The stars of Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster The Odyssey were given a rare chance to see a fragment of the oldest surviving book-form copy of Homer’s famous epic poem.<\/p>\n
Part of a 1,700-year-old copy, kept at Manchester’s John Rylands Library was taken by researchers to the film’s London premiere. <\/p>\n
The fragment, written in ancient Greek by what was thought to be an Egyptian scribe and his teacher, is the oldest existing version of the poem arranged into a book. <\/p>\n
Prof Christopher Pressler, part of the University of Manchester team tasked with preserving the work, said actor Tom Holland was “super interested” when the cast were shown the text at a press junket in New York. <\/p>\n
He said: “There was some mind-blowing moments for people realising that this document is almost 2,000 years-old and of course the poem is 1,000 years older than that.”<\/p>\n
His colleague Dr Jeremy Penner said the film stars wanted to see where “the names of their characters were in the texts”. <\/p>\n
Nolan’s film, which was adapted from Homer’s epic, stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, with Holland playing his son, Telemachus, and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope.<\/p>\n
It also features Robert Pattinson as one of Penelope’s suitors, Antinous, and Lupita Nyong’o as both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra.<\/p>\n
Penner, the library’s curator of African and Near Eastern Manuscripts, said the actors had been excited to see the text, adding: “Encountering something that old, it’s very hard to not have some kind of an emotional reaction.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The stars of Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster The Odyssey were given a rare chance to see a fragment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-706733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}