Was Homer’s Ithaca Really an Island?: New Research Challenges a 2,000-Year-Old Assumption

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.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

Christo­pher Hitchens Explains Why Homer’s Odyssey Still Mat­ters to Our World (2000)

Sean Con­nery (RIP) Reads C. P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Itha­ca,” Set to the Music of Van­ge­lis

Lau­rie Anderson’s Mind-Blow­ing Per­for­mance of C. P. Cavafy’s Poems “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians” & “Itha­ca”

The Ori­gins of the Mon­sters in Homer’s Odyssey: The Cyclops, Sirens, Scyl­la & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.