The Odyssey's women deserve their own epic - with loyalty, seduction, and modern dilemmas that never go out of style

There's no doubt that Christopher Nolan's take on The Odyssey film comes with its dose of testosterone and gore, but that's not all the famous Greek poem is about. In amongst the blood and battles, there's a surprising amount of modernity, especially when you look at all the women.

In my days at Oxford University, we spent plenty of time picking apart this epic poem, looking at references to it in some far flung and surprising places classic novels, from Margaret Attwood and James Joyce through to your beach reads (yes, it's still even relevant to the Love Island storyline).

Even though this was written 2,500 years ago, the reason The Odyssey makes sense as a film and a relevant text is the messages in the story. The film and poem centre around coming home, how you settle into a place that's changed in your absence - and, most prominently for me, it also raises a lot of questions over the roles women play. From distant marriages through to seduction and trust, there's a lot to explore. So, whether you've been inspired by the film, or you want to know more about the source, here's a way to read The Odyssey, with an eye on the ladies in your life.

The Shape Of The Story: The Odyssey

Before we get into what the women are doing, it helps to know where they're doing it. What I have always found fascintating is that The Odyssey doesn't open with Odysseus at all. For the first four books, we're stuck on Ithaca with Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway in the film). In the poem, we spend a long time watching her field a house full of suitors who are convinced her husband (Odysseus played by Matt Damon) has been dead for years.

She's holding them off with a clever trick, as she promises to chose a new suitor once she has woven her father's shroud, but, at night, when everyone is asleep, she unravels her work. Meanwhile, our supposed hero (Odysseus) is nowhere to be found: he's on Calypso's (played by Charlize Theron) island, and it's unclear whether he's a captive there or simply in no hurry to leave.

It's only from book five that the gods intervene and Odysseus is set loose to make his way home. And even then, home takes its time arriving. What follows is Odysseus himself narrating the years in between: run-ins with witches, a descent into the land of the dead, and a stopover with the Phaeacians, whose king offers him his own daughter's hand before Odysseus insists he has somewhere else to be (this is all taken out of the film).

Only in the second half of the poem does he actually reach Ithaca, and even then he arrives in disguise, recognised by his old nurse and, more slowly, by the wife he's been gone from for two decades. What follows is less a triumphant reunion than a test of loyalty, patience, and of who still belongs where. It's a poem, in other words, that spends far more time on waiting, disguise, and reintegration than it does on swords. Which is why the women in it deserve more attention than a "bloodbath" reading gives them.

What about the seductive women?

Penelope (played by Ann Hathaway), Odysseus' wife, is one of my favourite characters and we'll talk about her in more detail later on. In short, she represents the role of the wife and unwavering loyalty and devotion. But if Penelope is defined by waiting, the women Odysseus meets on his journey are defined by the opposite: they want him to stay. Calypso (played by Charlize Theron) is the first and arguably the most overlooked, a minor goddess (referred to in the poem as a nymph), beautiful, fun company, and in no rush to let him go. The poem is coy about how much choice Odysseus actually has on her island, but there's no getting around the fact that he spends years there before the gods intervene on his behalf. It's not exactly captivity, and it's not exactly romance either. It sits in an uncomfortable, very human space in between.

Then there are the witches, the Sirens, and Circe (played by Samantha Morton), who between them give the poem its reputation for wit and sexiness as much as for storms and shipwrecks. These aren't brief temptations Odysseus resists on principle: he stays, he's seduced, he tells the story himself afterwards with something close to relish. It's worth sitting with that: our hero, ostensibly rushing home to a wife who's been faithful for twenty years, is in no hurry at all when a beguiling goddess is in front of him.

If you've read what critics have said about the film, you might notice this is pointed out as the content from the poem that Nolan drops. Watch the adaptation and you'd have no idea Odysseus slept with Circe, let alone that the poem treats his encounters with these women as charged and flirtatious rather than as obstacles to be gritted through. Stripping that out doesn't just simplify the plot, it flattens every woman he meets into a threat or a delay, rather than someone he's drawn to. And it lets Odysseus off the hook a little too easily, when the poem itself isn't especially interested in doing that. A film can't fit everything in, so I don't mind missing it out, but I think it's important to note the exclusion.

The wife who stays: Penelope and the question of loyalty

Set against all that flirtation is a woman who does the opposite of everything Odysseus does. While he's spending years being seduced, Penelope is spending those same years refusing to be. Twenty years is an extraordinary length of time to wait for someone everyone around you insists is dead, and the poem doesn't let her off easily either. She's under constant, mounting pressure from suitors who have effectively moved into her house on the assumption that she'll eventually give in.

Her answer is the weaving trick: she tells the suitors she'll choose a husband once she's finished weaving a burial shroud, then quietly unpicks her work every night to buy herself more time. It's a small act of resistance that's clever enough to fool the suitors for longer than it should.

Penelope's admirable devotion, however, raises the question the poem seems interested in: at what point does faithfulness stop being admirable and start being self-destructive? Is Penelope's twenty years of waiting loyalty, or is it a kind of stubbornness that borders on stupidity, given how little she actually knows about whether he's coming back at all?

The poem never quite answers that for us. Penelope definitely isn't passive; she's making an active, sustained choice under pressure, with no guarantee it's the right one, which puts her closer to Odysseus than a straightforward reading gives her credit for. He's tested by temptation; she's tested by doubt and time. Both are asked what loyalty actually costs.

What it means to be a husband, a wife, a son

It would be easy to assume the hard part of the Odyssey is the journey itself and that's what the film suggests too. There's no doubt that the monsters, the storms, the twenty-year delay are trials and tribulations, but the poem is far more interested in what happens once Odysseus actually arrives. Getting home turns out to be the easy part, relatively speaking. Staying home, and figuring out how to belong there again, is the real challenge.

This is where the poem reads as strikingly modern. Odysseus doesn't walk back into his old life; he arrives in disguise, has to feel out who still recognises him, and has to work out whether the household he left is even the one he's coming back to. It's a version of a question anyone who's been away and changed will recognise: coming home from war, from university, from any long stretch of being somewhere else entirely. You don't slot back into the same shape you left in, because you're not the same person, and neither, quite often, is home. The skills that kept Odysseus alive among monsters and witches for a decade are not the skills he needs to sit at his own table again.

The poem resists the idea that this reintegration is simple or automatic. It makes Odysseus work for it, testing, being tested, proving who he is before he's allowed to just be that person again. That's a far more honest depiction of coming home than the poem's reputation for battles and bloodshed suggests. The fight isn't really the climax. Re-earning your place in a life that moved on without you is.

Coming home is not the happy ending it looks like

The poem's structure is, at its bones, a familiar comic shape: a household falls into disorder, and the story is the process of restoring it. It's the same basic plot that runs from Shakespeare through to modern soap operas: chaos, then correction. But the Odyssey is unusually honest about the fact that restoring order isn't free, and it doesn't fall on everyone equally.

Once Odysseus is finally recognised and ready to reclaim his household, the suitors who have spent years occupying his house and pressuring his wife are killed. That part tends to get remembered as the poem's big cathartic climax. Less remembered, and less comfortable, is what happens to the household's own women: the slaves who had been sleeping with the suitors are executed alongside them, hanged for a betrayal that reads very differently depending on how much choice we assume they actually had in a household run by men who had effectively taken it over. The poem calls it a punishment for disloyalty. It's worth pausing on how much say those women realistically had.

This is where the Odyssey's interest in social order and hierarchy comes through most starkly. Putting a household "back in order" isn't a neutral act of restoration, it's a reassertion of exactly who holds power in it, and who doesn't. Odysseus gets his home back, but the poem doesn't pretend that comes without cost, or that the cost is distributed fairly. Reading the ending only as triumphant homecoming misses that the price of order is paid disproportionately by the women with the least power in the story to begin with.

One of the most telling ways of reading and understanding The Odyssey is in the first Ancient Greek word of the text "andra". This means man, or husband, depending on which meaning you let sit heaviest. It's tempting to read it as a translator's footnote, a bit of linguistic trivia. But by the time you've reached the end of the poem, it looks more like a thesis statement the Odyssey has been working through. This was never only the story of a man surviving monsters and getting home. It was always, at the same time, the story of a husband working out what he owes the wife, the son, and the household he left behind and whether surviving the journey is the same thing as deserving to walk back into that life.

Read it that way, and the women stop being scenery. Calypso and Circe aren't just obstacles measuring Odysseus's resolve; they're the pull of a life that doesn't require going home at all. Penelope isn't a passive prize waiting at the finish line; she's running her own twenty-year test of what loyalty is worth, with no guarantee of the answer. Even the household's slave women, and the price they pay when order is restored, are proof that "home" was never a simple, neutral place to return to.

So call it a bloodbath if you want the film's version, which is a great book to film adaptation. But the poem itself, and that single ambiguous opening word, is asking a much harder question underneath the fighting: not just what makes a man, but what makes a husband, and whether coming home is a victory or simply the start of a much longer, much more human reckoning. That's the Odyssey worth giving the women credit for.