This article examines the Periodos to Nicomedes within its literary, cultural and political context. After offering an analysis of how and why the anonymous author creates a work which straddles the boundaries between prose and verse while engaging with contemporary Hellenistic literary critical debates, it argues for the significance of the figure of Homer’s Odysseus in terms of the author’s presentation of an idealized relationship with his real-world patron, the Bithynian monarch Nicomedes. Ultimately the Periodos emerges as a work which is especially fitting for its Bithynian patron in the context of Asia Minor in the late second century BCE.