Now that it has returned as a $375 million cinematic blockbuster, it is worth remembering that The Odyssey is the story of a rich man who is forced to behave like a poor man. The great epic works by winnowing its hero down until he is the lowest of the low.

Odysseus starts out on his journey home from the Trojan wars as the admiral of a small fleet. Then he is captain of an isolated ship. Then a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of wreckage. Then a homeless stranger. And near the end, before he resumes his place as king of Ithaca, he disguises himself as a dirty old beggar.

In the Iliad, the Homeric epic that precedes the Odyssey, Odysseus is already cunning, ingenious, sneaky, crafty. Achilles contemptuously describes him as a man “who says one thing but hides another in his heart”. But there’s a big difference between having your wits about you and living on your wits. In the first condition you use your brains to exert your will. In the second you use them to survive. That’s what poor people have to do.

Odysseus is famously called in the Greek polytropos. Emily Wilson’s recent translation renders this as “complicated” which is rather flat and unspecific – which of us isn’t complicated? Scholars tell us that polytropos has an apt double meaning, carrying notions both of personal evasiveness and of a meandering journey which of course is what the story goes on to narrate.

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