You may have heard of a new film called The Odyssey. It’s been incurring a certain amount of wrath because they cast a Black woman as Helen of Troy. I’ll write about that another time.

But something else about the film caught my eye this weekend. The Observer newspaper referred to Odysseus as “the oldest superhero”. And this prodded my normally sleepy inner pedant into full wakefulness.

I’m quite old, but if I understand modern vernacular correctly, a “superhero” is a human who acquires some kind of “superpower” because they get bitten by a radioactive spider, or maybe there’s some freak lab accident involving chemicals and lightning, or something. Obviously we didn’t have radioactive spiders back in Odysseus’ time, or laboratories. And although Zev́s did like to throw the weather around, his motivation was never to benefit the strikee, or even to impose upon them a power-with-responsibility deal they’d find burdensome yet rewarding. Still, there were mortals to whom unusual things happened that gave them some distinctive characteristic.

The closest thing to being bitten by a radioactive spider that I can think of from those days is what allegedly happened to Akhillev́s (Achilles) – that quality of near-invulnerability he acquired because his mother Thétis dipped him in a magic river, or smeared him with ambrosia or something.

Of course it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Odysseus was smeared with food at some point – some people enjoy that kind of thing, and I wouldn’t judge them – but in all honesty, Odyssev́s son of Laértës was definitely not dipped in any rivers of the underworld, even in the wildest of myths.

Nor was he one of those mortals who were reckoned to have innate superhuman powers. He wasn’t like Heraklë́s, with that Superman-like strength, or Augeías, with the Superman-like eyesight. (That’s the Argonaut Augeías, incidentally – not the Augeías who’s best remembered for his shocking attitude to animal welfare and health and safety in his stables.)

Nor was Odyssev́s like Persev́s (Perseus). Some people reckoned Persev́s was as fast as, well, lots of superheroes familiar to the modern world – Aurora, Cheetah, the Flash, Makkari, Northstar, Quicksilver, Red Rush, Speed, Superman, The Blur, The Ray and Wonder Woman spring briskly to mind. Actually Persev́s was really only remarkable as a good all-round top-athlete type with a certain knack of receiving divine favours. That and because of the story of his conception, which as you probably know involved an illicit liaison between an imprisoned princess and the king of the gods. And in that regard, I can assert that the story of Danáë and the Golden Shower has in fact been widely misreported.

Anyway, I’m at risk of digressing. To come to my point: contrary to what The Observer said, Odyssev́s was not the “oldest superhero”. He was preceded by any number of heroes who’ve retrospectively been accorded superpowers, and some who did actually have abilities you might call uncanny. In fact he wasn’t a superhero at all, nor the “oldest” hero, or even the oldest Greek hero.

He was certainly an interesting fellow, though. And numerous depictions of him, or characters more or less loosely based on him, are worthy of scrutiny. Which brings me back to this new film about him.

Ironically, The Observer made its “oldest superhero” assertion while highlighting an article by its book critic Chris Power, who made no such claim. In fact Chris Power treats us to an entertaining, indeed edifying account of the literary and film tradition around the tricksy old hero. I’d recommend you read it.

And personally I can’t wait to see the new film.

A postscript, in case you’re interested in non-super ancient heroes and that sort of thing: while I haven’t written about Odyssev́s’s circuitous journey home from the war, my own humble contribution may offer some fresh insights into his marriage and his part in what was, up to that time, the greatest war in history. I called my story Troían Godfather.

Spiky Books straplined it “The truth behind the greatest mob story ever told”, but you know what marketing people are like.