Homer has captivated scholars and the wider public for more than two and a half millennia. An eloquent manifestation of this is the current hype surrounding Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film, The Odyssey. Interestingly, as soon as the first image of the film was released, some commentators complained that the helmet worn by Matt Damon, in the role of Odysseus, belongs to a type that was introduced circa 700 BC and that did not exist during the time of Homer. But is Homer an actual historical figure, and is he associated with a specific period in history? These problems have puzzled scholars since antiquity, and according to the consensus of the last decades, the short answer to both questions is no. However, the reasoning behind this answer is neither short nor simple, which underscores the importance of Michael B. Cosmopoulos’s authoritative, nuanced, and fully up-to-date discussion of the topic, which is written in a style that is both accessible to nonexperts and appealing to specialists.

To Cosmopoulos, there was not one but many Homers, poets whose names are no longer known and who composed and performed poetic compositions that eventually crystallized into the Iliad and the Odyssey. Indeed, Cosmopoulos subscribes to the idea that Homer’s time—that is, the formative period of the epic poems—covers roughly a thousand years (from the mid-second to the mid-first millennium BC), bringing together physical and mental landscapes, societies, and objects (including helmets!) that belong to chronologically distinct historical periods. The author argues that these topics should be approached through the concept of memory, and this theoretical approach is one of the reasons why his work should be of interest to readers of American Antiquity.

Cosmopoulos draws from studies in archaeology, philology, history, performance, and oral tradition to explore “the scholarly debates and approaches that have shaped our understanding of the formation of Greek epic poetry; the historical, social, and cultural contexts reflected in the Homeric poems; and the processes of memory, history, and oral composition that contributed to the creation of these monumental works” (p. xvi). This threefold agenda corresponds to the three parts of the book, which are unequal in length, with the second (contextualization) being three times longer than the other two taken together.

Part I covers the historiography of the Homeric epics from antiquity to the present, focusing on issue of authorship, orality, the development of the poems over time, and the impacts of Indo-European and Near Eastern traditions on them. Part II addresses the historicity of the epics and the Trojan War, and of the society, political geography, economy, warfare, and religion described by Homer. By systematically comparing the descriptions of the epics with the textual and archaeological record of early Greece, Cosmopoulos concludes that the epics contain historical elements that (1) date to the early to mid-first millennium BC, (2) date to the second millennium BC but survived into the first, and (3) date to the second millennium BC but disappeared by the first.

The scope of parts I and II encompasses a broad range of issues familiar from Anglophone-edited companions and guides to Homer, and the German monograph series Archaeologia Homerica—both genres that emerged in the 1960s and that remain productive. Accordingly, these two parts do not engage recent anthropologically driven discussions over personhood and object agency in the epics and beyond. However, Cosmopoulos departs significantly from tradition in having produced single-handedly a concise analysis (spanning 270 pages of text, plus 70 pages of bibliography) of a wide range of complex topics on epic and the archaeology of early Greece, thereby crossing disciplinary divisions and specializations. The work sheds light on previously underappreciated aspects (e.g., the crucial role of what may be called the Thessaloniki school of neoanalysis of the epics) and provides up-to-date considerations of a wide range of topics, including some that have not received comprehensive study for decades (e.g., Homeric geography). Most innovative is the final chapter (9, in part III), in which Cosmopoulos draws inspiration from the works of Maurice Halbwachs, Jan Assmann, and Pierre Nora to argue that the survival of elements from different periods in the Homeric epics and the processes of the creation of these works can best be approached through the concept of memory. The argument is fascinating, and it would be even more compelling if it had been introduced from the start of the book.

All in all, Cosmopoulos has produced a highly recommended analysis of the famous early Greek epics and their worlds, and in doing so, he reaffirms and promotes the everlasting appeal of Homer.