This last weekend, millions of Americans bought a ticket to see a poem that is nearly three thousand years old.

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” arrived in theaters as one of the most anticipated films of the year, and with it came a familiar chorus of questions with any adaptation. What did he keep? What did he cut? Is this really Homer? How much of my AP English class do I actually remember? 

Those questions were often framed as a referendum on faithfulness to the text, as though the ideal adaptation would simply transcribe the original. But that framing misunderstands what the Odyssey is and always has been. Homer’s epic began as oral performance, recomposed night after night by a wide range of singers who shaped the story to the room in front of them and may have even involved audience participation in the telling. And the poem has survived not because generation preserved it under glass, but because generations have argued with it, translated it, and told it again in their voice. 

The poem has survived not because generations preserved it under glass, but because generations have argued with it, translated it, and told it again in their voice. 

Just this past decade alone, Emily Wilson became the first woman to publish an English translation of the Odyssey, and her opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” was what inspired Nolan to think about a screen adaptation. Madeline Miller’s “Circe” handed the narrative reins to a witch the epic treats as an obstacle. Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” carried the story to the Caribbean, Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” to Civil War North Carolina and the Coen brothers “O Brother Where Art Thou?” to Depression-era Mississippi.  

At Interfaith America, we often draw on the religion scholar Diana Eck’s distinction between diversity and pluralism. Diversity is simply a fact, the reality of difference all around us and pluralism, in Eck’s words, is the “energetic engagement with diversity.” Something similar is true of our cultural and religious inheritances. A tradition lives and continues because of how we continually engage it. It requires people who care enough to actively wrestle with their texts and beliefs, to ask what it demands of them now, and to risk retelling/reliving it in a myriad of ways. 

The Catholic theologian David Tracy gives us a definition of the classic that argues that what makes a work a classic is not its age or its place on a syllabus, but its “excess of meaning.” What makes a classic work worth knowing is a surplus of richness that no single interpretation, era, or community can exhaust. By Tracy’s definition, a text that could be rendered definitively, once and for all, would not be a classic at all. Which means every serious retelling of the Odyssey is not a threat, but evidence for its importance and proof that the poem still discloses more than any one telling can hold. That is why Homer can belong to a Caribbean poet and to everyone who bought a ticket this weekend. And it is the same logic by which the religious classics travel, the reason Exodus, the Sermon on the Mount, and Rumi’s verses can speak across traditions and to folks of no belief system at all. 

“The Odyssey” rewards this kind of engagement more than almost any text I can name, because at its core it is a poem about how we treat strangers. The ancient Greeks called it xenia — the sacred obligation of hospitality between host and guest. Odysseus washes ashore, unknown and unnamed, and the moral character of every household he enters is revealed by a single question. How do you receive the stranger at your door before you know who he is? The Phaeacians feed him, honor him, and ask to hear his story. Polyphemus, the Cyclops, eats the guests. Not even Odysseus passes every xenia test and I think that is part of what makes the Odyssey so compelling. It is hard to think of an older or sturdier foundation for the work of engaging difference. Long before anyone used the word pluralism, this poem was teaching its listeners that civilization is measured in part by the welcome extended across the threshold, to people whose identities, loyalties, and gods you do not yet know. 

“The Odyssey” rewards this kind of engagement more than almost any text I can name, because at its core it is a poem about how we treat strangers.

And the retellings themselves model the practice. The recent wave of Odyssey reimaginings have produced controversy, with some readers casting new translations and adaptations as attacks on the canon and others dismissing the epic poem as part of a calcified canon that is beyond redemption. But it is important to notice what the retellers are actually doing with the text. Wilson did not burn the Odyssey down, but instead spent years engaging the original Greek, closer to the text than likely any of its self-appointed defenders.

To retell a story is to stay in relationship with it and (perhaps) with everyone else who loves it differently than you do. We can see pluralism when we get beyond finding agreement on the “correct” version of the Odyssey, and instead focus on the importance of continued engagement with the text across live, personal, and sometimes irreconcilable readings. 

Homer’s first word for Odysseus is “polytropos” or the man of many turns. While translators have many different perspectives on what it means, it is a fitting epithet for the poem itself, which has turned and turned again through every culture that received it. At Interfaith America, we like to describe pluralism with the image of a potluck, a shared table where everyone brings a dish shaped by their own tradition and nobody is asked to leave that particular tradition or perspective at the door. The question the Odyssey has always asked is one the practice of pluralism asks now — when the next stranger shows up at the door, do we bolt it, or do we set another place and see what they have brought?