The essay compares Madeline Miller's books The Song of Achilles and Circe to their antique originals: the Iliad and the Odyssey. The main focus is the relationship the characters in Miller's books hold to their homeric counterparts and the evolution of the heroic and masculinity ideals they represent. The ideals they carry are examined through western history and compared to Miller's contemporary autorship to observe what adaptations are being performed. The paper considers the texts through Genettes terms of transtextual relationships, including hypotextual, hypertextual relationships and transpositioning to examine the changes in both character and theme. The results show that some aspects of the heroes and theme remain intact through Millers books, while particularly the masculine and heroic aspects differ and that they do so intentionally through the media of historical fiction.