Play It Forward: Ancient Greece and Rome in Digital Games

Things move fast in digital gaming. One of the best-selling English translations of Homer’s Odyssey is by Robert Fitzgerald, which after sixty years in print has sold over three million copies. Ubisoft’s game with a title borrowed from Homer, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (which is actually set during the war between Sparta and Athens) took just eighteen months to sell over ten million copies. Their previous Assassin’s Creed game, Origins (2017), is set in the Egypt of Caesar and Cleopatra and has also sold ten million copies. Numbers like these suggest that of all the people alive today with an interest in ancient Greece or Rome, thousands—perhaps millions—first encountered them through the work of game developers like Ubisoft. This trend is set to continue.