Homer for our time
Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things by Joel P. Christensen. Yale University Press, 2025. 248 pp., $30.00
The world is in flux in many unsettling ways. One of these involves how humans now envision artistic production, creative originality, meaning and authorship. Joel P. Christensen’s newest foray into the Homeric epics offers a welcome and timely intervention for our cultural moment, reminding us that ancient poetry has long held rich resources for reflecting on these matters. While modern sentiments have long been shaped by romantic ideals of the creative genius, scholarship demonstrates that ancient Greece’s most celebrated literary works—the Iliad and Odyssey—emerged from collective contexts and were produced as collaborations between performers and audiences.
Storylife proceeds through a series of metaphors drawn primarily from biology, such as the transmission of DNA, development of ecosystems, and arboreal features. The latter involves further discussions of tree rings, roots, and branches. Elaborations on these themes yield various meaningful insights—for instance, the evolution of crustaceans provides Christensen conceptual language for scholarly quests for a proto-myth that gave rise to Homer’s epics.
This search for original myth and its cultural transmission has proven to be consistently elusive. Christensen borrows terminology from evolutionary biology to suggest that a better approach attends to “analogous adaptations” rather than “homologous” ones (i.e., those that are dependent on a common ancestor). This approach allows for meaningful comparisons between mythological traditions (e.g., Gilgamesh or the Enuma Elish) without privileging either Indo-European or ancient Near Eastern cultural forebears. Parallels between stories of heroes—whether Heracles, Moses, or Jesus—can be conceptualized as “developing in ecosystems, like crabs, and exhibiting different features based on an interplay between their inheritance (genetics) and their environment,” combined with complex layers of human involvement.
Christensen effectively applies such insights from biology to numerous details within the Iliad and Odyssey. The well-known Homeric epithets, for example, are often thought to be fossilized—that is, fixed and thus lacking poetic creativity. On the contrary, Christensen argues, a phrase such as “swift-footed Achilles” is like a gene or strand of DNA: When transferred into a new setting, it can take on a striking range of inversions and ironies. Similarly, narrative patterns that appear to be inherited set-pieces are deployed in the epics with sophisticated patterns of recombination and change.
In short, for Christensen, Homer’s formulaic elements, from epithets to type scenes, are not merely building blocks. Rather, they are akin to features within biological organisms: evolving, adaptable and, above all, alive.
The velocity at which contemporary cultural attitudes toward creativity in arts and literature are shifting is well illustrated in the production timeline of Storylife. Between the moments when Christensen first conceptualized the book’s ideas and the date of publication, generative artificial intelligence became widely available to the public. Professional academics have faced this invention with a range of reactions from curiosity and excitement to anxiety and dismay. The most immediate task has been to establish policies for students regarding the extent to which they may deploy these tools in their written assignments. Beyond challenges posed for pedagogy, generative A.I. has provoked radical reassessments of what qualifies as one’s own work, original idea, or genuine insight.
While Christensen conceptualized his project as an endeavor to understand the construction of language and literature with biological metaphors—not inanimate ones, such as ChatGPT—he managed to insert an insightful, if ever so brief, discussion of the latter in his introduction. He helpfully anticipates how generative A.I. will force us once again to reevaluate what, if anything, about human consciousness uniquely enables the production of art. How might insights from the Homeric epics contribute to that discussion? This may be a question for a future book.
The implicit assumption running throughout Storylife—that Homer remains as relevant as ever—will warm the heart of every professional classicist. At the same time, Christensen’s engaging style and stimulating ventures through a wide range of academic perspectives are certain to appeal to a much wider audience. Such projects are especially vital in our historical moment when one of the most common biological terms applied to the field of classics (and indeed the humanities more broadly) is “extinction.”
In rebuttal, Storylife demonstrates that this field of inquiry has the potential not only to survive but to thrive in the years to come as long as the power of stories remains encoded within human DNA. The persistence of the academic discipline demands, however, that its practitioners learn to adapt to new cultural and intellectual environments. Christensen offers a welcome paradigm for this, and with luck his book might prompt its readers to return to Homer with fresh eyes and ears and to find renewed appreciation for the epics.
Courtney Friesen is Professor of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. His most recent book, Acting Gods, Playing Heroes, was published with Routledge Press in 2024.