Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey puts a twenty-first century spin on Homer’s epic tale. Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/ShutterstockIn The Odyssey, Homer records the earliest imaginings of autonomous ships guided by what sounds remarkably like artificial intelligence to modern readers. The ships of the Phaeacians, which carry Odysseus home to Ithaca, “know every city, every fertile land”. They “have no steersmen’, and “know by instinct what their crews are thinking and propose to do”.Homer’s epic tells of the adventures and mishaps of Odysseus as he struggles home from the Trojan War. Along with its prequel, The Iliad, it is a foundational piece of literature with roots as far back as 1600 bc. But for all The Odyssey’s fantastical tales of monsters and magic, it also gives glimpses into the science, medicine and technology of the Homeric world.Here, Nature looks at how researchers are finding the truths behind the legend.Metallurgy and tradeAfter being transmitted orally for centuries, The Odyssey was written down during the Iron Age, around 800 bc. Accordingly, it reflects an anachronistic mix of metalwork, from iron knives and gates to bronze spears and swords that reflect its late Bronze Age roots. There are also hints of steel production.In one passage, Odysseus and his men plunge a spear into the Cyclops’s eye and the hot stake sizzles like when a blade is quenched in water to strengthen it during smithing: a technique that works for steel, but not pure iron or bronze. Whoever composed that passage, suggests Michael Wright, a craftsman and ex-curator at the Science Museum in London, “witnessed the preparation of a tool with a steel edge”.Archaeologists have found other details that echo Homer’s text during excavations of the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor near Pylos, Greece. These include vessels made from a mix of bronze, silver and gold, and a rare depiction of a “fenestrated” axe with holes in, dating to around 1450 bc. The holes might explain a puzzling archery challenge that takes place after Odysseus finally returns home, involving shooting an arrow through a line of twelve axes. “The more we excavate, the more we confirm,” says archaeologist Sharon Stocker at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.The Odyssey argues for the existence of long-distance trading networks between late Bronze Age civilizations. Archaeologists didn’t find evidence of such trade until the 1980s, when they discovered a fourteenth-century bc shipwreck at Ulu Burun in southern Turkey, packed with luxury treasures from Europe, Africa and Mesopotamia.Such archaeological discoveries show that people from the eastern Mediterranean were “voyaging all over the Mediterranean much earlier than we would have believed”, says Brendan Foley, a naval and maritime archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden.The shipwreck was a small, slow cargo ship, around 15 metres long. Odysseus’s ship had 50 oarsmen, implying it was much longer, narrower ship optimized for speed, says Foley.Archaeologists found a sanctuary dedicated to the worship of Odysseus that dates back to some time between the fourth and first century bc on the Greek island of Ithaca.Credit: Massimo Pizzocaro/AlamyBotany and poisonsThe Odyssey mentions a range of plant-related drugs, poisons and antidotes. Helen of Troy uses a drug called nepenthe to banish grief, while the sorceress Circe gives Odysseus’s men a potion that makes them forget their homeland and take the form of pigs.Researchers hunting down nepenthe’s real-life origins say that it could contain plants such as henbane and mandrake, which contain compounds that block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. These were widely used in the ancient world as painkillers and anaesthetics, says Rafael Molina-Venegas, a botanist at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain.In the poem, Hermes gives Odysseus a mysterious herb called moly to protect him from Circe’s potion. It is described as having a black root and flower like milk. Molina-Venegas and his colleague Rodrigo Verano have suggested that moly could refer to a group of local plants, including sea daffodils (Pancratium spp.), that have white flowers, dark bulbs and inhibit the action of henbane and mandrake.Colour perceptionThe nineteenth-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone noted that Homer’s colour palette was extremely limited — mostly variations of white and black, with a few mentions of purple and red. He found Homer’s descriptions of a “purple” rainbow and “wine-dark” sea particularly vexing, and suggested that the Greeks’ eyes were less evolved than ours are. An article in Nature in 1886 argued that Homer was often really describing something’s luminosity rather than its colour2.How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite historyFar from not seeing in colour, says Mark Bradley, a classicist at the University of Nottingham, UK, the Greeks had a different way of organizing their visual world3. Today, thanks to Isaac Newton, we understand colour as related to the wavelength of the light, but for the Greeks, says Bradley, colours were inseparable from physical objects, and would have included all of their multisensory properties and connotations.