On the trail of a stray
It is one of the oldest and most important works of Western culture: the Odyssey of Homer, the great Greek thinker. But is the epic based on true events or is it purely a fantasy? A British researcher takes a fresh approach to answering this question.
Ithaka isn't Ithaca – at least according to John Underhill of Edinburgh University. The geologist leads a team of scientists searching for the true home of Odysseus - the legendary king of Ithaca whose ten-year wanderings are chronicled by Homer in The Odyssey. Underhill and colleagues want to use the drill to prove that it was not today's Ithaca that could have been the home of the cunning ruler, but neighboring Cephalonia.
Now the epic of Homer – whose existence and possible biography have been disputed since antiquity – has so many fairytale traits in many places that any attempt to localize the hero of all these improbabilities is out of the question seems. After all, Odysseus encounters gods, giants and sorceresses in the course of his long journey, he visits the realm of the dead, receives from the wind god a sealed hose with all adverse winds - which Odysseus' cheeky companions promptly open, which leads to new odysseys - he fights with cannibals and sea monsters. And a modern professor wants to tackle such a fable king with a drill, pickaxe and shovel? Where the scholar Eratosthenes of Cyrene scoffed more than 2000 years ago: If you want to find the stations of the Odyssey in the real world, you first have to find the saddler who made the hose of the wind god.
Was Odysseus' Ithaca a reality or a fairy tale?
In fact, scholars have been divided since antiquity as to whether the stages of the journey that the epic from the 8th century B. C. sung about, can be found in the real world. There are two opposing positions here: for one party – arguing purely philologically – the first storm that takes Odysseus from near home into foreign waters marks the transition to a fairytale world, which the hero only leaves again when the hospitable ones Drop Phaiacs on the beach at Ithaca. The Odyssey becomes a seafaring fairy tale from a time when the Greek horizon expanded considerably with the beginning of the colonization of the Mediterranean.
The other school tries to take Homer's travel descriptions literally, at least in part, and to assign real locations to the stages of the odyssey. As a rule, it is not about making the legendary ruler of Ithaca a historical person, but about the extent to which Homer - who may have lived around 400 years after the events described in the Odyssey - incorporated geographical knowledge of his time into history of his hero. Knowledge that the poet of the Odyssey gained either from his own nautical experiences or through the use of so-called periploi. Such navigational manuals for sea voyages have been around since the 5th century BC. BC, but must have been in use at the time the Odyssey was written.
To date, there have been more than eighty suggestions as to where the journey of the ancient seafarer could be located in reality - and the theories hardly leave any part of the world unconsidered. Ancient authors such as Thucydides or Strabo tended to look for Odysseus' goals in the Mediterranean, while more modern odyssey researchers let the ruler of Ithaca row around Britain (according to the Berlin judge Hans Steuerwald) or send him on a circumnavigation like the Viennese ethnologist Christine Pellech. Such deviating interpretations are possible because in the Odyssey routes with exact travel times and directions alternate with sections of the route for which little or no information is given - and which can be interpreted according to a separate model. For example, people are looking for the man-eating Laistrygones in Sicily, in Portugal, but also in Norway and on the east coast of South America. And if you want to avoid the terrible Cyclops Polyphemus, you should avoid Tunisia, Sicily and the coasts of South West Africa - just to name a few places.
New attempt for clarification
John Underhill is also one of those who want to take Homer literally. Last year he co-authored a book in which amateur archaeologist Robert Bittlestone presented his theses on ancient Ithaca. Accordingly, today's Ithaca, which belongs to the group of the Ionian Islands, cannot be identical with the ancient island. Unlike the Ithaca described by Homer, today's island is not on the outermost edge of the archipelago, but between the mainland and the island of Cephalonia. In addition, contrary to the description in the Odyssey, the island is mountainous.
Such doubts are not new. The well-known archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld - he is regarded as the founder of scientific excavation - had spent some time on Ithaca shortly after the end of his excavations at the side of Heinrich Schliemann in Troy in the spring of 1900 and had come to the conclusion that the island was not could agree with that described by Homer. But while Dörpfeld believed he had discovered ancient Ithaca in Lefkas further north, Underhill and Bittlestone claim to have found what they were looking for on Cephallonia. Their thesis: Palliki, today a part of Kefalonia as a peninsula, was once separated from the main island by a narrow arm of the sea. Relatively flat and situated at the extreme edge of the Ionian archipelago towards the sea, Palliki may have been the legendary island of Odysseus, according to researchers.
"Of course, we cannot verify that the story of Odysseus is true," Underhill told the BBC. "Perhaps we can show that Homer got the geography right."According to the thesis, the canal would have gradually filled up with rocks sliding down from the surrounding slopes - the result of natural erosion as well as the frequent earthquakes in that region.
Now the drill should bring a truth to light. If Underhill and his colleagues encounter loose rock during their drilling on the tongue of land between Palliki and the main island, the thesis of a sea inlet buried by debris would at least not be refuted. If, on the other hand, the drill head hits hard rock, another odyssey theory would no longer apply. Modern Ithaca would keep its most famous son for the time being - at least until the next theory.
