoples also deepen his guilt. They arrive by ship, disregard Zeus’s law and destroy the societies they enter. The film gradually folds the Greeks into that image: they came to Troy from the sea, passed through its gates behind a sacred offering and destroyed the city from within. Odysseus returns from one fallen city to a region approaching the end of an entire political order.
Inferno, Canto XXVI, by Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy during the early 14th century, more than 2,000 years after the composition of The Odyssey. The poem follows Dante’s imagined journey through hell, Purgatory and heaven. Dante knew Ulysses, the Roman name for Odysseus, through Latin writers and medieval traditions, influenced by retellings rather than Homer's actual text.
In Canto XXVI of Inferno, Ulysses and Diomedes appear together in the eighth circle of hell among the fraudulent counsellors. They are enclosed in a single flame for the schemes they carried out during the Trojan War, including the wooden horse.
Dante’s Ulysses leaves Circe and gathers his remaining companions for a final voyage west. He sails beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the boundary marking the limits of the known world, and continues until a storm destroys the ship.
His punishment centres on the use of intelligence and persuasion to lead others into destruction. The wooden horse becomes an act of fraud carried out under the appearance of a sacred offering, placing the achievement most closely associated with Odysseus among the reasons for his damnation.
Nolan has not publicly named Dante as an influence, but the same moral judgment runs through his film. Odysseus abuses the laws governing gifts, hospitality and trust. His men follow him into the horse, Sinon dies repeating his story and the Trojans open their gates to an object presented in Athena’s name.
Athena carries the face of the murdered priestess who witnessed the attack, giving his guilt the form of one of its victims. She remains with him throughout the journey, forcing the victory at Troy into every new encounter.
Nolan allows redemption to remain possible. Odysseus returns to Ithaca, tells Penelope the truth and accepts the duty that will take him away again. His actions at Troy continue to carry consequences, but they do not leave him beyond confession or forgiveness.
Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote Ulysses in 1833, shortly after the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam, and published it in 1842.
The dramatic monologue imagines the hero years after his return to Ithaca. Ulysses has recovered his throne and family, but domestic rule leaves him restless. He speaks of his subjects with impatience, prepares to hand the work of government to Telemachus and calls his former sailors together for another journey.
The poem’s closing lines became among the most frequently quoted in Victorian poetry, expressing a determination to continue seeking experience despite age and physical decline. Tennyson drew partly on Dante’s account, giving Ulysses a desire for travel that survives the homecoming. The speaker can also be read as a king rationalising the abandonment of his family and responsibilities.
Nolan’s film ends with another departure from Ithaca. Telemachus inherits the throne after finding his father, fighting beside him and showing that he is ready to rule. Odysseus leaves because Ithaca will face destruction if he remains, fulfilling his duty to the kingdom and giving his son the chance to lead it.
Penelope travels with him. Before the war, she had urged Odysseus to abandon his responsibilities and run away with her, but he refused because Ithaca would have paid the price. Their departure finally gives them the journey they once imagined after the throne has passed safely to Telemachus.
Odysseus reaches the sea with Penelope after returning home, telling her the truth and receiving her forgiveness. The final journey begins with the reconciliation he had spent years avoiding.
