Stephen Fry’s Odyssey is the final instalment in his retellings of Greek myth that began with Mythos. Here, Fry tells us, we move away from the turbulent creation of the gods and the swashbuckling heroes of old, into “a profoundly human story”: a tale of one man’s journey home “to a world of farm and family”.
But it turns out that, somewhat surprisingly, the “hero” who is looking for home isn’t only Odysseus. In Odyssey’s first half, despite the title, we find the Odysseus story interweaving with those of Agamemnon, Ajax (the one who raped Cassandra and caused Athena’s wrath upon the returning Greeks), Menelaus and Helen, and even the Trojan, Aeneas. So this story isn’t just about an Odyssey: it’s about many returns home.
And this is true to the world in which the Homeric epics were composed. We know that there were multiple oral tales of different “returns” (“nostoi” in Greek) from the Trojan war. Each of the Greek heroes who were said to have sailed back from Troy – Agamemnon, king of the Greeks, for example, or Menelaus, husband of Helen – likely had their own return poem. It’s a great tragedy that the Odyssey is the only one of the return epics we have left to us.
