A generation ago, it hardly seemed controversial to declare that ‘western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than by any other book’. Yet already this is looking less true, and perhaps it never was. In the forms and media of popular fiction, at least, the pagan influence of the Odyssey has always been incomparably more alive. Now, as the traditional borders between high and low culture seem to be opening permanently to traffic, that persistent influence is more visible than ever.

This tyranny of the Odyssey over the forms of Western narrative has two quite separate causes. First, like the Iliad but immeasurably more so, the poem has been the historical template for a general narrative system of remarkable versatility and strength: the system that in the last chapter I termed plotting in the major key, as opposed to the minor or tragic mode of the Iliad. Throughout history, this has been the more popular key for narrative composition – largely, no doubt, because one of its defining characteristics is the happy ending, something already noticed by Aristotle (Poetics 13.1453a30–5) as more attractive to groundling taste than the more emotionally challenging resolutions he preferred.

Even more importantly, though, the Odyssey is the most encyclopaedic compendium of technical plot devices in the whole of ancient storytelling, and one of the most dazzling displays of narrative fireworks anywhere in literature.