The Odyssey Is Back in the Classroom. Now We Need to Help Students Read It.

For nearly three thousand years, The Odyssey has had an extraordinary ability to find new audiences. Odysseus has survived not only monsters, shipwrecks, angry gods, and twenty years away from home, but enormous changes in language, culture, education, and the ways in which stories themselves are told.

Today, Homer has found another audience.

Renewed popular attention to The Odyssey, fueled in part by its latest appearance on the screen, has put one of the oldest works of Western literature back into contemporary conversation. Students who might once have regarded Homer as simply another ancient author assigned in English class are encountering his characters, adventures, and ideas through popular culture.

For teachers, that renewed interest presents a remarkable opportunity.

It also presents a familiar problem.

Getting Students to Homer Is Only the Beginning

There is a considerable difference between convincing a teenager that The Odyssey might be interesting and helping that teenager successfully read it.

The story itself hardly lacks excitement. There are shipwrecks and monsters, witches and gods, battles and betrayals. There is the Cyclops, the enchantress Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the long-awaited return to Ithaca. Beneath the adventures lie questions that remain surprisingly immediate: What does it mean to be loyal? What do we owe a stranger? What makes a good leader? When does cleverness become deceit? What is home worth after years away from it?

The difficulty is often not Homer.

It is access to Homer.

A complete Odyssey is a substantial undertaking for a high-school classroom. Teachers are working within limited semesters, competing curricular requirements, differing reading abilities, and students who may have little previous experience with long works of ancient literature. Names, genealogies, unfamiliar customs, repeated passages, extended speeches, and the conventions of oral poetry can make the distance between a modern teenager and an ancient Greek audience seem even greater.

The result can be unfortunate. Students may encounter one of the world's great adventure stories as something to endure rather than something to discover.

Abridgment Is Not the Same as Simplification

One answer has long been abridgment. But not all abridgments serve the same purpose.

There is an important distinction between simplifying a classic until little of the original remains and carefully shortening it so that the architecture, language, characters, ideas, and essential narrative remain intact.

A good classroom abridgment should not tell students what happened in The Odyssey. It should allow them to read The Odyssey.

A summary can tell a student that Odysseus encountered the Cyclops. Homer lets the student experience the encounter. A study guide can define xenia, the ancient Greek concept of hospitality between host and guest. The poem allows students to watch hospitality honored, abused, rewarded, and punished until they begin to understand why it mattered.

That is why the language of the original work—or, in English, the voice and integrity of a genuine translation—matters so much.

The purpose of abridgment should be to remove obstacles without removing Homer.

What Should We Preserve?

When we developed the abridged edition of The Odyssey at Richer Resources Publications, this was the central question.

What can be shortened without depriving a young reader of the experience of the work itself?

Our approach was not to rewrite Homer for teenagers or reduce the poem to a modern retelling. The abridged edition is drawn from Ian Johnston's translation of the complete poem, preserving the translation while reducing the length to make the work manageable within a secondary-school curriculum.

The distinction is important because an accessible first encounter with Homer should not have to be an inauthentic one.

Students are capable of grappling with difficult ideas. In fact, adolescence may be one of the best times to encounter the questions Homer raises. Young people are beginning to form independent ideas about loyalty, justice, authority, identity, ambition, family, and their own place in a larger community.

They do not necessarily need those ideas made simpler.

Sometimes the challenge is not the ideas themselves, but reaching them.

The Movie Can Be a Door, Not a Substitute

Whenever a classic work receives a major film adaptation, an inevitable question follows: Will students watch the movie instead of reading the book?

Perhaps we should ask a different question.

How many students might read the book because they saw the movie?

For generations, teachers have used adaptations, performances, paintings, maps, recordings, and other forms of interpretation to help students enter difficult works. A film need not compete with Homer. It can provide another doorway into his world.

And once students have walked through that doorway, the differences between adaptation and text become educational opportunities of their own.

Why did the filmmaker change this episode?

Why was a character interpreted differently?

What was omitted?

What did Homer tell us that the camera cannot?

What can a film show us that an ancient oral poem leaves to the imagination?

Those questions transform the familiar classroom exercise of "book versus movie" into something more sophisticated: a discussion about interpretation itself.

Why Homer Still Belongs in High School

There is another reason the current enthusiasm for The Odyssey matters.

Education continually faces pressure to make room for what is new, practical, and immediately relevant. Those goals have value. But relevance need not mean recency.

Few works demonstrate that better than The Odyssey.

The poem asks what happens to people after war. It examines the obligations of leaders, parents, children, husbands, wives, hosts, guests, rulers, and citizens. It considers temptation, endurance, pride, violence, deception, grief, identity, and the longing for home.

Those subjects have not become obsolete.

Perhaps that is why a story nearly three millennia old can still inspire filmmakers, fill theaters, generate public discussion, and send a new generation looking for Homer.

The opportunity for educators is not simply to capitalize on a moment of popular interest. It is to use that interest to introduce students to something that will remain after the moment has passed.

If a movie brings a fifteen-year-old to The Odyssey for the first time, that is not a diminishment of Homer.

It is another beginning.

And after almost three thousand years, Homer has had quite a few of those.