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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
His colleague Dr Jeremy Penner said the film stars wanted to see where “the names of their characters were in the texts”.
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.
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.
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.”