Important new research, published in the online journal Antigone on July 5, reveals that the assumption that Homer’s Ithaca was an island, held by scholars since antiquity, is incorrect.
In the paper, “Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island?”, Professor James Diggle CBE, Emeritus Professor of Greek and Latin at Cambridge University and Professor John Underhill, University of Aberdeen, present compelling evidence to dispel one of the most entrenched preconceptions of Homeric scholarship.
“Homer has many opportunities to call Ithaca an island,” says Professor Diggle, “but he never does so.”
Among the many examples from the texts that he cites:
- - Instead of ‘island’ (νῆσος/nisos), Homer, or his characters, refer to it constantly as ‘land’ (γαῖα/gaia), ‘native land’ (πατρίς/patris, πατρὶςαἶα/γαῖα/patrisgaia), or ‘country/region/area/domain’ (δῆμος’/dimos) even though νῆσος fits just as easily into the poems’ dactylic hexameter metre.
- - Homer uses the phrase “δῆμος of Ithaca” frequently in the poems, as when, for example, Odysseus makes landfall on his homeland at the end of his ten-year-long voyage:
Then the seafaring ship approached the island.
On Ithaca there is a bay of Phorcys,
The old man of the sea: in it, two headlands…
Odyssey 13.95-97 (trans. Diggle, 2005)
This translation can be taken to imply that Ithaca is an island but, as Diggle now points out, Homer actually writes “In the δῆμος of Ithaca there is a bay of Phorcys”, that is: “In the domain of Ithaca there is a bay of Phorcys”, clearly implying that Ithaca is a part of the island that the ship is approaching.
Professor Diggle concludes that the poems’ texts demonstrate that Homer knew that Ithaca was not an island but, instead, the name of a part of a larger island, specifically the Ionian island of Kefalonia. Odysseus, after all, is described as the leader of “the gallant Cephallenians”.
(Iliad 2.631).
The search for Odysseus’ homeland, ancient Ithaca
As interest in Homer’s poems grows with the imminent release of Christopher Nolan’s film of the Odyssey on July 17th, there is renewed interest too in one of the great unsolved mysteries of Homeric study – the location of Odysseus’ homeland of Ithaca.
Professor John Underhill, University of Aberdeen
For over twenty years, professors Diggle and Underhill have been part of a team that has been researching the idea, first proposed by Robert Bittlestone, that the western peninsula of Kefalonia, called Paliki, was Ithaca and not, as is usually assumed, the modern-day island of Ithaki.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus describes his homeland to the king of the Phaeacians. Ithaca, he says, faces west, is low-lying with several islands nearby: Zacynthos, Same and Doulichion:
Around are many islands, close to each other,
Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.
Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea
Towards dusk; but they [the three islands just mentioned], apart, face dawn and sun.
Odyssey 9.23-26 (trans. Diggle, Antigone)
Modern-day Ithaki faces east and is mountainous whereas Paliki does face west and is low-lying. The islands of Zacynthos and Same can be identified uncontroversially as modern Zakynthos and Kefalonia. Doulichion is a mystery, but if Paliki is Ithaca then modern Ithaki can be identified as Doulichion, as was sometimes suggested on early maps.
In the widely acclaimed book Odysseus Unbound (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Robert Bittlestone, with Professor Diggle and Professor Underhill, used geographical, topological and textual clues from the Homeric poems to offer compelling evidence to support his hypothesis that Paliki was Ithaca. Bittlestone identified candidate sites on Paliki for all the poems’ key locations, such as Odysseus’ palace, the harbour close by and his landing place, the bay of Phorcys.
But assuming, not unnaturally, that Ithaca was an island, Bittlestone realised that for his hypothesis to stand, Paliki had to have been an island in the time of Odysseus, the Late Bronze Age, around 1200BC.
He proposed a bold solution: that the ‘island’ of Paliki had been separated from the rest of Kefalonia by a marine channel that had been filled in by rockfalls and landslides triggered by earthquakes in what is Europe’s most tectonically active zone.
He was led to this idea by the Greek geographer Strabo who, in the first century AD, wrote of Kefalonia:
“Where the island is narrowest it forms a low isthmus, so that it is often submerged from sea to sea.”
(trans. HL Jones, Loeb)
Bittlestone suggested that implied a marine channel across the isthmus joining Paliki to the rest of Kefalonia that had been partially filled by landslides.
Professor John Underhill led twenty years of geological and geoscientific research into that solution but, as he reveals in the Antigone paper, the geoscientific evidence shows that the Paliki peninsula was not an island in the Late Bronze Age. It is this finding that triggered Professor Diggle’s re-examination of the Homeric texts.
As for Strabo, Professor Underhill says the geoscience has demonstrated that he was describing an overland watercourse consisting of rivers running north and south from an upland lake or marsh at the highest point of the Paliki isthmus. The streams still flow occasionally today after very heavy storms.
The case for Paliki as the location of Ithaca
Now that we know that Paliki was a peninsula in the time of Odysseus and that Ithaca was a low-lying, west-facing part of Kefalonia, the case for the identification of Paliki as Ithaca is further strengthened.
“We are confident”, say Professors Diggle and Underhill, “that an elegant explanation has emerged that unifies the geoscience, the Homeric texts and Strabo and is entirely consistent with Robert Bittlestone’s founding idea of Odysseus Unbound – that Paliki is the location of Homer’s Ithaca.”
Recent archaeological excavations by the Ephorate of Antiquities for Kefalonia and Ithaca of newly discovered Early Bronze Age sites on Paliki including Livadi Marsh, the proposed site for Odysseus’ harbour, has provided further encouraging evidence that Paliki was a significant Bronze Age location.