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Posted on 05/03/2025 3:35:51 PM PDT by nickcarraway
In the seventh century BCE, the Greek poet Homer wrote the Odyssey. This fascinating tale of adventure and loss would captivate readers for centuries, even millennia. It tells the story of Odysseus attempting to travel home after the Trojan War.
One of the most intriguing things about this lengthy poem is that there is significant controversy surrounding the locations mentioned throughout. Based on the best available evidence, where did Odysseus really travel to in the Odyssey?
Does the Odyssey take place all over the Mediterranean?
The most common belief is that the Odyssey takes place over a very large area. After all, this seems logical at first. Odysseus takes a full ten years to return home after the Trojan War. Taking the normal route from Troy, in northwest Anatolia, to Odysseus’ home island of Ithaca should have only taken a few weeks at most.
For this reason, many people today believe Odysseus must have traveled all over the Mediterranean. In fact, this belief goes back to ancient times. For example, the common belief concerning Scylla and Charybdis was that they lived on either side of the Strait of Messina.
In fact, certain ancient writers suggested the Odyssey is set across an even wider area than that, claiming that some of the locations were outside the Mediterranean. For example, some writers argued that Calypso’s island, Ogygia, should be identified with one of the islands of the British Isles.
Blown off course at Cape Maleas
In addition to the fact that the journey in the Odyssey took a long time, there is a more specific reason as to why many researchers today believe Odysseus must have traveled throughout the Mediterranean.
Odysseus’ journey starts off perfectly normally. The locations that appear obviously correspond with actual locations along the coast of the Aegean Sea between Troy and Greece. However, things take a turn for the worse—and the unusual—when the hero gets to Cape Maleas.
This is the eastern headland in the southernmost part of Greece, forming one side of the Gulf of Laconia. It is notorious for its strong winds. As Odysseus attempts to round the cape, a strong wind blows him off course in a southerly direction for nine days straight. Based on estimates concerning how far such an ancient Greek ship would go in a similar situation, many scholars have concluded that Odysseus must have traveled at least 630 miles from Cape Maleas.
Where did Odysseus travel to?
The problem is that the Mediterranean is not 630 miles from north to south at that point. In theory, then, this means that Odysseus simply cannot have been blown directly south. Rather, the wind must have blown him off course in a south-westerly direction along part of the length of the Mediterranean. This would take him to the coast of Africa, far west of Egypt, perhaps to Tunisia.
However, there is an important reason to challenge this assumption. As the late historian, sailor, and explorer Tim Severin pointed out, any reasonable interpretation of the Odyssey must be that Odysseus was trying to get home. This is the entire point of the story after all.
In such a situation, what would he logically have done while being blown off course? Would he have merely allowed the wind to carry him, or would he have steered the ships into the wind to try to hold his position as much as possible until the wind abated? The latter is obviously more logical.
This being the case, there is no reason to conclude that Odysseus was blown significantly to the west. Nine days of a wind driving him to the south, with him fighting against it during those nine days, would give a likely total distance of just 270 miles or so.
The Head of Polyphemus, the Cylops defeated by Odysseus. Credit: Steven Lek/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 This would mean that Odysseus would have reached the coast of Africa much further east than Tunisia. In fact, his fleet likely would have arrived more or less at the site of the later Greek colony of Cyrene. This is essentially directly south of Greece. Thus, as Odysseus continued on his journey home, he would logically have traveled directly north, likely stopping off at Crete on the way.
In line with this conclusion, Severin highlighted evidence that the setting of almost all the subsequent locations that appear in the Odyssey is to be found close to Greece. For example, the next location in the Odyssey is the island of the Cyclopes. If Severin’s argument is correct, this would be Crete.
As it happens, Greek mythology regularly associated Crete with the Telchines. This mythical race was similar to the Cyclopes in many ways and was sometimes conflated or confused with them. Furthermore, Severin recorded the presence of local folklore on Crete about a monstrous race that lived in caves, ate people, and had an eye on their forehead.
Around the coast
Severin went on to demonstrate that most of the other locations were places on the coast of Greece itself. For example, the Odyssey describes a small, round harbor in the shape of a horseshoe. It had an entrance so narrow that men with long spears could block it. A cliff face surrounded the small harbor, allowing men to stand on the edge and throw rocks onto the ships below.
Severin stated that in all his years of sailing, he had never seen a location that matched such a description. However, he then found it on the coast of Greece, at the unique and fascinating harbor of Mezapos on Cape Taenarum.
Another example is the entrance to the underworld. Homer explains in the Odyssey how Odysseus went down into the underworld through an entrance by the Acheron River. The Acheron River is in Thesprotia, a region in northwestern Greece. Here, in ancient times, there was an oracle of the dead, closely matching Homer’s description.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a good argument can be made that the Odyssey did not tell the story of Odysseus traveling all over the Mediterranean. Rather, with the arguments made by Severin, we see a far more logical scenario emerging. Odysseus evidently had his adventures fairly close to Greece, where the locations in the story can be convincingly placed.
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Epic tale
How many years did hi wife wait for him to return-21?
If you believe that you’ll believe anything.
Well, you see, there’s a port on a western bay, and it serves a hundred ships a day. Lonely sailors pass the time away and talk about their homes
Had to read The Odyssey in HS.
No way i could do it....skipped it and took the D.
...And i was a big book reader at the time.
And there’s a girl in this harbor town And she works layin’ whiskey down They say, “Brandy, fetch another round” She serves them whiskey and wine
Which translation?
Wasn’t there a Pauly Shore or Medea version you could have watched?
Traveled to an In-N-Out Burger in Ca.
She was a loyal one.
😂 Things were different back in the day.
A parallel to his wife whose name escapes me now, I think.
The wonderful character from fiction who knit a tapestry by day and unknit it by night.
I have no idea....
Just Homer’s The Odyssey.
I had zero idea what i was reading.
I was like “screw this”..
1985
So far, I'm not loving it.
But the only book I've ever started and never finished was Finnegan's Wake. Just awful.
😂 Very good fast food burger. Read Odyssey in college. Had a great professor who was really into it.
“Wasn’t there a Pauly Shore or Medea version you could have watched?”
lol
I was a public school student...had better things to do.
;)
One thing right off the bat!
“In the seventh century BCE, the Greek poet Homer wrote the Odyssey.”
Poets didn’t write, back then it was all told from memory.
Somebody later on wrote it down and as was tradition attributed the writings to the original story teller.
Not to themselves.
I love these stories and they inspired generations of people.
I checked my library and I still have the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Right next to Moby Dick!
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