Talk:Odyssey

Semi-protected edit request on 12 July 2026

Please change: "Penelope tells them she will remarry when she is done weaving a shawl; however, she secretly unweaves it every night."

To: "Penelope tells them she will remarry when she is done weaving a shroud; however, she secretly unweaves it every night."

Reason for change: In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope is cleverly delaying her suitors by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's father, Laertes, to be used for his eventual funeral. A shroud is specifically used for a corpse, whereas a shawl is an article of clothing for a living person. AsterionHekataios (talk) 13:58, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

 Done Day Creature (talk) 16:29, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

“Attributed to Homer” prominence and specificity

“attributed to Homer” is a very prominent part of this page. It features in the short description, first sentence of the lead, the “subtitle” of the Infobox.

As the “Background > Composition and Authorship section” makes clear. There is no consensus on if Homer lived. And the consensus seems to be that the odyssey was formed from oral traditions over centuries.

I thus have 2 questions: (1) Does “attributed to Homer” deserve such prominence in the lead/infobox/short description? (2) Should we be more specific on _who_ attributes it to Homer? YannLK (talk) 11:52, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

The earliest surviving source explicitly attributing the poems to Homer by title appears to be Herodotus. I've made this edit to clarify this point. --Omnipaedista (talk) 12:53, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

A related problem is that the whole wiki treats it only as Homeric standard version, the one that was written and known today word for word. But part of the reason why authorship is unknown and unconfirmed and mysterious is presumably because the person/group setting it down knew they were just writing/adapting an existing thing, and everyone know the story already (if they’d ever heard a bard). I’d like to revise some phrasing, in accordance with sources. Yes I know and understand the wiki article is for the one particular work, not the larger myth, but I still think it’s misleading and confusing in parts.

Example right in the first paragraph: “ also known by the Latin variant Ulysses”. It makes no sense to include that in the article, there, when the article is about the Homer Written Thing *not* the larger older myths or stories.

When someone thinks of any given myth story, they shouldn’t *only* be aware of one authored standard version mentally. This kind of thinking is wrong and comes from modern publishing culture. And the fact that Homer is thought to have never existed makes it all the more wrong that the very first words focus on “one of two” instead of just “a”. Why is broader bibliography being worked into the very first words of the article? If a novelist has 14 books, does every article say “[book X] is one of 14 books” in the first line?

The article also has Useless First Sentences syndrome, an epidemic on Wikipedia, partly because of the fuzziness around Homer. The two sentences before “It follows [i.e. story info]” should not be prioritized before a few words of brief definitive story info and a rough date (like any good book wiki article). Why am I discussing here instead of editing? I think the Useless First Sentences Syndrome is so entrenched now that editors will think it *should* be like that and they’d revert and improvement. So now ledes are buried, repeatedly, in a way that I think should be obvious to any person looking at it with a notion of helpful informativeness in mind. And yet.

Useless First Sentences Syndrome is where the nouns/phrases chosen in the first sentence are too broad, or are associations rather than definitive about what the thing is. I.e. “a ‘product’ manufactured by so & so” when it’s a ‘boat’, or just “a videogame by [publisher]” (always publisher instead of creator/developer as is obviously the standard for other works of art) when it’s a street-racing game, or a “musical style from [location]” with no word on what it really is. (These are just examples.)RandomEditor6772314 (talk) 16:54, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

Add Emily Wilson's translation to the list of translations

Emily Wilson's translation with a unique point of view, and using modern English, might warrant being added to the list of significant translations.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey_(Emily_Wilson_translation) for reference and reviews cited there as commendation for a possible inclusion in the list of translations. Derdok (talk) 20:51, 22 July 2026 (UTC)

Her translation is already referenced, in the "Books" section of the Bibliography. I agree it makes sense to also add it to the "English translations" section. However, I'm not sure how to handle this best – duplicating the existing {{Cite book}} entry would probably cause problems with short citations referencing it. Gawaon (talk) 05:16, 23 July 2026 (UTC)

? What "list of translations"? This article does not have one. We have some quite nice paragraphs discussing the history of translations, but the content on English translations doesn't go into the 20th century. I'm not sure why we would skip a whole century and throw in a 21st century translation. And frankly, the section is quite lengthy for an overview article, so I would be hesitant to expand it much. Aza24 (talk) 19:36, 23 July 2026 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion! My reference was to Odyssey § English translations, which is a subsection of "External links" – but I hadn't noticed that when I wrote my comment yesterday. Right now its contents are a bit odd – there's one translation in there (Lawrence) that doesn't come with an external link and should probably be removed. And you're right that it wouldn't make much sense to add Wilson's translation there since its full text is almost certainly not available online. My mistake. Gawaon (talk) 02:48, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

@Aza24: Hello, been a while. I can provide some context. I built out the translations paragraphs as a sort of non-sandbox draft while writing Translations of the Odyssey. The honest answer is quite boring: I intended to pare this article's translation section back in detail after publishing the dedicated translation article but didn't get around to it. Wilson's article is listed, alongside her Iliad, in English translations of Homer, and her scholarship is cited repeatedly on this article, but I agree that throwing her translation into the article for the sake of it feels a bit silly to me. (I made her translation's article so it had its own time to shine!) Further up the page, someone requested material on gendered analysis -- I had some time & wanted to put together another spin-off article but it never made it out of my sandbox because life got in the way. It could certainly warrant an entire paragraph in there. – ImaginesTigers 15:50, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

Title formatting

Why does this article refer to it as "the Odyssey" and not "The Odyssey"? A quick look on Amazon shows that English translations appear to overwhelmingly or universally be titled "The Odyssey", and I don't understand why this article is treating the title differently than we normally would. Somatochlora (talk) 01:54, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

To expand slightly, "Odyssey is composed of 24 books" and "The Odyssey is composed of 24 books" are both sensible, and are how we would treat any other poem or work of fiction. But the status quo seems ungrammatical. I see that secondary sources tend to use this styling. But I don't see why we would follow that anymore than we would use "Ke$ha" in prose. I am reminded of the rfc about names of birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_156#Bird_common_name_decapitalisation which determined that specialist styles within the field should not override normal rules of grammar and styling. Somatochlora (talk) 02:22, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

The idea is that the work's actual title is just Odyssey but that it's commonly used with the article, just as various other proper nouns. Just as we write "the United States" with a small "the" which is not a part of the proper noun but still precedes it. "United States" doesn't take italics, of course, but otherwise the idea is the same. Gawaon (talk) 02:53, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

In the United States the "the" is used to make clear that this apparent plural is a singular entity. That is not the case here, just "Odyssey" would be perfectly comprehensible. It really just seems to be a stylistic convention. Which is fine, but I would normally expect a Wikipedia page that does something like that to include e.g. a short section called "Name" that explains these conventions and the reasoning behind them. I don't know what that reasoning is as I haven't found any sources. I find it very jarring on this page and find it strange that there has never been any discussion I can see of why Wikipedia would follow this convention for a small number of ancient works.

I also think it is very clear that the common name for this work is genuinely the "The Odyssey". That's what every single English translation that shows up in the first couple of pages on Amazon calls it on the cover and spine from what I can see. I don't feel like feel like it would be worthwhile for me to actually put into the effort to change it but it seems pretty clear to me that by Wikipedia policies the title of this article should be "The Odyssey". In contrast, it is very common for "the" to be left off the U.S. in contexts where that is possible, e.g. map labels. Somatochlora (talk) 11:56, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Actually this specific work is given as an example of the thorny "the" capitalization issue in MOS:THECAPS. The idea seems to be that, since the article is not included in our page title, it's not an actual part of the title of the work. So, if you want to change the italics and capitalization, you'll have to make a WP:MOVE request to change the page title from "Odyssey" to "The Odyssey". If that request gains consensus, the rest will follow automatically. Good luck! Gawaon (talk) 13:46, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

As I said I'm not about to start a move proposal. More just think this should be clarified *in the article* because I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds it jarring and confusing. I can't do so because I don't actually understand why it is like this. I presume there is some historical or linguistic reason. Somatochlora (talk) 16:32, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Hi Somatochlora. What you're noticing is an English convention that isn't specific to Homer. When descriptive titles are borrowed from another language, we add a the that doesn't form part of the actual title (e.g., the Bible, the Talmud, the Torah). If the title is a proper noun, like a name, they don't add one (like Beowolf) because proper nouns don't need the definite article to be definite. The Ancient Greek/Latin titles were descriptive (song/story of Odysseus), so convention arose for the. This is so widespread that plenty of people do now consider the to be part of the title, and you'll see it in plenty of translation titles/modern printings. – ImaginesTigers 16:23, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

Does it insult the Greeks to suggest that mere Egyptians should have inspired them?

I mentioned a suggestion, with sources. Someone objected and reversed, which I find suspicious. But I'm not doing an edit war. Let someone else restore it, if they think it worthwhile. GwydionM (talk) 09:17, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

Actually, your edit, which I reverted, merely described the Odyssey as "part of a broader tradition of East Mediterranean homecoming stories", without saying anything about which stories inspired which. You also mentioned the "Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor" but without making a direct connection. If there was a reliable source (RS) establishing a likely specific influence from that story, it would be interesting, but your vague edit did nothing of that sort. The other problem is that the edit itself didn't refer to any RS, which is needed for all factual information added to Wikipedia. Gawaon (talk) 10:59, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

Ian C. Johnston's translation

Section "English translations" states that the translation by Ian C. Johnston was released into the public domain in 2024. I am not sure it is true. First, the link is dead. Second, the book is currently offered for sale ($24.50 from Richer Resources Publications, or Amazon.com).
Ion Soggo (talk) 14:56, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

Hubris?

The word "hubris" doesn't appear in the main text of the article, despite being a major (the major) theme of the story. ~2026-42129-94 (talk) 00:16, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

Do you have a source for this assertion? And really, instead of trying to explain how hubris is a (or the) major theme, please give us a reliable, academic source we can cite. Because it also doesn't appear in the Britannica article on the subject, nor our article on hubris (admittedly, a poor article). As recently as two weeks ago, a Professor of Greek Literature has rejected the notion of hubris as a central component: "All of the Homeric heroes are excessive in some way, which is at the root of the meaning of the word 'hubris.' The ancient word has to do with excess. The heroes of Greek epic all go to extremes in one way or another: extremes of grief, extremes of rage, whatever it is. So I don’t think there is exactly a reflection on hubris as such going on here." Aza24 (talk) 03:35, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

I'm not a classicist; my source is the Odyssey where the hubris of Odysseus causes great harm to himself and others throughout the story. The fact that academics debate the theme at all (the word "hubris" appears five times in the blog post you cite) is evidence that it should be included in the wikipedia article. The theme is glaringly absent from the recent film adaptation and I made the comment with the hope that someone more knowledgeable would be willing to include a discussion of and citations for the importance of the theme (which assuredly exist). ~2026-42129-94 (talk) 01:29, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

If you know relevant reliable sources discussing this, listing them here would be a good starting point. Gawaon (talk) 04:24, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

Modern screen portrayals of Odysseus

Would it be useful to add a brief section mentioning notable modern screen portrayals of Odysseus, including Matt Damon’s portrayal in Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey? I’m not sure whether this belongs in the main article or would be better kept in the adaptations section/list. ThuongDo1708 (talk) 06:34, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

Not needed; the film is already listed in the "Legacy" section. Gawaon (talk) 10:36, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

In principle, this would be more in place at Odysseus. However, note MOS:POPCULT: we don't simply list the actors that have played a particular role, and discussing a portrayal on Wikipedia normally needs that portrayal to have been widely discussed (much beyond, simply, "this person played this role and was good/bad/indifferent") in existing high-quality sources. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:57, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 18 September 2026

Change the IPA transcription at the top of the page so that it doesn't use "[ss]" and instead uses "[sː]" (or simply "[s]"). You do not write double characters in the IPA; it simply makes one of them redundant. I'm also 99% certain that the "[y]" vowel should NOT have a traditional accent diacritic. ~2026-50493-89 (talk) 15:44, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

I've updated the article. Ntrl9284 (talk) 21:19, 18 September 2026 (UTC)