The Odyssey and interstellar flight

The Odyssey in The Odyssey finally begins in section 9, about a third of the way through the epic poem, as Odysseus, rescued after a shipwreck by the Phaecians (?), expert sailors who promise to take him on a safe voyage home at last, entertain O with Olympic-style games - at which, after being taunted, he beats everyone in the discus throw - and then in a banquet. After the banquet an epic poet sings of the Trojan War and O burst into tears; the hosts ask him to identify himself and tell where his home lies - oddly inexplicable that they wouldn't have asked this straight off; there must have been some obvious tipoff - language? - that showed them he was a ruler and not some castaway ordinary sailor - and at last he tells them he's the very hero of whom they've been hearing, and he begins the tale of his journey. Of course The Odyssey is what makes The Odyssey The Odyssey, and it's every bit as enthralling and richly imaginative  as you remember - from the Land of the Lotus Eaters (a surprisingly brief segment of the poem) to the captivity by the Cyclops and Odysseus' cunning in outwitting him and gaining safety for some of the men to the attack by the Laodecians (?), smashing all but one of the boats, to the landing on the Isle of Circe, the first place of enchantment. The ancient Greeks must have imagined that each of their thousands of islands had its own story and its own life form; most people would never travel and would have little or no news of life beyond their immediate horizon, except for the fantastic tales that the poets told. Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world but in fact poets were the unacknowledged journalists of the world as well - providing the only way in which people understood that there was life elsewhere and that human culture was one. It would, however, be much easier for ancient Greeks to give credence to stories about one-eyed giants living within a day's travel - the world was entirely populated by their imagination, they were not as fact-bound as we are today (they might imagine life on the Mediterranean isles as we imagine life on other planets or in other galaxies; anything's possible beyond the physical or visible world as we know or see it). It's not exactly that they would have taken the story of the Odyssey as literal truth - but the story may have verged on the edge of credible, as an imagined story of interstellar flight - Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, et al. - does for us today.