Interactive map of Odysseus\' travels

[Epictetus]

I stumbled across this website that has an interactive map of Odysseus' journey in the Odyssey. I wish it was a bit more detailed and included relevant quotes, but it has some good images and is a pretty cool map.

http://esripm.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapTo...acf3dd1b3e

[Robert Vermaat]

No doubt a nice map, but... do we even agree about the spots visited by Odysseus? In a legendary sense, even?

[Prasutagus]

This is very cool. Nice find.

[Epictetus]

No doubt a nice map, but... do we even agree about the spots visited by Odysseus? In a legendary sense, even?

Not as far as I know. Local folklore places different events at different places, like Calypso in Malta. And when he goes to the underworld, I thought he had to pass 'the river Ocean,' which I assume means he had to pass the Pillars of Hercules. This map has it on the Mediterranean coast of Spain for some reason. Maybe there is some local tradition there? I don't know.

[Lyceum]

In short, no, there's no agreement because there's no concrete sense of place in them, nor did the archaic Greeks think in such simplistic terms. Erm I'm not sure how to explain this without cracking open the formula system or turning this into a boring lecture but, in essence:

Homer, Hesiod et al stood at the midpoint in a very lengthy tradition, one way in which we trace interactions between these fixed poems and their traditional background is called traditional referentiality, we can track this through the formula system and what seems to be pointed allusions. Between that and art etc you can wrest quite a lot of information from the poems. Its basically obvious that Kirke etc were set much farther east and that part of the Odysseys' itinerary is reacting to a hypothetical *Argonautika (hence the *) - which occurred in expansion at some point. You'd need more than a basic grasp of Greek to see these things though I really think they're very bloody obvious.

So geographical references are scattered and malleable, what happened was as the Greeks encountered new peoples/areas these had to be fitted into ethnographic and geographical traditions, by Roman times these things have ossified. Hesiod for example treats the west with the kind of mental schema you'd associate with islands rather than land proper, but obviously that changes later. Incidentally we can use epic and lyric as a sort of relative dating system.

I'd recommend Irad Malkin' The Returns of Odysseus for a specific treatment of this phenomena however I sort of think his newer one on ancient Greek networks might be a gentler, more interesting, introduction since its treats a wide variety of cases rather than just the Odyssey.

[Epictetus]

Bryn Mawr gives it a good review, and apparently Oxford has a whole new series. Thanks for the tip. This looks pretty interesting.