Although Homer’s The Odyssey has seen a recent surge in popularity following the release of Christoper Nolan’s blockbuster film adaptation this year, Trinity College Associate Professor of Classical Studies Vincent E. Tomasso has been teaching and studying the epic poem for his whole career.
Tomasso’s research interests center around Ancient Greek poetry and the reception of antiquity in modern times. In 2020, he published an article about the theme of immortality in The Odyssey and The Telegony—a lost epic poem that serves as a conclusion to The Odyssey—and this semester, students in his first-year seminar, “Epic Quests,” are reading The Odyssey.
This fall, Tomasso is participating in Odyssey Day, a new nationwide event hosted by The Society of Classical Studies, a national organization promoting interest in the literature, history, and cultures of the ancient world. Taking place on October 15, Odyssey Day aims to further explore Homer’s ancient epic with free programming including public lectures, book and film discussions, dramatic readings, storytelling for children and families, and art or creative writing workshops.
Tomasso will give a lecture on the poem and Nolan’s film at the Monterey Library in Monterey, Massachusetts, on October 15. However, his work with The Odyssey won’t stop there: Tomasso is planning a screening of the film at Cinestudio on the Trinity campus in November, and he will be a guest editor and will write the introduction for a future issue of the journal Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic devoted to different aspects of Nolan’s The Odyssey.
With Odyssey Day approaching, Tomasso shared his thoughts on the event and on Homer’s epic poem.
I’m hoping to impart some excitement about the poem. This poem comes from Ancient Greece; it was written thousands of years ago. So I’m hoping that people get excited about the poem, and about the film, too. I want to get people interested in the story, in The Odyssey and its themes in general.
I’m editing an issue of a journal devoted to various aspects of the film. It’s coming out in a couple of years, but I’m working on that right now. I did a presentation recently at a library in Avon, Connecticut, called “Why Do We Return to Homer’s Odyssey?” about how people have interpreted the poem and how people respond to it. I talked about O Brother, Where Art Thou? [the film loosely based on The Odyssey], The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, the translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, and Circe by Madeline Miller. I’ll give similar presentations at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum in November and for the Hartford Public Library system in April, as part of National Poetry Month.
The students are reading parts of the poem. They’re discussing it and writing about it, and we’re having a trip to a museum to see art based on The Odyssey. We talk about the themes of xenia, the Ancient Greek word for hospitality, intelligence, and leadership. We also talk a lot about women and female roles in the poem.
A big part of it is humanity. It’s about someone returning home from a war and coming home after 20 years. It links to being human in the world and coming back to a community—is it different or the same? So that really resonates now with us, as in returning to an identity that maybe we’ve lost, or returning to a world that has been forgotten. That’s what the movie does—the director’s approach to it is thinking about a world that’s vanished. The idea of returning to something that’s lost and how we get it back resonates with us now and how we think about our position in the world. It’s about how we adapt to change and become part of a community. I think audiences today respond to those ideas.
Read more about Tomasso’s work with The Odyssey here.
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