This article analyses the photographic mission undertaken by the translator of the Odyssey, Victor Bérard, with the Swiss photographer Fred Boissonnas in the Mediterranean in 1912, putting it into perspective with the history of images. With the help of the original photographs, the correspondence of the two protagonists and later works published by Bérard, he shows to what extent this journey was a vast investigation into the figurability of a work of fiction nourished by philology, history and geography, but also by art history. As Homer’s work began to be adapted for the cinema, this investigation was based on strong intuitions: that in order to transmit history to the general public, it was now necessary to rely on the spectacle of images; that these had, moreover, the capacity to create intimate and disruptive connections with the past; that Homer was a resource of sacredness and narrative useful to a secular Third Republic, whose colonial ambitions henceforth linked metropolitan France to millions of people and vast territories on the shores of the Mediterranean.