Geography of the Odyssey
There are also incidental mentions of Troy and its house, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Crete, which hint at a geographical knowledge equal to, or perhaps slightly more extensive than that of the Iliad.
[1] The places visited by Odysseus in his journey have been variously identified with locations in Greece, Italy, Tunisia, the Maltese archipelago, and the Iberian peninsula.
Odysseus' Ithaca is usually identified with the island Ithaki, as it shares the same name with the ancient location and has archaeological and historical associations with the Odyssey.
Some scholars have argued that Odysseus's Ithaca is actually Leucas, and others identify it with the whole or part of Cephalonia, despite not being supported by geographic, historical or archaeological evidence.
Ancient sources provide a wealth of interpretations of Odysseus' wanderings, with a complex range of traditions which affect one another in various ways.
The most standard identifications, which are rarely disputed in ancient sources, are: Euhemerist accounts are generally those found in writers on antiquarian subjects, geographers, scholars, and historians.
Herodotus identifies the land of the lotus-eaters as a headland in the territory of the Gindanes tribe in Libya, and Thucydides reports the standard identifications mentioned above.
[20] He is Euhemerist to the extent that he believes that any hypothesis at all, no matter how outrageous, is more plausible than saying "I don't know";[21] in this regard he accepts Polybius' arguments completely.
Kepler in his “Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia” estimated that “the great continent” was America and attempted to locate Ogygia and the surrounding islands.
It falls into a tradition of anti-Homeric literature, based on the supposition that Homer got most things about the Trojan War wrong by making virtuous people look like villains, and vice versa.
Many Western mediaeval writers also accepted Dictys (in the Latin summary by Lucius Septimius) as the definitive account of the Trojan War.
After visiting the lotus-eaters he went to Sicily, where he encountered three (or four) brothers, Antiphates, Cyclops, and Polyphemus (and possibly Laestrygon, according to Septimius), who each ruled a portion of the island.
[25] Numerous places in Italy and northern Greece also had aetiological legends about cities and other institutions founded by Odysseus on his various travels.
Kakridis admits that one may indeed ask what real locations inspired these imaginary places, but one must always bear in mind that geography is not the main concern either of Odysseus (as narrator) or of the poet.
[30] W. B. Stanford, in his mid-20th century edition, comments as follows on book 9 lines 80-81 (where Odysseus says that he met storms off Cape Malea near the island of Cythera): "These are the last clearly identifiable places in O.
The heroic legends, including an Odyssean geography, served to attach newly founded western communities "to a prestigious ancestry in the Greeks' mythical past."
Fox notes that even Circe found a home on "Monte Circeo" between Rome and Cumae: "but this association began at the earliest in the later sixth century BC.
For Bérard the land of the Lotus-Eaters was Djerba off southern Tunisia; the land of the Cyclopes was at Posillipo in Italy; the island of Aeolus was Stromboli; the Laestrygonians were in northern Sardinia; Circe's home was Monte Circeo in Lazio; the entrance to the Underworld was near Cumae, just where Aeneas found it in the Aeneid; the Sirens were on the coast of Lucania; Scylla and Charybdis were at the Strait of Messina; the Island of the Sun was Sicily; the homeland of Calypso was at the Straits of Gibraltar.
The Lotus Eaters are in the Gulf of Sidra; the Cyclops and Aeolus are both to be found in the Balearic Isles; the island of Circe is Ischia in the Bay of Naples; most unexpectedly, Scheria is Cyprus.
Along the way he found on the map Cape Skilla (at the entrance to the Ambracian Gulf) and other names that implied traditional links with the Odyssey.
Severin agrees with the common opinion that the Lotus Eaters are in North Africa (although he placed them in modern Libya rather than Tunisia) and that Scheria is Corcyra.
In addition he noted that the Acheron is marked on the map, but traditionally ignored, whilst in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes the Argonauts' home voyage took them into the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, corresponding to a north west Greek location for many of the later adventures.
[43] Strabo's opinion (mentioned above) that Calypso's island and Scheria were imagined by the poet as being "in the Atlantic Ocean" has had significant influence on modern theorists.
[45] Two centuries ago, Charles-Joseph de Grave argued that the Underworld visited by Odysseus was the islands at the mouth of the river Rhine.
[47] Finally, a recent publication argues that Homeric geography is to be found in the sky, and that the Iliad and the Odyssey can be decoded as a star map.
