Christopher Nolan's forthcoming film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey is being tipped to break box-office records, and this Guardian feature explores why the director of Inception and Oppenheimer was so determined to bring the ancient Greek epic to the screen. It also asks a broader question: why a poem thought to date from around the 600s or 500s BC continues to exert such a powerful hold on modern popular culture, echoing through works from The Wizard of Oz to Game of Thrones.

The piece explains that although the Greeks attributed the poem to Homer, a supposedly blind bard from Chios, scholars now doubt it was the work of a single author. It notes that the American classicist Milman Parry, studying oral singers in the Balkans in the 1930s, showed the Odyssey and the Iliad grew out of a long oral tradition of bards performing through memory and improvisation. The writer argues the poem is strikingly self-aware — at times feeling "more postmodern than ancient" — containing scenes of bards telling stories that move their listeners to tears, and suggests such live performances may once have been even more overwhelming than Nolan's cinema.