page_title: Geography of the Odyssey
section_title: Around Greece
hierarchical_section_title: Geography of the Odyssey / Geography of Odysseus's narrative / Modern views / Around Greece
context_page_description: Events in the main sequence of the Odyssey take place in the Peloponnese and in what are now called the Ionian Islands. Incidental mentions of Troy and its house, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Crete hint at geographical knowledge equal to, or perhaps slightly more extensive than that of the Iliad. However, scholars both ancient and modern are divided as to whether or not any of the places visited by Odysseus were real.
  The geographer Strabo and many others came down squarely on the skeptical side: he reported what the great geographer Eratosthenes had said in the late third century BCE: "You will find the scene of Odysseus's wanderings when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds."
context_section_description: A minority view is that the landfalls of Odysseus were inspired by places on a much shorter itinerary along the coast of Greece itself. One of the earliest to suggest any locations here was the 2nd century AD geographer Pausanias who, in his Description of Greece, suggested that the nekyia took place at the river Acheron in north west Greece, where the Necromanteion was subsequently built. However the location was overlooked or dismissed by many subsequently, until the archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris excavated the site, beginning in 1958. He found evidence of sacrifices to the dead that matched Homer's description of those made by Odysseus. Subsequently, the location was accepted by others as that described by Homer.
  Working on the assumption that the discoveries at the Acheron could challenge the traditional assumptions about the Odyssey's geography, Tim Severin sailed a replica Greek sailing vessel (originally built for his attempt to retrace the steps of Jason and the Argonauts) along the "natural" route from Troy to Ithaca, following the sailing directions that could be teased out of the Odyssey. Along the way he found locations at the natural turning and dislocation points which, he claimed, agreed with the text much more closely than the usual identifications. However, he also came to the conclusion that the sequence of adventures from Circe onwards derived from a separate itinerary to the sequence that ended with the Laestrygonians and was possibly derived from the stories of the Argonauts. He placed many of the later episodes on the north west Greek coast, near the Acheron. Along the way he found on the map Cape Skilla (at the entrance to the Ambracian Gulf) and other names that implied traditional links with the Odyssey. Severin agrees with the common opinion that the Lotus Eaters are in North Africa (although he placed them in modern Libya rather than Tunisia) and that Scherie is Corcyra.
  A key part of Severin's thesis is that whilst the text of the Odyssey contains many place names to the east and south of Greece, there are very few identifiable references to places to the west. As a result, he questions whether the western Mediterranean was known about at the time the original legends emerged (which he estimated to be some centuries before Homer composed the poem) and so consequently he doubted whether the stories had their origins there. In addition he noted that the Acheron is marked on the map, but traditionally ignored, whilst in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes the Argonauts' home voyage took them into the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, corresponding to a north west Greek location for many of the later adventures.
caption: The Ambracian Gulf and the island of Levkas (foreground, centre), around which Severin suggested locations for the Sirens, the Wandering Rocks, Scylla, Charybdis and the island of Helios's cattle.
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