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For thousands of years, a tale of war, wandering monsters, and homecoming has traveled across oceans, languages, and civilizations. Its journey from ancient performance to written masterpiece reveals a story that survived empires, religious upheavals, and technological revolutions. And along the way, it's been preserved, translated, reimagined, and shared by countless generations. Learn more about the historical journey of the Odyssey on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Square. There's a local cafe I visit where paying is almost effortless. They use Square, and whether I'm tapping a card or leaving a tip, the whole process takes just a few seconds. That smooth checkout means the staff can spend less time wrestling with technology and more time dealing with customers. That's what Square does for businesses. It brings payments, point of sale, inventory, staffing and online sales together in one system. 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The Odyssey is one of the oldest and most influential works of literature ever created. For nearly 3,000 years, the journey of Odysseus has shaped how people think about adventure, heroism, loyalty and the struggle to return home. The Odyssey is an ancient Greek epic poem traditionally attributed to Homer that tells the story of Odysseus, King of ithaca, and his 10 year journey home after the Trojan War. Along the way, he faces monsters, gods, storms and temptations, including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Sirens and the enchantress Circe. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope and his son Temeculus struggle to protect their home from suitors who believe Odysseus is dead. The poem ends with Odysseus returning to Ithaca, reclaiming his household and reuniting with his family. The Odyssey began as an oral tale sung by bards in the ancient Greek world. Bards journeyed from town to town performing their versions of epics for anyone who was willing to pay. In telling these stories, bards routinely took liberties with grease's core myths, knowing that a story was only as good as its performer and a flat, lifeless delivery meant going home empty handed. The credited author Homer, who is said to be a blind 8th century bard, was almost certainly not the author of the stories. Most historians agree that even if a man named Homer existed, these stories were far older than he was. He was simply one of a long chain of storytellers. For these stories to survive into the modern world, they couldn't have been handed down orally for thousands of years. They eventually had to be written. The earliest societies in the region developed unique systems of writing in the era. Writing was used for very different purposes, primarily for record keeping and economic transactions. Writing at the time wasn't built for epic storytelling in its sophisticated themes and complex poetic meter. The Minoans, a civilization on the island of Crete, wrote in an undeciphered script that researchers have called linear A, while the Greek speaking Mycenaeans used linear B. This complex administrative code vanished entirely when the palaces fell during the chaotic Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century BC. This plunged the Aegean world into a dark age, an era in which centralized government and cultural and economic interactions virtually vanished along with the written scripts that sustain them. Evidence suggests that literacy returned to the region during the 8th century BC as a direct result of expanding trade routes between Greek merchants and Phoenicians across the Mediterranean. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician Alphabet, and through a complex evolution that took centuries, developed a new Alphabet that paired with the Greek spoken language. The Odyssey undoubtedly evolved over the centuries. Between its earliest origins sometime around the 13th century BC and the return of literacy in the Greek world in the 8th century, it's hard to imagine that the moment literacy returned, someone sat down to write a massive epic that high schoolers read in abridged form and college students wrestle with in Classics 101. While we generally hold the Greeks in very high regard as brilliant thinkers, the shift to a fully literate society was a surprisingly slow multi century process. Because writing materials were so scarce and expensive, bards created shortened competing scripts that left plenty of room for live improvisation. And this explains why our oldest surviving copies of the Odyssey come from Egypt during the Greek ruled Ptolemaic dynasty. As the Greek world awakened from its dark age, rulers worked to codify the story's text into a standard version. The man credited with finally unifying the script of the Odyssey was the infamous 6th century Athenian tyrant, Pisistratus. Pisistratus was a master of political theater. He was the same guy who once seized power in Athens by dressing a tall local woman in armor and parading her through the city as the goddess Athena. To sanction his rule. In that same spirit of theatrical control, he ordered an official master copy of the Odyssey to be compiled and recited at the Panathenaic Games, a major rival to the early Olympics. His objective was to captivate the audience, outshine rival city states, and place Athens squarely at the cultural center of the Greek world. The modern version that we're accustomed to has its origins at the famed Library of Alexandria. There, scholars collected hundreds of local variations written down across the Hellenistic world, sifting through them to resolve contradictions and eliminate suspicious additions. This massive effort culminated in the 2nd century BC when Aristarchus of Samothrace produced the master standardized text that serves as the backbone of every edition we read today. In an age before the printing press, sharing this standardized text took a massive manual effort. In Athens and Rome, a lector would read the story line by line to a room full of scribes, as many as 30 at a time, who would copy the story verbatim along onto fresh pieces of papyrus or parchment. These early editions would have posed a great challenge for modern readers as they were compiled without spaces between the words in a style called scripto continua. As the version was standardized and written down for enhanced public consumption, it was also spread into other cultures. During the earliest stages of the Roman Republic. In 240 BC, a Greek named Livius Andronicus translated the story for the first time in into Latin. At this point in Roman history, its literary tradition was far more limited than that of Greece. As a result, Andronicus translation became a cornerstone of early Roman education, helping generations of children learn to read while absorbing Greek culture. Rome also had a unique relationship with the story. The name Odysseus was changed to Ulysses and the Romans had a very different interpretation than the Greeks. In Greece, Odysseus was lauded for his skill as a leader, his prowess as a soldier and his keen intellect. He was the mind behind the famed Trojan Horse. To the Greeks, he and Achilles represented heroism. The Greeks aspired to display the same endurance and stamina, marveling at his decade long struggle to survive his hardships and finally return home to his wife. Yet in Rome, many of his virtues ran counter to Roman values. To the Romans, the wisdom of the Trojan Horse was actually treacherous and dishonest. It represented cowardice, as Odysseus didn't face his enemies on the battlefield with courage and valor. The Roman attitude towards Ulysses can be seen in the epic poem commissioned by the emperor Augustus, the Aeneid. Functioning sort of as book three of the Trojan War trilogy. Along with the Iliad, the story shifts the focus to the Trojan prince Aeneas as he escapes the destruction unleashed by the scheming Ulysses. Aeneas flees the burning Troy, carrying his elderly father on his back, leading his young son by the hand and guarding his ancestral gods, personifying the ultimate Roman ideals of duty, family and civic virtue. Sailing west to settle in Italy, Aeneas becomes a founding figure of Rome. Emperor Augustus went so far as to claim a direct lineage to him, framing the epic as a tool of political legitimacy. By tying his own family tree to the Trojan hero, the emperor made his newly formed empire feel less like a political takeover and more like the ultimate fulfillment of Roman destiny. With its roots in the Odyssey, the Eastern Roman Empire, AKA the Byzantine Empire, embraced the story just as passionately. In Christian Constantinople, educated Byzantines writers read and preserved Homer's original Greek text not just as mythology, but as an essential textbook for rhetoric, grammar and philosophy. The Byzantines viewed themselves as the guardians of Greco Roman tradition and teaching. The Odyssey was an essential part of their intellectual journey. In the 12th century, Eustathius, the archbishop of Thessalonica, vigorously defended teaching Homer to students by noting, quote, someone might escape the beautiful bewitchment of Homer's Sirens by not starting at all, by stuffing wax in his ears or by turning in some other direction to avoid the charm. But if he does not refrain, could he ever be anything but enchanted? Homer is a vast ocean of words and thoughts. There is no art, no discipline, no human wisdom that does not take its starting point from him. The Renaissance brought renewed European interest in ancient Greek literature. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars fled to Italy, bringing manuscripts with them. This helped fuel the renewed interest in classical texts in Western Europe. The first printed edition of the complete Greek text of homer appeared in 1488 in Florence, Italy. Produced by the Greek scholar Demetrius Chalcocondylis, the Odyssey isn't just a treasure of literature and culture. The clues and descriptions in the epic have provided details about Bronze and Iron Age technology, commerce, and religious beliefs. The specifics in the story have also led archaeologists and historians to try to prove some of its details. While Heinrich Schliemann used the Iliad to unearth key discoveries about the historic city of Troy, clues in the Odyssey have led scholars to wonder where Odysseus Ithaca was actually located. One line in the Odyssey has consistently intrigued classical it lies low, furthest out to sea towards the sunset, while the other islands lie apart towards the dawn and the sun. The modern Ionian island of Itaki has long been celebrated as the hero's kingdom, but its geography doesn't match Homer's description in the Odyssey. Despite that contradiction, the island has provided key archaeological finds of Bronze Age weapons but pottery and cooking tripods that do match Homer's descriptions. To solve the puzzle, management consultant Robert Bittlestone teamed up with geologist John Underhill and classicist James Diggle in 2005 to continue the search. Together they proposed that the Paliki peninsula on the neighboring island of Kefalonia offers a far better match to the clues in the Odyssey. They argued that during the Bronze Age, landslides triggered by earthquakes and fallen debris choked a narrow marine channel, conjoining Paliki to Kefallonia. As a separate island, Paliki would have matched Homer's geographic descriptions while also sitting low on the horizon and anchoring the westernmost edge of the island chain, widely believed to be the kingdom of Odysseus. Scholars don't expect to find an exact match to confirm the location of Odysseus Ithaca, as there are too few details to provide confirmation. But it won't stop them from looking for his island or other locations featured prominently in the story, such as the strait flanked by Scylla and Charybdis. Scholars don't believe that a pair of sea monsters flanked a narrow canal, but the mythology may point to a real the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla, the six headed creature dwelt in a dark cave high atop a jagged sea cliff that plunged straight into the water. And that scene closely mirrors the sheer rock promontory found near the coast of mainland Italy, directly opposite, off the Sicilian shoreline. Violent colliding tides often create treacherous whirlpools, giving the appearance of a turbulent, swirling abyss. The two sites are about two miles apart, far too long for an arrow shot, but the Greek bards were prone to exaggeration. The story of Odysseus has survived for nearly 3,000 years because it's more than a tale of monsters, gods and distant seas. It's a story about the human experience and the search for home. From ancient Greek storytellers to modern readers around the world, each generation has found new meaning in Odysseus Journey. And it all began with some ancient bards telling a story to try to make some money. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research and writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. 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