The Heroic Remains of Homer’s Odyssey

About a mile north of the Ithakan town of Stavros, halfway up a mountain, lies an archaeological site traditionally known as the School of Homer. It is a Mycenaean-era palace complex, with roads, staircases, courtyards, chambers, all constructed of massive, expertly hewn stone. It has been excavated, but is all the more evocative for being entirely unreconstructed.

A large model of the complex, made in 2013, is proudly displayed in the town square. It is accompanied by an elaborate descriptive key. This invokes many references to architectural details from Homer’s account of Odysseus’ eventual homecoming: the threshold, where the goddess Athena, descending from Olympus, alighted; the entrance hall, where Odysseus, disguised by Athena as a beggar, fell asleep in a corner; his son Telemachus’ bedchamber; that of his wife Penelope, with the marital bed Odysseus himself had built decades before; and so on. Every feature mentioned in The Odyssey is reproduced and identified in the model. In the key’s rendering of the incognito Odysseus’ words to his helper, the swineherd Eumaeus:

This noble house is surely Odysseus’ own: one could tell it at once amongst a hundred. Each part of it opens out from another. The courtyard has been made complete by a corniced wall, and there are double doors for protection.

This loose translation confirms that Odysseus’ reported view is enthusiastically endorsed by today’s Ithakans.

It might be thought that there is a certain poetic licence in this logic, but it has been supported by archaeological finds made in the 1930s in a cave, since destroyed by an earthquake, at nearby Polis Bay. Those finds included bronze tripod cauldrons, dated to the ninth or eighth century BC, pottery sherds of the third to first century BC testifying to a cult of nymphs, and a sherd of the second century BC on which has been scratched ‘pray to Odysseus’. According to Homer, Odysseus hid his gifts from the Phaeacians – gifts which included tripod cauldrons – in a cave dedicated to the nymphs. One of the finds supports the idea that there was a cult of Odysseus on Ithaka a millennium after his supposed lifetime (12th century BC). But the strongly implied further suggestion that the Polis cave was the very one in which Odysseus concealed his treasures might be deemed wishful thinking. It could provide no support for the conclusions derived from Homer’s architectural details.

Such historical scrupulosity, however, misses the point. Though the sack of Troy has been dated to 1184 BC, the Homeric epics were composed and perhaps written down in the eighth or seventh century. Homer shows himself acutely aware of the gap between his own day and the period about which he was singing. With a few slips, he was for instance very careful not to impose iron on his bronze age heroes. And heroes they were, in many ways akin to gods. We have not seen their like since, and never shall again. Homer was not alone in this view. All Greek epic, most lyric, and most tragedy is confined to the few generations between the Theban and Trojan wars. Though god-like – sometimes with a divine parent or, in Odysseus’ case, a divine great-grandfather – heroes were not gods, and were thus not immortal. They provided a model for humanity in embracing the roles allotted by the gods, and confronting the almost inevitable prospect of violent death and descent to Hades. For most of them – Sarpedon, Patroclus, Achilles, Ajax – it was a death rendered still more grim by being met at a young age and far from home. The only reward lay in the prospect of glory accorded by future generations of mortals. Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, thought that the gods had orchestrated the whole Trojan War in order to provide a theme for song, for instruction. But that was scant consolation for dead heroes.

Odysseus is not a normal hero. Though he suffers much adversity at the hands of the god Poseidon, he does not die a violent death, but survives, chiefly by guile. The Odyssey is the story of his eventual return from Troy to his home, his reunion with his wife and son, even his dog, and his reclamation of his kingdom. There is a deliberate contrast with Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who, unusually for a hero, makes it home, but is then murdered by his wife and her lover. We are told that the uniquely happy outcome for Odysseus will not be the end of his travails: during an earlier visit to the underworld the blind seer Teiresias prophesied that after Odysseus’ initial homecoming he would have to carry an oar to a place where no one knows what an oar is – a colossal distance. But after he had planted it in the ground, and made his peace with Poseidon, he would return to Ithaka again, and die of ‘sleek old age’ in his bed. Homer saw no need to recount in detail Odysseus’ life after his first, triumphant homecoming.

The pride taken by modern Ithakans in Odysseus is therefore entirely in tune with Homeric tradition. The poet might not have a perfect grasp of the island’s geography. Even had he ever visited, that would hardly be surprising if he was, as the ancients claimed, blind. Some of the tales of Odysseus which he repeats may, he hints, be tall ones. But meticulous attention to empirical accuracy cannot get one very far in this case. The Odyssey’s message is of human ingenuity and courage in the face of almost relentless adversity. Homer’s implicit assumption is that those qualities were far more apparent in the age of heroes, when gods mixed freely with mortals, than they have been since. The hero linked with Ithaka still deserves the reverence that archaeology suggests he was already receiving on the island in the second century BC. Homer’s words, like those of his heroes, are winged.


George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of St Hugh’s College at Oxford University. The Norman Conquest in English History Volume I: A Broken Chain? is out in paperback now.