Odyssey - Cultural Impact

Cultural Impact

• Cyclops by Euripides, the only extant satyr play, retells the respective episode with a humorous twist.
• True Story, written by Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century AD, is a parody of the Odyssey describing a journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules and to the moon.
• Some of the tales of Sinbad the Sailor from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights were taken from the Odyssey.
• Merugud Uilix maicc Leirtis ("On the Wandering of Ulysses, son of Laertes") is an eccentric Old Irish version of the material; the work exists in a 12th-century AD manuscript that linguists believe is based on an 8th-century original.
• Dante Alighieri has Odysseus append a new ending to the Odyssey in canto XXVI of the Inferno.
• Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, first performed in 1640, is an opera by Monteverdi based on the second half of Homer's Odyssey.
• Every episode of James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses (1922) has an assigned theme, technique and correspondences between its characters and those of Homer's Odyssey.
• The first canto of Ezra Pound's The Cantos (1922) is both a translation and a retelling of Odysseus' journey to the underworld.
• Nikos Kazantzakis aspires to continue the poem and explore more modern concerns in The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938).
• The 1954 Broadway musical The Golden Apple by librettist John Treville Latouche and composer Jerome Moross is freely adapted from the Iliad and the Odyssey, re-setting the action to the American state of Washington in the years after the Spanish-American War, with events inspired by the Iliad in Act One and events inspired by the Odyssey in Act Two.
• In Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris (1963), German film director Fritz Lang plays himself attempting to direct a film adaptation of the Odyssey.
• The Japanese-French anime Ulysses 31 (1981) updates the ancient setting into a 31st-century space opera.
• Omeros (1991), an epic poem by Derek Walcott, is in part a retelling of the Odyssey, set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia.
• The Odyssey (1997), a made-for-TV movie directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, is a slightly abbreviated version of the epic.
• Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain (1997) borrows much from the Odyssey to tell the story of an American Civil War veteran's homecoming.
• Similarly, Daniel Wallace's Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998) adapts the epic to the American South, while also incorporating tall tales into its first-person narrative much as Odysseus does in the Apologoi (Books 9-12).
• The Coen Brothers' 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? is loosely based on Homer's poem.
• American progressive metal band Symphony X interprets multiple scenes of the epic in their song, The Odyssey (2002).
• Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007) is a series of short stories that rework Homer's original plot in a contemporary style reminiscent of Italo Calvino.
• Dominic Allen's stage play Odyssey loosely adapts the story into a post-apocalyptic setting, basing the Odysseus character on Ezra Pound.
• The film Pandorum has many story elements of the Odyssey.
• The film Ulysses' Gaze (1995) directed by Theo Angelopoulos has many of the elements of the Odyssey set against the backdrop of the most recent and previous Balkan Wars.
• An excerpt from the Odyssey appears in graphic-novel form, with art by Gareth Hinds, in volume one of the anthology The Graphic Canon. The anthology is edited by Russ Kick and published by Seven Stories Press.