In around 750 BC an anonymous poet put the finishing touches on his epic The Odyssey. It is no accident that Odysseus’s name means “trouble”, or indeed, that the ancients called the unknown bard “Homer” or “Homeros”–which literally translated means “someone displaced and vulnerable”, a word with similar connotations to the modern terms “asylum seeker” and “refugee.” It is this idea of asylum, and Odysseus as the “eternal traveller” which, nearly three millennia later, has captured David Farr’s imagination. A synopsis of his stage adaptation of Homer’s work could easily be mistaken for a modern story of a refugee: “a man is washed up on a foreign shore and confronted by immigration officers as he wakes up on the beach. Refusing to answer his questions, they throw him in a detention centre with a torrent of abuse.”

The Classicist H. D. F. Kitto described the Greeks as “A people not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well organised [but a people] who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.” These people have had a greater influence on Western civilisation than any other people or nation in the last two and a half millennia. Philosophy and ethics, the fundamentals of science and maths, prevailing notions of governance and citizenship, literature and both the performing and visual arts as well as sport and the spirit of competition derived their seeds and, indeed, much of their substance, from the Greeks