The Odyssey is not only one of the most renowned literary texts ever written, it’s also one of the oldest surviving. The epic is thought to have been composed by Greek poet Homer around 3,000 years ago, during the late 8th or early 7th century BCE. Told over 12,109 lines, the poem details the homeward-bound journey of Odysseus—the King of Ithaca—after fighting in the Trojan War.

With Christopher Nolan’s movie adaptation of The Odyssey—starring Matt Damon as Odysseus—hitting cinema screens on July 17, here are five fascinating facts about Homer’s original Greek epic.

1. The Odyssey was first told orally.
2. Odysseus doesn’t actually appear until Book 5.
3. The Odyssey has a lost sequel.
4. The Odyssey might not have been written by Homer.
5. The Odyssey was about ancient history even for the ancient Greeks who first heard it.

The Odyssey was first told orally.

Literacy levels were fairly low in ancient Greece, so stories were usually told orally. As a result, the Odyssey was composed with a few devices to make memorization and recitation a little bit easier for performers—including repeated lines, formulaic phrases to fit the poem’s meter, and epithets for characters (for instance, Odysseus is paired with polymetis, which means cunning or clever).

The poem circulated orally for a few hundred years and was likely first written down in the mid-6th century BCE for the Panathenaia Festival. This festival took place in Athens and, along with athletic events and chariot races, also included a competition for professional reciters—known as rhapsodes—of the Iliad and the Odyssey. At this time, the poem was likely written down on rolls of papyrus.

The oldest surviving fragment of the Odyssey was found in Egypt and dates back to the 3rd century BCE. Although this is hundreds of years after the first copies were produced, the fact that so many ancient manuscripts of Homer’s two poems have been found—there are more than 1,000 (with copies of the Iliad outnumbering those of the Odyssey)—indicates just how popular and widespread they were.

Odysseus doesn’t actually appear until Book 5.

Despite being the main and titular character, hero Odysseus doesn’t actually make his first appearance in the story until Book 5 (there are 24 Books in total). The story starts with his wife and son, Penelope and Telemachus, in Ithaca a decade after the end of the Trojan War—which itself was a decade long. In Odysseus’s twenty-year absence, he’s been presumed dead and a variety of suitors have been vying for Penelope’s unwilling hand. But on the orders of the goddess Athena, Telemachus leaves in search of his father.

Odysseus finally enters the story in Book 5 as a captive on Calypso’s island. After starting in medias res (which is Latin for “into the middle of things”), the narrative then continues in a non-linear fashion, with Books 9 to 12 being a flashback to Odysseus’s adventures after the Trojan War.

The Odyssey has a lost sequel.

Odysseus’s story doesn’t actually finish at the end of the Odyssey, with the Telegony serving as a sequel. But you can’t read the follow-up poem because it’s been lost to time. The Telegony is the final story in the Epic Cycle—a collection of eight poems, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, which all involve the Trojan War and its aftermath. The authorship of each poem is uncertain, but the Telegony is thought to have been written by either Cinaethon of Sparta or Eugammon of Cyrene.

So why haven’t any of the Epic Cycle poems survived? Well, they simply weren’t as popular as Homer’s two epics. While the Iliad and the Odyssey were well-received and therefore widely shared and eventually copied down, the less popular Epic Cycle faded into obscurity. The only reason we know what happens in any of the poems is because some of the people who read them at the time wrote summaries, and some of those have survived.

The Odyssey might not have been written by Homer.

Although Homer is commonly cited as the creator of the Odyssey, scholars continue to debate his authorship. We don’t really know all that much about Homer—which isn’t surprising given how few documents have survived from ancient Greece—and that can make it hard to pinpoint his authorship. For instance, the idea that he was blind is simply conjecture based on the Odyssey’s portrayal of a blind bard. 

There are also a few things that suggest the Iliad and the Odyssey may have been written by different people (and maybe multiple people!) Not only are the two epics completely different stylistically—with the former being more formal and the latter employing more casual speech and storytelling—but the oral tradition in which they were circulated means that there’s a chance that different reciters added their own flair before the words were finally written down.

Maybe Homer was the original sole mind behind the poems, maybe he was just one contributor, maybe he was the one to first write the poems down, or maybe he wasn’t involved at all.

The Odyssey was about ancient history even for the ancient Greeks who first heard it.

It’s sometimes assumed that for the ancient Greeks, the setting of the Odyssey was either contemporary or in the near past. But the events described in the Odyssey took place during the 12th century BCE—roughly 500 years before the story started being told. This means that for the original Greek listeners, they, like modern-day readers, were also hearing about ancient history (although we now know that much of it is mythology!)

To put the timescale into context, the people who first heard the Odyssey being recited were hearing a story that, to us, would have been the equivalent of reading a story set during the reign of Henry VIII in the early 1500s. 

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