Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has put Homer in front of an audience of hundreds of millions – a remarkable second life for a poem three thousand years old. But how much of the poem travelled with it?

The Odyssey may be the first great story in Western literature about living well in a world where the gods are no moral guide. They intervene constantly, but on no principle you could live by. Odysseus is favoured because a goddess enjoys his cleverness, not because he deserves it. Its afterlife hands out no rewards for a life well lived. And its hero is offered immortality, and turns it down, to go home to a wife who will grow old and die. The virtues the poem honours are human ones: hospitality, loyalty, endurance, and wit, practised by people towards each other.

Join Tim Whitmarsh and Andrew Copson as we follow Odysseus home, and ask where a poem written long before anyone had a word for humanism found its moral compass. What does it value, once the gods are removed from the moral equation? What did Nolan's film keep, and what did it leave behind? And why does a story about a man trying to get back to his wife still move people who expect no divine rescue?

About Professor Tim Whitmarsh

Tim Whitmarsh is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, working on all areas of Greek literature and culture with a particular emphasis on Greeks under the Roman Empire and religion and atheism in the ancient world. He is the author of Battling the Gods, which was shortlisted from the Runciman Award, the London Hellenic Prize and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and has been translated into Dutch, Greek, and Chinese.

About Andrew Copson

Andrew Copson is Chief Executive of Humanists UK. He was educated at Balliol College in the University of Oxford, where he read Classics and graduated with a first in Ancient and Modern History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Associate of the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University. With Alice Roberts, he is the author of the Little Book of Humanism series.