A sandal-wearing cry-baby with a taste for blood: Is Odysseus really a hero?

The King of Ithaca confused me as a child. I’m wary about seeing what Christopher Nolan has done with him.

July 9, 2026 — 5:00am

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The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, is coming to cinemas next week. I’ll be approaching the epic blockbuster warily, just as I approached my first encounter with the poem in picture-book form when I was eight years old.

My dad has always loved the Greek poems and myths. When he presented me and my sister with an illustrated edition of The Odyssey, I was suspicious. It was a book about a man in a tunic and sandals. I’d seen these before, and I dreaded moral instruction.

On closer inspection, it was a chaotic story about a warrior-king, Odysseus, and his gruelling 10-year journey home to the island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. Along the way, he encountered terrifying characters: a man-eating Cyclops, a sentient whirlpool, the sirens with their irresistible song.

I wouldn’t say I liked the book. The illustrations were lurid; some of them were disgusting. But I respected it for being overtly unpleasant in a way my other books were not. The volume was heavy on monsters and on Odysseus’ ingenious schemes to escape danger. (My favourite........

© The Sydney Morning Herald