Composers from Purcell to Birtwistle have created passionate dramas inspired by ancient Greek stories – and none of them require you to sit through three hours of solemn spectacle without an interval

If you smooth out Homer’s epic poem and modernise it too much, you lose what made it so important to begin with

The Odyssey is the summer’s biggest film: an adaptation of an almost 3,000 year old poem that everyone is talking about. So what was our readers’ verdict?