An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey, one of Home­r’s two great epics, nar­rates Odysseus’ long, strange trip home after the Tro­jan war. Dur­ing their ten-year jour­ney, Odysseus and his men had to over­come divine and nat­ur­al forces, from bat­ter­ing storms and winds to dif­fi­cult encoun­ters with the Cyclops Polyphe­mus, the can­ni­bal­is­tic Laestry­gones, the witch-god­dess Circe and the rest. And they took a most cir­cuitous route, bounc­ing all over the Mediter­ranean, mov­ing first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sici­ly, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again.

If you’re look­ing for an easy way to visu­al­ize all of the twists and turns in The Odyssey, then we’d rec­om­mend spend­ing some time with the inter­ac­tive map cre­at­ed by Gisèle Moun­z­er. “Odysseus’ Jour­ney” breaks down Odysseus’ voy­age into 14 key scenes and locates them on a mod­ern map designed by Esri, a com­pa­ny that cre­ates GIS map­ping soft­ware.

Mean­while, if you’re inter­est­ed in the whole con­cept of ancient trav­el, we’d sug­gest revis­it­ing one of our pre­vi­ous posts: Play Cae­sar: Trav­el Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Inter­ac­tive Map. It tells you all about ORBIS, a geospa­tial net­work mod­el, that lets you sim­u­late jour­neys in Ancient Roman. You pick the points of ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion for a trip, and ORBIS will recon­struct the dura­tion and finan­cial cost of mak­ing the ancient jour­ney.

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber, 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Dis­cov­er the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Tor­ture Machine That Dou­bled as a Musi­cal Instru­ment

Learn­ing Ancient His­to­ry for Free