From Homer to Hollywood: how The Odyssey still speaks to the young in their “odyssey years”
4 September 2026
This summer, The Odyssey returns to the big screen in a new Hollywood adaptation, drawing fresh global attention to the ancient Greek epic. Yet for CUHK students and alumni, the epic is already familiar. Since 2012, every undergraduate has taken the compulsory General Education Foundation course In Dialogue with Humanity, reading a selection of Eastern and Western classics, including this 3,000-year-old masterpiece of Western literature.
CUHK in Focus speaks with Dr Ho Wai-ming, Associate Programme Director of the General Education Foundation Programme, who has taught the course since its soft launch in 2011. Drawing on the original text, he unpicks where the film departs from the epic and explores how a hero’s ten-year voyage home, beset by trial after trial, still speaks directly to the search for identity in the 21st century.
Myth vs. history: from oral tradition to Trojan reality
Q: Before watching the film or reading The Odyssey, what context should we keep in mind?
A: The Odyssey is divided into 24 books and runs to more than 12,000 lines. Set after the ten-year Trojan War, the story follows the Greek heroes as they make their way home. All return except Odysseus, who spends another ten years wandering before reaching his native Ithaca. Even then, a throng of suitors has occupied his household and is pressing his wife, Penelope, to remarry. Only after driving them out can he reclaim his throne and reunite with his family.
The Trojan War is traditionally dated to around the 12th century BC. In the centuries that followed, writing fell out of use in Greece, and the story survived through the oral tradition of travelling bards reciting in dactylic hexameter, a six-beat poetic metre well suited for memorisation. When writing re-emerged in Greece in the 8th century BC, these oral traditions were finally brought together and transcribed.
Modern scholars generally doubt that a single poet called Homer ever composed The Odyssey entirely on his own. More likely, the epic grew out of generations of oral storytelling that preserved the collective cultural memory of the ancient Greek world.
Q: Was the ten-year Trojan War really fought over the beautiful Helen of Sparta, as the famous story goes?
A: In Greek mythology, the Trojan prince Paris carries off Spartan queen Helen, sparking the Greek alliance’s expedition against Troy. However, there is still no conclusive archaeological evidence that the Trojan War occured as described, let alone over a beautiful woman. Tellingly, Homer’s epic devotes remarkably little space to Helen’s appearance, noting only her loose, lustrous hair and comparing her beauty to that of a deathless goddess.
From a historical perspective, during the late Bronze Age (around the 13th–12th centuries BC), the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites engaged in frequent contact and repeated conflict across western Anatolia. The legendary Trojan War is most likely a poetic memory of those complex geopolitical struggles.
Trials at sea: allegories of human conduct and free will
Q: Odysseus’s ten-year journey at sea is filled with gods, monsters and strange encounters. What do these adventures symbolise?
A: To the ancient Greeks, the sea was both a trade route and an unpredictable realm of danger. The gods and monsters Odysseus encounters reflect the awe a seafaring people felt towards the sea, while each adventure carries its own deeper philosophical lesson. For instance:
- The Cyclops: Odysseus blinds the giant and could have escaped unharmed. In the original text, driven by pride and unwilling to remain a “nobody”, he shouts his true name, enraging Poseidon, god of the sea and father of the Cyclops, and bringing years of retribution on himself. His crew also begins to lose faith in him. The episode stands as a vivid warning against arrogance.
- Circe: The goddess turns Odysseus’s greedy crew into pigs, a metaphor illustrating that once people give free rein to appetite and cast off the restraints of civilisation, the line between human and beast blurs.
- The journey to Hades: There, his old comrade Achilles tells Odysseus he would rather toil on earth as a landless hired hand than reign as king over all the dead, underscoring how precious life itself is.
- The Sirens: Knowing he cannot resist their enchanting song yet desiring to hear it, Odysseus orders his crew to plug their ears with wax and lash him tightly to the mast. What the Sirens sing of is the sufferings of the Greeks and Trojans at Troy, the very war Odysseus lived through. Why would a hero of that war long to hear what he had already endured? Perhaps because the Sirens turn his own deeds into an undying epic: the promise of hearing himself immortalised is the temptation he can least resist.
- The Cattle of Helios: The prophet Tiresias had warned Odysseus not to harm the sun god’s sacred cattle, yet the starving crew ignores Odysseus‘s warning and slaughters them regardless. Zeus punishes them, and the entire crew is lost, leaving Odysseus as the sole survivor. The episode speaks to the value of patience and restraint.
Q: Left unsaid in the film, the epic opens with Zeus, the king of the gods, decreeing that Odysseus will eventually make it home. If his fate is preordained, do individual human choices and all the hardships along the way still matter?
A: The ancient Greek word for fate, moira, means “the portion allotted to you”. It does not make human agency irrelevant. In The Odyssey, fate is intrinsically linked to human moral character and conduct. As Zeus states at the outset of the epic, “O the waywardness of these mortals! They accuse the gods, they say that their troubles come from us, and yet by their own presumptuousness they draw down sorrow upon themselves that outruns their allotted portion.”
Odysseus is granted his homecoming because of who he is: resourceful, steadfast, a just king of Ithaca who honours the gods. Precisely because of his wisdom and courage, Athena pleads with Zeus on his behalf. Yet the gods can only assist; they cannot face the hardships or make his choices for him.
The Odyssey therefore presents fate and free will as coexisting, in what scholars call “double determination”, meaning that the gods’ framework and human free will operate in parallel. A life can be understood through a person’s character and choices, or within a divine plan; the two are not mutually exclusive. Fate sets out the framework, but how a person chooses and acts within it reveals who they truly are.
Film vs. epic: a journey of repentance or self-reconstruction?
Q: The film centres on “Zeus’s Law”, the code of hospitality known as xenia. Why did the ancient Greeks hold this code in such high regard? Is this faithful to Homer’s text?
A: The code of hospitality is a central religious and social principle in ancient Greece. In an era where seafaring and trade were vital yet perilous, travellers venturing beyond their own homes were exceptionally vulnerable. A strict code of mutual welcome and good faith between host and guest was therefore essential to sustaining social and commercial ties. The Greeks made this obligation sacred, believing that a stranger arriving at their doorstep might even be a deity in disguise and so must be received with good grace.
In the epic, Odysseus’s son Telemachus offers a model of xenia when he welcomes Athena, who arrives disguised as a mortal. The suitors represent its complete opposite. They occupy Odysseus’s home for years, squander his wealth and mistreat beggars, repeatedly violating the code. In the end, their actions cost them their lives.
The film, however, makes the violation of “Zeus’s Law” a catalyst for the fall of Greek civilisation. That is not the epic’s overarching theme, but the director’s own reinterpretation. In the original text, it is the Trojan prince Paris’s abduction of the Spartan queen Helen that breaches xenia, directly triggering the war and setting Troy on the path to destruction.
Q: The film centres on Odysseus’s remorse over devising the Trojan Horse and the devastation of Troy. His ten-year voyage home becomes a journey of repentance, as the film links the breakdown of hospitality and trust to the fall of a civilisation. If this is not the epic’s main line, what is the original story really about?
A: This is one of the clearest contrasts between the film and the original. The epic places little emphasis on repentance. Odysseus neither relinquishes his throne nor sees any signs of the collapse of Greek civilisation. Its true spine is a journey of self-reconstruction.
Once a hero in his prime, Odysseus loses everything during his long years at sea, and the trials he endures force him to reflect on his past. In an episode the film touches on only briefly, the goddess Calypso offers him immortality if he stays with her. He chooses instead to return to the mortal world, embracing ageing and death. In those years of isolation on Calypso’s island, he reconsiders what gives his life meaning, ultimately choosing to go home and live out his mortal life as husband, father, king and hero, the roles that define who he is.
He returns to his own door not as a king but disguised as an anonymous beggar. Only after he has defeated the suitors and been recognised by his wife, Penelope, does he fully reclaim his identity. The epic ends with a joyful reunion, completing an arc of inner transformation that the film largely leaves unexplored.
Q: Odysseus’s journey of self-reconstruction concludes with the violent slaughter of more than a hundred suitors. How should we understand this resolution?
A: Through a 21st-century ethical lens, the climax appears excessively violent. However, within the ancient Greek value system, Odysseus’s retribution could be seen as an act of restoring order and justice. The suitors had gravely violated xenia, occupying Odysseus’s home for years, squandering his wealth, pressing Penelope to remarry and even plotting the murder of his son.
The tragedy of Agamemnon is invoked as a sharp contrast in the original epic. The Greek king was betrayed and murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, a reminder that betrayal can be fatal. This may be why the epic casts Odysseus’s revenge as purging his household of the disloyal and treacherous, restoring its loyalty and security. In a sense, it is a righteous ending that sets the world to rights on heaven’s behalf.
Q: What else does the film leave out that matters in the original epic?
A: One of the most significant omissions is the coming-of-age story of Telemachus. At the beginning of the epic, he is a bewildered youth, even reluctant to acknowledge that he is Odysseus’s son. Athena, in mortal guise, encourages him to set out in search of his father, and the journey becomes a rite of passage. As the story unfolds, he gradually grows into a young man capable of fighting alongside his father. By contrast, Telemachus is already relatively mature when he appears in the film, and this important arc is largely omitted.
The three women who play pivotal roles in the epic, Athena, Calypso and Penelope, are also given far greater depth in the original text. Athena helps father and son grow and find their way home; Calypso forces Odysseus to reconsider what gives life its value and choose to return home; and Penelope, left to guard the household for 20 years, uses her intelligence to outwit the suitors and preserve Odysseus’s home. The film greatly thins out these finely drawn women.
Navigating the modern “odyssey years”
Q: How does a 3,000-year-old epic resonate with university students nowadays?
A: Western civilisation is profoundly shaped by two great traditions, the Greek and the Hebrew, with the Homeric epics standing as foundational texts of the former. To truly understand Western culture, The Odyssey remains indispensable. Great literature brings to life particular people, their conversations and their choices; through CUHK’s General Education Foundation curriculum, we encourage students to start with these individual lives, examine the universal questions they raise, and in turn reflect on their own life choices.
For 3,000 years, The Odyssey has inspired new translations, interpretations and films, a testament to its lasting resonance. That is precisely why the course selects it. We read the opening and closing books and a few from the middle, inviting students to follow Telemachus, a youth of their own age, as he grows from uncertainty into a confident young adult capable of fighting alongside his father; to weigh what Odysseus’s rejection of immortality reveals about leading a meaningful life within finite boundaries; and, through the family’s reunion, to reflect on enduring questions of family, love and trust.
At its core, The Odyssey returns to an ancient, existential question that defies a definitive answer: “Where is home?” Home is far more than a physical address or location. It is an anchor of identity, a means of inquiring into who we wish to become and where our lives are headed.
Recently, students introduced me to an internet slang phrase, “odyssey years”, which captures that uncertain, unsettled and searching phase of young adulthood.
Three thousand years ago, Odysseus navigated unpredictable seas to find his way home; three millennia later, young people in Hong Kong are navigating their own voyages to discover where they belong and where they are heading.
Perhaps, through Odysseus’s timeless tale, we can invite our students to think afresh about the road home that is their own.
By Jessica Chu
Photos by Steven Yan
