The Iliad in the Odyssey – screenshot of Agamemnon with Odysseus from the 2026 Nolan Odyssey film trailer

(6) THE ILIAD IN THE ODYSSEY (OR THE SHADE OF ACHILLES)

Wait – isn’t this the other one?  How does the Iliad feature as a distinct odyssey within the Odyssey?.

Well, firstly, we’re now moving to the narrative or thematic odysseys I tease out from within the Odyssey as a whole.

But secondly, and more fundamentally, the Iliad is suffused throughout the Odyssey, as you might expect where the latter is told as a sequel of the former, although not quite a direct sequel as we use that term today but more as part of a shared universe – the Homeric mythic universe as it were.

And beyond the Iliad – which after all only tells a small part within a mythic war of ten years duration – the events and figures of the wider Trojan War are suffused through the Odyssey.

Hence, the Odyssey is very much a post-Iliad story, but arguably also an anti-Iliad one, the anti-Iliad as it were, with its direct counterpoint to the Iliad’s wrath of Achilles (as the Iliad’s opening line and subject) in the Odyssey’s shade of Achilles among its book of the dead in Book 11, lamenting what his wrath and choice of short-lived glory got him.