Even if we didn’t make it to a screening of Christopher Nolan’s big-screen adaptation this past summer — and indeed, even if we’ve never read Homer’s original epic at all — we know that the Odyssey tells the story of a ten-year-long journey back to Ithaca. The narrative’s urgency doesn’t arise from the fact that its protagonist, the king Odysseus, has classes at Cornell to teach. In fact, he may not even be trying to get back to the extant Greek island celebrated for bearing that same name.
So, at least, argues a recent paper by two distinguished professors, Cambridge’s James Diggle and the University of Aberdeen’s John Underhill. You can read “Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island?” at the online journal Antigone. Alternatively, you can watch the new video from classicist-novelist Honor Cargill-Martin above.
The real Greek island of Ithaca, or Ithaki, with its picturesque hamlets and limestone monoliths, “actually doesn’t match, pretty much at all, the description that Homer gives us of Ithaca,” she says. Having sailed there last summer, she can describe it as “an amazing place, so dramatic and so evocative, but in large part, that’s because the mountains essentially rise straight out of the sea” — a direct contradiction to Homer’s lines about lowlands surrounding a single central peak. Did he just get it wrong?
Or was he taking artistic license in order to imagine the kind of place from which a hero like Odysseus would come forth, despite the fact that he got his geography more or less right elsewhere? In 2005, a management consultant called Robert Bittlestone put forth the argument that Homer’s Ithaca was actually Paliki, a peninsula on the western edge of Kefalonia. In order to test this theory, Bittlestone brought in Diggle and Underhill, his collaborators on the book Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca.
Now, a decade after Bittlestone’s death, the others have produced new geological and textual evidence for the Paliki hypothesis, not least that Homer never once explicitly calls Ithaca an island, or even describes it in terms he applies to known islands. Cargill-Martin finds their research “extremely convincing,” which makes you wonder: will Ithaca take down its statue of Odysseus in response? Probably not, but at least we’ll have something to talk about when we go stand before it.
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Extract — continue reading at the source.
