No, not The Simpsons.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey arrives this week, which means Homer the ancient Greek poet, not the yellow one from Springfield is suddenly everywhere, and the arguments about casting, armour and accuracy are already multiplying. I'll stay out of the casting debate; books and films live in separate folders in my head, and every reader casts the thing privately anyway. But a new film is an excellent excuse to go back to the books and work out which of the many versions might suit you. Nolan opens on 17 July. Homer has been provoking adaptations for close to three thousand years.

What is the Iliad actually about?

Not the whole Trojan War, despite the shorthand. The war is nearly ten years old when the poem begins, and the action covers only a few weeks near the end. There is no Trojan Horse. Troy does not fall. Achilles is not killed by the arrow to the heel.

It opens with rage. Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, quarrels with Agamemnon over Briseis, an enslaved woman taken as a prize, and withdraws from the fighting. Men die because two powerful men are furious about honour and possession. The poem gives us glory alongside mutilated bodies, enslaved women and grieving parents and its summit is the night Achilles and Priam, father of the man he has killed, recognise each other through grief.

The Odyssey follows the war. Odysseus has been gone from Ithaca twenty years ten fighting, ten trying to get home. The famous set pieces are all here: the Cyclops, Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, storms, shipwrecks, and a striking number of terrible decisions made right after good advice. But it's really about homecoming: what happens when the person who returns isn't the one who left, and what became of the family that waited. Odysseus survives on bravery, charm and an almost professional relationship with lying. He is the hero of the poem and often its least reliable witness.

Who was Homer and did the Trojan War really happen?

Nobody's certain. Homer may have been one poet, or two, or a name attached to poems shaped over generations of oral performance. The tell-tale signs are the repetitions rosy-fingered Dawn, swift-footed Achilles, grey-eyed Athena ready-made phrases that let a performing poet build lines at speed, from memory, in front of a crowd. In the 1920s and 30s, Milman Parry and Albert Lord confirmed it by recording oral poets still doing exactly that in the Balkans.

As for Troy: a real city stood at Hisarlık in modern Turkey and was destroyed, but that doesn't prove Homer's war happened as told. Heinrich Schliemann, digging in the 1870s, was so sure he'd found Homer's Troy that he bulldozed through later layers to reach it and archaeologists have spent the century since working out what he wrecked. The poems may hold distant memories of Bronze Age conflict, reshaped over centuries, which makes "historical accuracy" a slippery thing to demand.

Wilson, Fagles or Mendelsohn: why every Homer reads differently

There is no neutral English Homer. A translator has to choose between accuracy, pace, music, grandeur and clarity — keep every repetition and it feels heavy; smooth them out and the oral machinery vanishes.

One word shows the whole problem. The Odyssey calls Odysseus polytropos  many-turning, much-travelled, wily, devious describing both his route and his mind. Watch three translators split it:

Emily Wilson: "Tell me about a complicated man."

Robert Fagles: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns."

Daniel Mendelsohn: "Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways."

Same Greek, three different men. Wilson makes him morally difficult by the end of the first line; Fagles gives movement and drama; Mendelsohn slows down and lets "roundabout ways" carry the journey and the character at once.

Which Homer translation should you read?

Our Homer shelves can look like an academic dispute that escaped into retail. The good news: you don't need the "best" translation, only the one that keeps you reading.

Emily Wilson — the best first modern read. Lucid, fast and tightly controlled, matching the Greek line count, and unusually alert to power: where women are enslaved, she doesn't turn them into cheerful "maids". Her later Iliad brings the same clarity to the battlefield.

Robert Fagles — for sweep, drama and reading aloud. His Odyssey and Iliad have scale and momentum without keeping you at a respectful distance.

Daniel Mendelsohn — the newest in our range. His six-beat line chases the roll of Homeric hexameter and keeps the repetitions. Choose this one if you want the poem's architecture and don't mind its pace; the introduction and notes are superb.

E. V. Rieu & Martin Hammond — for the story in prose, with no shame in it. Rieu didn't just open a door to Homer; he founded Penguin Classics, and the series began with him reading his own translation aloud to his family during the Blitz. Editors doubted it would sell; it topped the list for sixteen years. The current Penguin Iliad revises his work with Peter Jones's notes, and there's a lovely clothbound edition too.

Anthony Verity — a readable verse translation with generous Oxford notes that explain the context without turning it into homework.

George Chapman — a different beast: his early-1600s Iliad is great English poetry and the one that floored Keats. Muscular and exuberant, if not the easiest way in.

New to all of it? Gillian Cross and Neil Packer's illustrated retellings are clear, intelligent and faithful and starting with a retelling isn't cheating for the Iliad, Caroline Alexander's lean version, the first complete English translation by a woman, is especially alert to the cost of war.

Two you won't find on our shelves yet Richmond Lattimore, the closest to the Greek and the standard university text for seventy years, and Robert Fitzgerald, beloved by poets for its music we're always happy to order in.

The oldest Homer on our shelves

Our Homer isn't only whichever paperback has the nicest cover. This year we acquired volume two the Odyssey of Joshua Barnes's great Cambridge edition of 1711: a quarto holding the Greek text, a Latin translation, ancient commentary, Barnes's own notes and a record of variant readings. A small classical library bound into one volume, and a costly object in its day, made for universities and wealthy collectors.

Barnes, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, wasn't troubled by modesty he declared his edition more correct than its predecessors, made room for his own poetry and jokes, and turned the dedication to the Earl of Rochester into a masterclass in academic flattery. It proves that arguments about the "authentic" Homer didn't start on social media: this volume was already a century old when Keats first looked into Chapman's.

Why are young women reading Homer?

Something I notice while people-watching in the shop: Homer is bought, again and again, by teenage girls and women in their early twenties. The way some young men will lecture you unprompted on Roman aqueducts, these readers are astonishingly fluent in the Greeks the gods, the curses, the family trees, and exactly which hero behaved appallingly to which woman.

The retellings did it. Madeline Miller, Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, Margaret Atwood and Jennifer Saint pushed Circe, Briseis, Penelope, Cassandra and Clytemnestra to the centre of stories where women were once just prizes or consequences. And they don't lead readers away from Homer they send them back with better questions. Who gets to be heroic? Who is believed? What does "faithful" mean for Penelope when Odysseus's own journey runs through Circe and Calypso?

Neither poem hands you a clean hero. Achilles is magnificent and terrifying; Odysseus ingenious, charismatic and disastrous for most of his crew; Penelope faithful, strategic and hard to read; the gods dazzling and cruel. A new film simply gives us one more Homer as Wilson, Fagles, Mendelsohn, Rieu and generations of unnamed singers each gave us theirs.

Choose the door that suits you and walk in. Browse our Mythology and classics shelves at Chapters Bookstore on Parnell Street, Dublin or ask us to order in whichever Homer you're after.

Shop our Homer Collection