Parks’ play is billed as an “American Odyssey” because it takes rough plot points, character names, and themes from Homer’s two epic Ancient Greek poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and resets them within the context of enslavement in the United States. The Iliad and the Odyssey are dated anywhere between the 12th and sixth century B.C.E. However, little is known about the figure of Homer. While often considered to be a single man, it is also possible that he was a person of another gender or even “a group or lineage of poets” (Dunn, Daisy. “Who Was Homer?” The British Museum, 2020). Regardless of who Homer was, his work was very influential from the time he composed it, and it is taught and studied even today. It is thus hard to overstate how much Homer’s epics affected the early literary landscape of Europe, as well as European culture and thought from the ancient period onward.

Homer’s epics retell popular Ancient Greek stories surrounding the events of the Trojan War. The Iliad recounts the 10-year Trojan War and follows characters such as Hector on the Trojan side and Odysseus and Achilles on the Greek side.